When you think about it, the functional name “customer success” is a little frustrating in itself because it insinuates that the people who work in customer success are solely focused on the customer, but customer success is there to help all departments better serve the customer along their journey. Sales comes in, sells, and moves on to another

Finally, I have seen CSMs manage the entire renewal process. In addition to their regular responsibilities (such as understanding and driving value, creating operational dependence, nurturing and finding advocates, etc.), they are also responsible for the renewal transaction with the customer. This means upselling, cross-selling, changes to SLAs,

Chief Customer Officer, which gave insight into how customer-facing functions operated. This included areas such as support, training, renewals, and customer success.

This company uses a very different method than Salesforce to determine customer health (and it requires a sophisticated understanding of your product and what differentiates it and its features from competitors in the market), but it works all the same.

I once was on the client side and worked with a CSM who was so invested in my business (and understood my challenges and industry so well) they were able to point to other products and services in the market that existed to help me. These weren’t products their company offered, just products the CSM knew I needed. That CSM was the greatest CSM in

leading customers to success. (A lot more on this later in this book.)

The ability to get a customer to adopt your software is one of the most preeminent components of retention, expansion, and advocacy; through training and certifications, software adoption was the main function of my job.

Then you need to bury the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) by making it easy for them to switch. Maybe you provide them with a cheat sheet? Or you could work with marketing to create a video or reference card with training tips that translate easily for the user. Remember, you aren’t

I also learned that customer success was much broader than the customer success function itself, because I managed all the internal teams responsible for enabling a successful customer. I learned where customer success needed to integrate and share metrics with other functions within the company to amplify its ability to be effective, impactful,