Most CS organizations are not built to drive world-class GRR and NRR. Not yours, not mine of the past…and for a while that was ok. It’s not any longer.
Senior leadership and Boards know that the relationship-approach isn’t enough, so they push toward commercial conversations. The result: A junior sales team with better relationship skills. We called it Customer Success. Our customers know the difference.
That’s 2 models — Relationship function vs Sales function. Both models are wrong. Both models fail.
We had a retainer-based professional services team at one company where I led CS. This team worked with customers to define and assess their programs powered by our solution. They, more than any other, worked strategically with clients: Understanding their program goals, analyzing the results of various program initiatives, and recommending program changes to drive the desired outcomes. They were not part of CS.
Our CSMs were classic relationship CSMs — weekly check-ins, escalation management, and QBRs that reviewed usage rather than outcomes. Customers valued the Strategists. They tolerated the CSMs.
Don’t get me wrong, my CSMs were smart, hardworking, services-oriented people. They cared deeply about the work they were doing and helping customers be successful. The gap between what the Strategists produced and what the CSMs produced wasn’t a talent gap. It was a design gap. The org produced exactly what it was built to produce.
That’s the problem. And it’s fixable — but only if we’re honest about what we’ve actually built.
To make this shift, the CS organization needs to be redesigned. That means either retraining your CSMs or hiring a fundamentally different profile.
CS must play a direct role in driving GRR and NRR. That is non-negotiable.
But the path must run through driving outcomes, not forced commercial conversations. Upselling and cross-selling becomes a natural byproduct of outcome-oriented CS work. When we deliver on the outcomes, customers will do more with us.
So how do we make this shift?
First: Business Fluency Is Not Optional
We need to train our CSMs to be more business fluent — or hire team members who already are. They need to understand their customer’s commercial context (revenue models, growth priorities, and board-level KPIs and priorities) and how your product moves the needle in those areas. Not generically, but for this customer — in this quarter. They need to understand their customer’s competitive landscape and where their customer is winning or losing. They need to understand their client’s internal dynamic and politics and how to work within them. How do they get their champion promoted? They need to connect your product to their customers’ outcome every day, and they need to show up with a point of view — advising and guiding the customer along the way, and telling them what they need to hear…not what they want to hear. They need to be the smartest person in the room about the intersection of the client’s business and your product. That goes even beyond what our strategists did in my past role, and yet, they got closer to it than my CSMs — not because they were smarter, but because they were positioned, measured, and empowered differently.
Second: Measure What Actually Predicts the Future
We need to measure what matters. You need to identify and measure the true leading indicators for your business, not just the lagging indicators…which GRR and NRR are — they tell you what has already happened. They don’t tell you what’s going to happen or why. While usage and adoption can be leading indicators of a renewal or expansion problem, they aren’t always. At one of my last companies, customers would use our system right until the last day. High usage/adoption didn’t mean “happy” or “renewing” customers. We had the data to prove it.
The leading indicators worth tracking are those that predict customer health before it shows up in a renewal number: Whether outcomes were defined at kickoff and are actually being achieved, whether executive relationships are active and multi-threaded, whether the CSM can articulate the client’s top strategic priorities without pulling up a dashboard. Those signals tell you what’s coming. GRR and NRR tell you what already happened.
Third: Org Structure Matters
There has been a trend over the years to move CS under the CRO. I get it…CS needs to directly drive revenue through higher GRR and NRR, and the CRO has “revenue” right in her title. CMOs also have a responsibility to drive revenue, but marketing does not typically sit under the CRO. Why? Because it is a unique specialization that is designed to support revenue creation. It comes with its own strategy, KPIs, and designed outcomes. Marketing is not “part of sales” and neither is CS — for the same reasons.
Folding CS under sales, which, let’s face it, is the primary responsibility of the CRO, creates a clash between the perceived function — Junior Sales People, and the actual need — business fluent, strategic partners who are more like the Strategists in the retainer-based PS group than an AE in a sales org.
What I’d Build Today
If I were building a CS team today, I’d hire people who look a lot more like those Strategists than the CSMs I had — business fluent, outcome-obsessed, willing to tell a client what they need to hear. I’d measure them on leading indicators of customer health, not just renewal rates. I’d give them the playbooks, the authority, and the org design to do the job right.
And I’m not sure I’d call them Customer Success Managers at all actually.
Customer Success Strategist.
Customer Strategy Partner.
Something that signals what the role actually demands…and what customers should actually expect.
Your customers already know the difference between a CSM who manages the relationship and one who drives the outcome. The question is whether you do, and whether your org is built to produce the latter. Are you?
Andrea Mulligan is a B2B SaaS executive and advisor with 30 years of experience building Customer Success, Professional Services, and GTM organizations. She works with growth-stage companies on CS transformation, AI operationalization, and post-sale strategy. Start a conversation →