Nearly ten years ago, I started my journey through the trenches of Go-to-Market (GTM). From the front lines to management, I've been in the thick of it most recently developing Customer Success organizations at Splunk & Amplitude. I’m quite familiar with the question CSMs and CS Leaders today are nervously watching their organizations ask: Is Customer Success Management worth it? 

I think back to my early career when I was on the front lines driving high retention and expansion. Back then my boss would say “I wish I could clone you”. But, I find myself asking: what was he trying to clone? What is that secret sauce? I think it's simple. 

Driving Growth 

At its core, driving growth with a customer is disarmingly straightforward. I focused on three things:  

1. I understood my customers (goals, views, needs, wants) better than anyone else.
2. I could influence my customers better than anyone else.
3. I could earn my customers' trust more than anyone else.

These three things are the recipe for success in any relationship profession, not just software. A doctor who understands their patients completely, who can get them to take their advice, and who earns the patient's heartfelt trust is going to be a successful doctor. So the solution seems easy: Hire a CSM to do those 3 things, and growth will follow! But, if the blueprint for growth is so elemental, why is it faltering? 

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CSM Works but Doesn’t Scale

The magic that a single CSM can weave is bound by a fundamental human limitation: Dunbar's number. This is the idea that an individual can maintain only about 150 stable relationships - because every relationship takes work.  At most SaaS companies, each account is made up of 1-10 relevant stakeholders. That means a CSM with 20 customers could have up to 200 relationships to maintain. This isn’t sustainable. Inevitably the CSMs don’t build a relationship with everyone, which leads to missed growth opportunities and churn. 

Relationships can create an exponential amount of value but we have limited ability as humans to capture it. This creates a ceiling: a Relationship Ceiling, leaving a value gap. It's a classic case of exponential demand crashing against the ceiling of limited human supply. 

The Juggling Act: Where CSMs Lose Balance

Customer Success Management is failing because CSMs are being set up for failure. CSMs must understand, influence, and inspire affection in every contact but they can only juggle so much. If they were being asked to juggle a manageable three or four balls that might be possible, but with a staggering hundred. It's not just a set-up for failure; it's a guarantee. 

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When that failure inevitably happens, companies venture into the realm of well-intentioned malarkey: “Perhaps mandatory training on a new PowerPoint deck will solve the problem?” “Or another field to update in Salesforce?” “Or maybe if we just say ‘growth’ a lot our CFO won’t notice how ineffective we are?” This is the result of ignorance of the fundamental truth: Humans are good at driving growth, we just can’t profitably hire enough humans to do it.

The Search for a Solution

In my career, we’ve tried to solve the problem through hiring but learned that that route is unsustainably expensive. Now, desperate for a solution, companies find themselves spending time and money on customer portals, predictive models, in-product guidance, and other incomplete solutions for reprieve. I’m not innocent here; I have built all these in my years in CS. I can say that these efforts don’t come close to matching the performance of a human CSM. They also add a ton of complexity that necessitates the hiring of administrators, analysts, and program managers further reducing the capacity in the field. It was supposed to be so simple but now it's complex and expensive. So what are we to do? 

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AI Shatters the Relationship Ceiling  

Human CSMs are great. It’s the Relationship Ceiling– Dunbar’s number–  that is the problem. But AI provides us with the ability to smash through the Relationship Ceiling. 

• We can’t maintain a complete understanding of the goals, views, wants, and needs of 150 people. But AI can help us do that. 
• We can’t effectively influence 150 different people in 150 different situations to take 150 different pieces of advice. But AI can help us do that.
• We can’t nurture 150 different relationships of loyalty and trust. But AI can help us do that. 

Rather than investing in inferior alternatives, we know what works on a small scale. Now we need to extend it– to clone ourselves like my boss requested– and leverage our human minds to impact a larger set of stakeholders. The CSMs of the future won’t be jugglers, they will have complete control of each ball.  

We’re exploring how AI can help CSM shatter the relationship ceiling but we need your help. We’re surveying CSMs on how AI can help with relationship building. Click here to share your perspective. We’ll publish a future post with the results!

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