Yet another Customer Success professional recently became nervous about their long term prospects at their company. The last few board meetings had a dark tone. The senior management team looked gloomy, and their statements weren’t encouraging. There was suddenly heightened emphasis on developing ai resources to “make the Customer Success team more efficient,” and more questions about the effectiveness of high-touch CSM activities. Sound familiar? Are similar storm clouds gathering over your team and company? What can/should you do about it? The time to choose is now, before the choice is made for you.
Many years ago, Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, was addressing a conference of software executives. In the Q&A period, a young support manager said: “My company won’t give me the budget for the tools I need or let me hire the headcount necessary to properly respond to our customers’ calls. What should I do?” Cook’s response was immediate. “Put your resume on the street,” he said. “Find a company where you can practice your profession to your own standards.” That’s certainly one answer, as valid today for Customer Success executives facing severe challenges as it was when first given. But it’s not the only answer, and whether or not it’s the best may vary. Let’s look at the options.
What are the board and senior management reacting to? Business downturns? Increased focus on profitability? There can be a range of responses, but they all come from a common ground. Cut costs. Do more with less. If your group is perceived as a cost center, you’re a target.
Let’s pause for an important distinction between the Customer Success *group and its *activities. Your group may well be performing actions that are deemed valuable from on high. You’re doing renewals and expansion sales, and those will continue — it just may not be your CSMs that does them in the future. Sales owned them before, and it’s likely they will again. (Yes, we both know that you were doing them better — but that’s clearly not enough.) But what about the revenue and profits from your Support contracts? From user Training, if you offer that at a premium? From Professional Services/Onboarding? You almost certainly aren’t getting full credit for that income today, and those income streams will continue anyway after the Customer Success group itself gets cut.
What is needed are significant profits from something that only your team can do, and it’s necessarily tied to your original founding mission: product adoption. You need to create and market a paid adoption service. That’s going to require a lot of proving in two directions, but it’s doable. First, what would persuade a customer that such a service would increase *their profitability, de-risking their investment in your technology? Second, what’s the profit potential to your company that is significant enough to get senior management buy-in? That proof has to be in the form of a solid business case, as other companies have done before launching their premium success offerings.
What are your options? Do nothing, and hope that the axe doesn’t fall on you and your team members’ jobs. Build a case for an adoption service / success product. Or put your resume on the street, hoping to find a better professional environment. Which will you choose? Let’s talk, either directly here via the Contact Us link, or in the discussion in The Customer Success Forum on LinkedIn.
