customer success
also referred to as: cs
59 statements across 39 episodes · 24 bullish · 21 bearish · 24 people on the record · first statement Jul 7, 2017 by Jason Lemkin · said 1 times in 1 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
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2017 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about customer success, oldest first
Jul 7, 2017 positive
Jul 26, 2017
Aug 28, 2017
Aug 28, 2017 positive
Monetizing Customer Success Requires Self-Serve Alternatives Before Charging For Services
“Before you can have that ask for the services order conversation with your customer, you need to make sure that you actually have tools available that they can opt to do themselves. So whether that's Resources in the community, or training online content that …”
Jan 24, 2018 positive
Roberge: Redefine the sales manager role to lead cross-functional pods
“What I've seen companies experimenting with that I like is to almost redefine the sales manager role where a traditional inside sales manager might have like eight or 10 reps under them and instead have a sales manager that has six reps under them Plus four BD…”
Mar 17, 2018
Lemkin: SaaS Startups Must Double Pay Sales and CS on Expansion Deals
“You have to pay twice. You have to pay sales for revenue that comes in after the contract is signed, and you have to pay customer success, however you're going to pay them, for the work they do. And when work overlaps over an extended period of time, you just …”
May 20, 2019 bullish
Deeter: Software Category for Product Teams Is Opening Up Rapidly
“And yet, historically, their product teams, internally, have had strong, very talented resources, but very little technology to accomplish their goals. And very little product for the product teams, ironically. We've seen an explosion of tools and technologies…”
Sep 19, 2019 negative
Oct 9, 2020 negative
Mehta: Many vendors engage in 'customer success washing' with legacy tools
“Some vendors are just taking their old stuff and dressing it up as customer success or whatever. And so there's a bit of a kind of like cloud washing. If you remember that where everyone says they're a cloud company, it's the same thing here where everyone say…”
Jan 10, 2021 negative
Feb 26, 2021 positive
Terminus had its CPO lead customer success for six months
“In fact, the person is our chief product officer. I had him go and lead our customer success team for six months to understand and have empathy for our customers, for what they're doing to really embrace that, to be able to make better trade-offs.”
Sep 17, 2021 positive
Lemkin: Early-stage SaaS startups now possess sophisticated churn analytics in year one
“The instrumentation that I see early stage is shocking. The data, the metrics, their insight, Their cohort. I still don't even know how to do a cohort analysis myself. Their ability to do that in year one to segment churn by category, right? They get it.”
Sep 17, 2021 negative
Oct 5, 2021 neutral
Nick Mehta: SaaS customers churn because they continuously demand increasing value
“What we would say if we revise this now is that customers churn eventually because they always want more value. They always want more, right? They're not buying your technology for a point in time. They're buying your technology so that you can constantly deli…”
Oct 5, 2021 positive
Nick Mehta: SaaS companies must align sales and CS around customer outcomes
“What you need is an integrated journey from sales to customer success, because the truth is, your customer is trying to achieve a business outcome. They're trying to generate more leads for their business or make their employers happier or grow their sales, ri…”
Oct 5, 2021
Nick Mehta: Managing stakeholder turnover is critical even for 10-person startups
“Operationalizing that whole process of the stakeholder change. And this is so easy to do. And frankly, even if you're 10 people in your company, It's critical. I'd argue it's even more critical when you're 10 people in your company. Because honestly, the reaso…”
Oct 5, 2021 positive
Nick Mehta: Top CS teams create mutual success plans assigning client tasks
“Customer success is a two-way street, and the best CS teams out there are bringing their customers into the customer success process, creating what we call a mutual success plan with that customer. Right? Where the tasks aren't all assigned to your company. So…”
Oct 5, 2021
Nick Mehta: Top CS executives demand core company commitment before joining
“If you are in a position where you're founder or CEO and you're trying to recruit people, the way you structure it, the way you talk about it will influence who you can recruit. And you're not gonna be able to get the best people if you don't make it part of y…”
Dec 9, 2021 positive
Lemkin: When unsure about sales strategy, invest in customer success
“If you don't exactly know what to do in sales, right? And sometimes we don't, right? If you're not sure, we're planning for next year, right? Hopefully we're all planning, 20, 22 planning it. And if you're not quite sure how to do that extra thing, how, where …”
Dec 9, 2021 positive
Lemkin: Early SaaS startups can hire CS talent outside SaaS
“If you're below four or five million in revenue, so customer success is still hands-on. It's not all systems and process and tools, right? It's not all instrumentation. I can take more risk in CS. I can take someone that's smart. I could take someone that has …”
Dec 9, 2021 positive
Lemkin: Requiring CS acceptance before paying commission is the best anti-churn hack
“Having customer, if you have enough trust with your head of customer success, have them have to accept the customer. This is the only hack I've seen. Not that the commission is delayed until deployment or renewal, but CS has to accept it.”
Dec 9, 2021 negative
Lemkin: Almost 100% of SaaS founders under-invest in customer success
“But if Salesforce at twenty billion in ARR and a three hundred billion market cap can get 70% of revenue from its base, that means who, any founder, CEO that is listening to this, It's under-investing in customer success. Almost by definition, almost a hundred…”
Feb 15, 2022 positive
Asthana: PLG customer success teams should engage $1,000 ARR accounts
“We had to kind of shift the motion entirely for functions like customer success, where they were, you know, effective in a post-sales process in their prior roles, and we had to, you know, make them comfortable that even if it's a thousand dollar ARR customer,…”
Mar 15, 2022 positive
Knight: Customer success leads most AgentSync account expansion conversations
“Our customer success team leads most of those conversations. We're starting to bring more product lines and learning what that motion is going to look like, but they've done a fantastic job because they're responsible for Owning that relationship”
Mar 15, 2022 positive
Knight: AgentSync paused early sales and hired customer success to prioritize retention
“So our first hires were actually customer success. Niji, Put that in play because he was nervous about selling more and we put a hold on selling because we wanted to make sure that we could make people successful, and then we ramped up the sales team”
Jun 24, 2022
Lemkin: Every churned customer in SaaS represents an organizational failure
“Every customer you lose in SaaS is sort of a failure. Someone failed. Sales oversold it. Your product let them down, or CS let them down. No one buys SAS products for fun. It's not fun to deploy, test, and roll out a SAS app in your company, and every single t…”
Oct 11, 2022 negative
Split Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success Into Separate Early Roles
“I actually split sales, marketing, and customer success into three different functions inside the go-to-market organization. I don't believe it's a good idea to put those all into one person. For what it's worth, not until you get much, much later”
Dec 8, 2022 positive
Feb 16, 2023 neutral
Fox: Brex split customer success and upsell roles at 30-40 employees
“Eventually we split out the team when we cross kind of like 30, 40 people. And we had one team of customer success reps that only focused on churn... And whenever an opportunity came to sell a new product or to increase our share of wallet with an existing pro…”
Feb 16, 2023 positive
Blond: Early startups shouldn't overspecialize post-sales customer roles
“Initially you have somebody focused on serving the customer. That includes both mitigating churn, making them successful, and also increasing the revenue because especially at an early stage as a startup, having this like concept of over specialization where y…”
Jun 14, 2023 negative
Jul 7, 2023 negative
Jul 12, 2023 negative
Dec 29, 2023 negative
Feb 2, 2024 bearish
Lemkin: The era of SaaS customer success generalists is likely over
“I just don't think that there's any great generalist role. There's no great role for, hey, I'm a generalist. I'm going to go into CS or support and just make customers happy. I'm worried this is gone. I'm worried the era of this generalist making customers hap…”
Feb 2, 2024 negative
Feb 9, 2024
Define an anti-charter when hiring for broad or ambiguous roles
“In my, one of my first principles is focus on the anti-charter of that hiring. So oftentimes when you're hiring a role, a lot of this happens in marketing. You mentioned customer success. So that's another one as well, where you have clarity on what you think …”
Jul 5, 2024 negative
Lemkin: Moving Customer Success Under Sales Weaponizes The Function
“I think the worst of all of this, what has made it the worst is when we've all decided that customer success should be part of sales. The worst of all of these trends, because what we've done is weaponized customer success. We've taken the one person in the co…”
Jul 5, 2024 negative
Aug 16, 2024 positive
Klaviyo shares upgrade quotas across sales and customer success teams
“We share an upgrade number across sales and customer success as well. So we've created a team who sells into our existing customer base, working closely alongside CS, who's responsible for strategy and identifying additional value add within the product.”
Nov 4, 2024 negative
Kellogg: Customer Success Should Not Report to Sales or the CRO
“By the way, for whatever it's worth, I don't actually think customer success should report to sales. I think that's a stress reaction to save money. I think the company hits a downturn. There's too much sales expense, which customer success is usually classifi…”
Nov 7, 2024 positive
Amin: Sales, Marketing, and Success Are Consolidating Into Unified GTM Teams
“Sales, marketing, customer success are becoming go-to-market and you're thinking more holistically about
The different sales marketing and success basically align with the different stages that a prospective customer can be in, right?
It's almost like a pros…”
Jan 14, 2025 negative
Jan 14, 2025
Mooney: In vertical SaaS, product, sales, and support must replace customer success
“So the like simple framework here is that the product owns success. So this means that It should be so aligned and so good with your verticals needs that it doesn't need translation and it doesn't need somebody to come back in and say, Hey, we noticed you're n…”
Jan 14, 2025 positive
Mooney: Mangomint eliminated its customer success team over three years ago
“It's never going to solve your problem to just plug in this new team and think that they can smooth out whatever that is. So I'm all about killing off the CS team. I'm happy to share how we did that. It's been over three years now and it's worked quite well.”
Jan 14, 2025
Jan 22, 2025 negative
Jan 24, 2025 negative
Feb 5, 2025 positive
Effective CS and Sales Leaders Can Run Each Other's Meetings
“The thing that I've always loved is this idea of like leadership interchangeability. Can you walk in the shoes of your revenue peers, right? So as a CS leader, can you actually drive a sales forecast call? If you're a sales leader, can you run a risk review me…”
Feb 5, 2025 positive
Feb 5, 2025 positive
Business Reviews Should Focus Exclusively on Yellow and Red KPIs
“I don't want to talk about the green, right? The green means that we put the right targets in place and we're happy with them. I only actually want to talk about the yellow and the rest. And if there's no yellow or red, I, it makes me really uncomfortable. I g…”
Feb 5, 2025 negative
Relying Solely on GRR and NRR Is Like Driving in Reverse
“I think very commonly when people talk about KPIs for customer success teams, people quickly throw up GRR, NRR, like those are my numbers. I'm like, that's cool, but that's, you know, if you're driving by looking in the rear view mirror, you have the right set…”
Feb 5, 2025 neutral
GitHub Prioritized Professional Services Early, While Notion Focused on CSMs
“At GitHub, as I mentioned, the big need was how do you get people onto a software development platform, and that's why professional services was the orientation at the start. At Notion support, obviously, like technical support was an underpinning, but custome…”
Mar 7, 2025 negative
Jul 10, 2025
Giglio: Separating enterprise CS and PLG touches divides teams solving identical problems
“Many of you might work in organizations where you have a customer success team. That's like the high touch customer success team. And then oftentimes what happens is there's a marketing organization or a product organization that is doing customer touches to y…”
Apr 22, 2026 positive
Lemkin: Startups must view FDEs as retention drivers, not cost centers
“View FDs as one of your most important assets to getting renewals, retention, NPS, word of mouth, virality. Don't look at FDs as a cost center. This was the mistake we made in customer success a generation ago. And this is why customer success was cut to zero …”
Jun 11, 2026 bullish
Lemkin: Customers Prefer High-Performing AI to Mediocre Human Account Managers
“Customers will prefer, prefer a great eye to a mediocre human. They'll prefer a great eye that solves their problem today, that knows the answer, to someone that has to get an engineer and an appointment to you next week, that doesn't know, that says I'm just …”
Jun 16, 2026 negative