CSMs: strategic partners or order-takers?🤔
How those "quick tasks" are killing your CS motion
February 16, 2025
The CSM "catch-all" continues to be the biggest threat to your customers’ success… and your profitability. Let’s talk about how you can transform your CSM team.
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Ask anyone in your company what a CSM does, and you'll likely get 20 different answers.
CSM roles have become a costly dumping ground for everything "customer," and it's destroying your economics. Here's just a small sample of what I've seen dumped on CS teams:
Marketing: Creating customer case studies and managing testimonial collection.
Support: Building technical documentation and troubleshooting login issues.
Commercial: Negotiating renewals and processing contract paperwork.
Product: Writing feature requirements and managing beta programs.
Services: Running full implementation projects and technical configurations.
The kicker? Each of these tasks pulls them further from driving and verifying customer outcomes and protecting revenue. At one company we ran a “time and motion” study and found CSMs spending 40% of their time on activities that other teams were better equipped to handle. And my belief is that they are average, if not better, than many companies under $50M in ARR.
Once you see it and decide to do something about it, the real challenge isn't identifying misaligned tasks - it's executing change while 1) maintaining internal alignment, and 2) evolving operations without dropping customer experience.
You can't just announce that "we're no longer the catch-all team" and expect everything to work.
Instead, it’s a bit like sculpting a marble statue… you carefully carve away the pieces that don’t belong, little by little, until something new takes shape. Changes like this are best managed systematically and over time.
Here’s how I’ve executed this sculpting in the past:
First, design the future.
This isn't about job descriptions — it's about jobs to be done.
What do customers actually need to succeed? What resources do they need access to? Human or otherwise.
Then ask the most critical question: who's best positioned to deliver each of those elements? Where does that work actually belong?
Two weeks ago I wrote about creating a specialized role for renewal management. We decided, for various reasons, that the renewal management team needed to live in Finance and we put it there, then collaborated (CCO + CFO) to build and execute the playbook. This week I was with a $250M ARR company who decided it belonged under the VP, Customer Success who sits in the revenue organization.
The point is to identify the work being done and sit down with peers across Support, Sales, Services, and Marketing to find the right home for each process - and be ready to kill tasks that don't drive value.
“Breakthroughs are achieved more often in recognizing what to ignore than by knowing what to prioritize”
Ben Wilson, How to Take Over The World
Next, build a campaign.
Designing an ideal future on a whiteboard is easy. Facilitating change in the real world is not.
In the change management practice, there’s an acronym for the steps required to facilitate a successful change: ADKAR.
It stands for…
The best leaders don't just tell people things are changing - they show them the future, teach them what to do, and constantly communicate to reinforce the new world order.
They utilize the CEO and other executives to help drive awareness and build desire to support the change.
They train individuals and teams on what to do and how to do it in the new model.
They monitor processes to confirm that new behaviors and skills are utilized.
They reinforce the new order of things through constant communication in town halls, video updates, team meetings, road shows, and email communications. Internal marketing.
The best leaders repeat themselves. A lot. And just when they think they’ve communicated enough, they double down and communicate more.
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
George Bernard Shaw
Finally, execute against a roadmap (and remain nimble).
Break the changes into smaller chunks. Instead of changing everything, everywhere, all at once, try quarterly sprints. Each with clear success metrics and an interim end state.
A successful roadmap answers three key questions:
Start small and iterate fast. In the renewal example above, we started by moving 10% of renewals into the new model. We measured and inspected the process, and adjusted our approach before scaling to all customers.
Most importantly? Remain flexible and adjust the plan as you go. As Ike famously quipped, “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.”
The real payoff of unbundling the catch-all isn't just efficiency - it's opportunity.
Every hour your CSMs spend on misaligned tasks costs you twice: once in wasted salary, and again in revenue opportunities (renewals + expansion).
And in 2025, that's a luxury none of us can afford.
Have you started unwinding the catch-all in your organization? What's working? What isn't?
Hit "Reply" to share your experiences. I'm particularly curious about which activities you've successfully "carved off" and how you managed the transition.
🤘
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We’re grateful you choose to read each week.
When you’re ready for more, there are a couple ways we can help:
» Cover Your SaaS is a financial literacy course for go-to-market leaders. Grab your copy here.
» Promote your product and services to over 4,000+ senior SaaS Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success pros by sponsoring our twice-weekly newsletter and podcast.
