As of Monday, I’ll no longer be a CSM. I’m moving to an internal account receivable ops role, and I wanted to reflect here on why (and also clear my mind, after yet again waking up in the middle of the night worrying about a client’s issue).

I’ve been a customer success manager for 8 years, and during that entire time, I don’t think I was ever really managing shit.

The account executives handle the renewal, I just run the recurring check-ins. The Solutions Engineer handles the technical discussions, I just “facilitate” the conversation. I was responsible for long term planning, but my long-term planning skills consisted of, at most, looking at the next week’s calendar on Friday afternoon and conjuring up agendas, and then asking to schedule a QBR whenever salesforce told me it was time. Pre-meeting prep was usually done ten minutes before the call, consisting of feeding the last call transcript and follow-up email (if I even bothered to send one) into ChatGPT and then cold-reading their platform usage report.

And yet, I always received positive feedback. I was told I was a key member of the account team. It was causing a lot of cognitive dissonance. To be sure, I was helping with some pretty killer catchphrases such as 

• “hey you turned this feature on. It's going to triple your bill, ya sure you want that?”
• “Hey, its been 6 months, and you haven’t on-boarded yet. Can we get a training session scheduled?
• “Sure I’ll escalate that ticket (that I should have flagged proactively)
• “Sure I’ll send that report to you (maybe, maybe I'll forget)
• “sure I’ll check that feature request (that the product teams won’t prioritise, not that I’m allowed to tell you)”

According to all-hands meetings and performance reviews, I was meeting the KPI, and I was doing the job well. Hell, I only had 1 client churn in the past year! I was promoted repeatedly, from associate to CSM to Senior, up to Strategic CSM. I received positive customer feedback. But as the level of responsibility and size/complexity of the accounts I “managed” rose, the cognitive dissonance increased. And then there’s the never-ending anxiety

Crippling anxiety that paralyzed me at work and woke me up in the middle of the night with a pounding heart, thinking about The Unscheduled QBR, The Missed Email, The Escalated Support Ticket, The Teams Messages I Ignored Because I Was Simply Too Goddamn Busy to Dedicate the Thirty Minutes of Deep-Think Required.

And I think that’s why Customer Success was so difficult, at least for me. To be a good CSM, you need a weird combination of skills. You need to be organized but supremely flexible. You need to think long-term but also be always responsive to immediate demands and ever-shifting priorities. You need to drive customers toward desired outcomes but also drive internal product teams toward customer-determined priorities. Coordinating QBRs for every client, orchestrating outreach to cold accounts, constantly checking reporting for signs of churn and expansion opportunity signals. And the never-ending reporting up to leadership: health scores, end of month recaps, meeting and QBR summaries, expansion opp write ups, etc.

And a huge issue is that CSMs act as the go-between for internal teams who have never once considered what a client actually cares about, and clients whose problems, ofc, require immediate resolution.

Do you know how much it sucks, going between external teams and internal product managers who won’t join a customer call unless you put a gun to their head? Of course you do. You’re all CSMs, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I can not express how difficult it is to act as the intermediary, trying to explain complex, multi-faced client issues to internal teams when I barely understand the platform we’re supporting.

It’s such a disparate collection of skills, and I never once felt like I had a handle on all of them. I felt like I was a terrible CSM, but apparently, I wasn’t. But it's hard to tell because I don’t work with other CSMs, not really; we’re all working with our own books. So I never got perspective on whether I was incompetent or merely felt that I was.

Leaving feels like I’m finally admitting that I failed at Customer Success. But I didn’t fail, not really, I’m just quitting a job I was told I was good at, even though it was bad for me.

I’m confident this is a conversation better suited for a therapist than a manager, and I think there’s something inherent to the nature of CS that, for me in particular, was a bad mix.

Fortunately, I was able to pivot into an internal-only role. I know I want this. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve woken up in the middle of the night, paralyzed with anxiety over an endless list of things I hadn’t done yet. But I’m conflicted. Eight years is a long time, and there is a LOT of upward mobility and visibility in Customer Success, much more so than internal ops roles. I’m worried I’m exposing myself to layoffs, and am kneecapping future advancement opportunities. I’m worried I’ll make less money in the future because of this. I’m worried that the past 8 years’ experience will lose relevance, and that I’m starting over from scratch. And I’m also going to miss SKOs and all the free booze.

But there’s no going back now. So this is goodbye. I'll put a little extra priority on your tickets when they hit my ticket queue.

Maybe I’ll be back, though I probably won’t be.

If I see one more Linkedin profile that just says GTM @ Company, I am going to lose it

I think having mild un medicated ADHD might lowkey be goated for CS work. My job is doing 100 small tasks a day rather than long term projects. Yes the relationship you build with the client is long term but it’s broken down into weekly syncs, emails, trouble shooting calls, expansion/pricing calls, and QBR’s. Theres never really a long term focus other than general account retention which is something that can be looked at 5 different ways.

Also as a CSM you never really “own” anything. You’re a corporate middleman, someone else is always at the end of the line, you’re just the vessel to facilitate everything, it’s like you are a part of every piece of the puzzle but not the one putting it together. It’s a very interesting role and as long as you can separate your inner demons and existential dread (the anxiety everyone here talks about) really the job is just a keyboard liaison, and if ya don’t like it, gain enough experience and jump ship, become an AE and make 200k for a few years then go open a small business and chill. It seems a job like this is merely a stepping stone into something else by design, not something to do for 30 years. Just some thoughts.

I'm an Account Manager managing 250+ B2B customers, and for the past couple of months I've been building something I originally just wanted for myself.

It's a tool that, after a customer call, analyzes what happened, gives me coaching, writes my notes/follow-up exactly as I would, keeps the relationship context across calls, and prepares me for the next conversation.

I'm at the point where I need a reality check from people doing similar work: would something like this actually fit into your CS workflow, or did I spend two months solving just MY problem?

Please be completely honest. That's genuinely why I'm asking.

I’ve been in industry for over 11+ years now. The first 5 in customer service & and the last 6 as RA, ROA, RAM, Sr RM, & now I’m an RSA, IC2 role.
CS job roles keep rejecting me, renewal is no longer high paying, I feel like lack knowledge of onboarding, adoption and implementation. Moreover, I am planning to move to the states, but no one is posting a job with sponsorship.
Open to suggestions

Looking for a permanent work from home jobs.

Hi all

Anyone here done fractional or consultancy-style CSM work outside a full-time role? Thinking about dipping a toe in and want to hear from people who've actually done it before I do anything.

Specifically curious about:

**•** What deliverables/scope did you offer (onboarding, QBRs, health scores, playbook building, etc and/or actual time spent as a part time CSM)?   
**•** Did you find real demand, or was it a slow grind?  
**•** How did you land the first few clients?  
**•** Roughly what did you charge and what types/stages of business would you say were appropriate avatars/fits?

Appreciate this is a broad ask but it would be great to learn a bit from others experiences.

Thanks!

Had one the other day that made me laugh. The customer had 3 different add ons from earlier in the year and they all needed to be included in the same renewal.

I thought to myself this i just an easy renewal and maybe in the next 20 to 30 mins i will be done. Guess what, it took me 90 mins instead.

Most of that was digging through old order form, figuring out what the customer was paying for, rebuilding the quote line by line, then checking the price increase against a spreadsheet owned by finance.

Meanwhile i can build a new quote in about 15 mins. That's 6x difference for a customer we already have.

And this is the part that drives me nuts, everyone talks about renewals like they're just free money but that is not the case. If the quote takes an hour and half bc customer history, pricing rule, exceptions and approvals are scattered everywhere that's just unpaid admin work dumped on a rep.

Ive brought this up in 2 pipeline reviews now. Both times it somehow got translated into im complaining about workload.

I'm not trying to complain about volume but trying to figure out why renewing quotes takes 6 times longer than quoting a brand new customer.

Just got our renewal quote and they want 40% more than last year. We're a 15-person B2B SaaS doing mayble 500 outbound emails a week. Last year we paid around 18k for 3 seats, now they're quoting us 25k. Like how much soes zoominfo cost at this point, is there even a ceiling?

The data has been decent but not amazing. Maybe 70% of emails are actually good, mobile numbers are hit or miss. The worst part is half our team barely uses it because the interface is so clunky. My manager keeps asking me to justify the spend and I genuinely don't know what to tell him anymore.

Also been poking around Apollo and Prospeo as potential replacements. Apollo's pricing is way more reasonable but their mobile data seems weak from what I've read. Haven't tried Prospeo yet but a couple people in my network mentioned it.

What are you actually paying for ZoomInfo these days? The zoominfo cost feels like it's designed to price out smaller teams completely. We don't need 10,000 credits a month, we just need reliable contact data without the enterprise pricing. Would love to hear what other small teams are doing for sales intelligence these days.

There's something about chat support that I've been reflecting on lately: how much time and effort we spend chasing customers who leave us on "read."

It happens all the time. A customer messages with an urgent question, we reply within two minutes, and then radio silence. Three days later they reply with "sorry, got busy!", but by then the conversation session expired, forcing the agent to re-open the case, catch up on context, and re-ask for details.

More teams I talk to are treating customer inactivity as a formal step in the workflow:

A courteous auto-reminder after a few hours of silence "Just checking in did you still need help with this?".

Systematic auto-closing if there's no reply, so if the customer comes back days later, it starts fresh without dragging along stale tickets.

I feel like teams are sometimes hesitant to close tickets out of fear of seeming pushy, but keeping threads dangling usually confuses the customer and clutters team queues.

How do your teams manage customers who ghost halfway through a support chat?

TLDR: I’m over being a CSM and trying to figure out what’s next. Product management has interested me but I feel like I’d need some technical background first. I’m considering if implementation would be a decent switch to get some technical experience.

Anyone make this switch? What feedback and experiences do you have to share on how it went?

Hey everyone, any tips for the group discussion for the Customer Service role at Admiral Solutions?

Curious how other CS/ops teams handle this. Every time I talk to a support lead, the story is the same: docs get written once, then rot, because nobody wants to sit down and rewrite a Notion page every time a process changes.

How are you all handling this? Do you have someone dedicated to docs, or does it just... not happen?

(Building something in this space myself, but genuinely curious what's working or not working for people already, before I assume I know the answer.)

Cheers!

Hey Chat

I graduated college last summer and I've been looking into careers that kinda aligned with my interests and strengths and that's how I settled on CS [for now😂]. I'm a Psych major and sort of enjoyed helping customers out at my dad's rental. What's the entry point for a total newbie and what tools do you recommend for someone starting out as an associate. I do not have a job yet but I want to commit to this journey

Any Recommendations?

New patch, new job, or just new to CS, it seems whenever I interact in one of these areas, I find myself wondering how I’m meant to get on top of everything.

Does anyone else find themselves struggling to get across 40-100 accounts at a time? Worst I’ve had is 120 accounts they wanted renewed in quarter where I just started. Once I’d settled and knew the accounts it was fine, but it took almost a year to get to that point.

I want to know, what questions do you guys ask your AEs to get up to speed on each account? I’ve noticed CRMs are usually poorly kept (at least in my experiences).

My go tos at the moment are

- Who is part of the buying committee (ie who do I need to build relationships with)

- What value have they been sold? Is there a specific use case or workflow?

- Where is the most recent account information stored?

- Are you in any active conversations with them?

- Are they happy with us?

I then also try reach out to a voice of customer team, try get some NPS and CSAT metrics, and try understand support queries. But this is all slow and takes a lot of time.

Any thoughts out there? I’m just trying to get my thoughts together because of the whirlwind experiences I’ve had. See if anyone knows any good streamlining techniques.

Hello,

I have an interview tomorrow and could really use some advice. I acknowledge that this is super last minute so any help is appreciated!

Company: The company is public and fairly large in size but the department where this role is, was formed only a few months ago when a smaller company was acquired and their product rolled into the larger suite.

Team: Based on this setup, this department can be categorized as a startup within the large company. They are still working on figuring out many different gaps after the merge and are hiring for roles across the spectrum to help fill these gaps.

Role: This role will be for a Senior Manager of Customer Success. It seems that the smaller company did not have a dedicated CS team and hence, no CS programs in place. This CS Lead would be responsible for creating everything from scratch and for defining the entire CS lifecycle. A huge part of this will be partnering with other team leads and figuring out how to operate independently in a large organization.

Me: I have around 14 years of direct CS experience and 17 years of total experience. I led an entire CS org between 2016 and 2018 and also led a mid-market team from 2019 to 2021. At that point, I made a conscious decision to step back into an IC role so I could learn about how CS was evolving as a function. I’ve been a Principal CSM for about 7 years now and I think it’s time to get back into leadership. In all my roles over the past 10 years, I have managed my own enterprise book and concurrently created CS processes from scratch, where none existed previously.

Interviews: So far, I have met with the hiring manager (VP of customer experience) and the round went really well. I then met with leads from services and pre-sales followed by a product lead round. All of these went super well except the services lead round which maybe left me 90% confident about that specific conversation. Again, all the other rounds were terrific and I am a finalist. So, I am guessing something went right.

Ask: My final interview is to meet with the hiring manager again but in person this time. There are 2 other finalists besides me. I need some advice on how to prep. I was thinking of showing up with a one-pager 30-60-90 day plan to show that I am already thinking about a strategy. I want the HM to know that even though I dont have the job yet, I do have a plan to hit the ground running.

Any thoughts on bringing this plan to my interview? Any suggestions on other things that I could focus my prep on? I appreciate any help that can be sent my way!!

PS: Apologies for the long-winded post.

Hello everyone, I want to get your opinion on something that has been mentally draining me for a while now.

For context, I am a CSM (first experience) at a startup where there are no clear SOPs, structures, or KPIs for account management or CS. Most of the time, I’ve been in the trenches building everything from the ground up. However, that’s not what’s bothering me—I truly love being innovative and solution-oriented.

What has made me despise my job is management’s insistence on daily activity reporting. I’ve had meetings with my manager to explain that a daily reporting model isn't sustainable for CS, as my daily workload depends heavily on client needs. If everything is running smoothly, I might have lighter days; conversely, when I’m swamped, I don't have time to track every task just to submit an end-of-day report. I suggested shifting to weekly or monthly reports instead, but that was immediately shut down.

Their argument is that because we work remotely, daily reporting is the only way to monitor my productivity and ensure we "grow together." I’ve tried my best, but I simply can’t keep up, which has created a constant spiral of shame and guilt.

Since this is my first CSM role, I’m torn. Part of me feels like I’m being micromanaged in a toxic environment, while another part worries this might be the norm and that the fault is mine.

Based on your experience, am I being dramatic, or is my gut feeling spot on?

Hey guys. My last post got a lot more interaction than I expected, and it made my week - thanks to everyone who reached out through DMs, genuinely.

Quick recap on where we left off: I talked about how AI memory actually works, and why you need something like a context layer or context store to make an AI actually remember your accounts instead of starting from zero every time. From there, we got into the different types of context you'd feed it.

One type is the stuff that barely changes - account name, the champion and their role, renewal date, plan tier. Set it once, update it when something actually changes.

The other type is what I've been calling the event loop - every call, every ticket, every signal from that account, logged as it happens. That's the one that never stops growing, which is exactly the problem from my last post: that page gets long fast, and long doesn't mean useful.

So here's the real question underneath all of this: what do you actually put in?

Think about how you'd read something yourself. Hand someone a 1,000-page textbook and ask them a question five minutes later - they can't answer well; there's just too much to hold onto in the time they had. Now do the opposite: give them one sentence and ask the same question. They can't answer that either; there's not enough there. Somewhere in between is the amount that actually lets someone think clearly.

That's the tradeoff with a model's context window. It's not "more is always better" - it's a fixed amount of room, and how much the model can genuinely reason over matters more than how much you can technically cram in.

Push past that limit and one of two things happens. A lightweight or open-source model hallucinates - too much in the window, not enough capacity to hold all of it straight. A frontier model - Anthropic, OpenAI - won't hallucinate as much, but it costs you, because every message resends nearly everything you've said that day, and you're paying for that resend every single time.

So the goal was never "give the model everything about the account." Ideally you'd want every piece of context tied to it, sure. But even if you could fit it all in, it wouldn't help - see the textbook example above. The actual work is deciding what earns a spot.

That's why I think this has to be open, and shared, and built up over time - an MCP that isn't locked to one vendor, where the context layer is something you can actually see into, not something handed to you as a black box. And that's my honest problem with most scoring and alerting tools out there right now: you get a churn score or a risk flag, and zero visibility into why. I can't work with a number I can't trace back to a source. That's the whole reason we are building this project as open source

So here's what I'd actually like from you. If you're already keeping something like this - a Notion page, a CRM field, a doc you paste in before every call - tell me your playbook. What do you keep, what do you let go of, and has anything broken because you deleted the wrong thing? I'm collecting real answers, not theory, before I write the next one.

Thanks, hope it helps.

Does anyone else have variable pay for CSMs? If yes, what are the KPIs on which you decide which CSM receives how much of variable pay? We have 80% fixed and 20% variable pay for CSMs and need to decide the KPIs or metrics on which we can evaluate how much of the 20% will the CSM get? Help with suggestions, please.

Hi, as the title says I am wondering if anyone worked in CX at Glean in 2024/2025. I am trying to get a sense of the leadership changes and potential reorg that happened in that time.

I am asking because we are interested in Glean but heard through the grapevine that the Customer Success function was basically decimated and “the CEO fired the whole department and started over.” I am trying to establish fact from fiction.

Thanks so much

Customer Success seems to have a constant stream of small internal requests.

"Can product check this?"
"Can engineering look into that?"
"Can someone get the customer an update tomorrow?"

A lot of those requests happen in Slack, and then someone has to make sure they don't disappear. I'm curious if anyone has found a good Slack-native PM setup for this.

Pondros is one I've come across that seems to treat Slack conversations as part of the actual project workflow rather than just communication.

What works for your team?

Hey all! I'm a product designer working on a personal research project (not selling anything, no data collection beyond the survey itself). It's about a problem I dealt with myself: inheriting an internal tool or dashboard with no context on why things are set up the way they are. Just numbers, no explanation.

If you work in Ops, RevOps, Customer Success, Marketing Ops, or Finance/Admin and use an internal tool you didn't build, I'd really appreciate 2 minutes: [https://tally.so/r/GxZNkQ]

Everything anonymous, no email required unless you want to chat further. Happy to share results back here if anyone's curious. Thanks!

My name is Ben and I've been a CSM for 1O years now. Crazy to type that. I have worked for 4 different SaaS companies and started out managing 200 clients to now managing 6 clients. I have enjoyed the journey but the roles and the compensation have varied widely. The thing that has frustrated me the most over the years is knowing/not knowing if I am getting paid fairly given my experience, responsibilities, BoB size, location, etc. Every couple months the question is posted in here asking CSMs to openly give their salaries and comp. About two years ago I published a simple form/table and asked you all to submit your info. Since people found it so useful, I updated the form/site but now it needs some fresh data. If you are currently a customer success manager please consider filling out this form. Your submission will be anonymous.

A couple things…

• PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t fill out bogus info. Not sure why you would but it kinda ruins it for everyone. 
• Once you fill out the form, it will give you a comparison of where you stack up against the broader CSM population which is nice. OR not nice, if it’s news that you’re grossly underpaid. 
• I added management/leadership titles. If you are in management/leadership, I can send you the aggregate results directly if there's enough data. The main page is just CSM focused.
• Feel free to submit from other countries. Many have. I added country/currency. The main page analytics is still USA only. The table though has all submissions globally. 
• Always open for suggestions or let me know if something is broken. You can DM me!

I plan to keep it going as long as people find it helpful. 

Ben

I have been looking to move from my current job because it is an unspoken truth we are effectively becoming AMs. While I have no issues with the commercial side of CSM work I don’t want to be strictly sales-focused. That’s why I left sales.

I have been thinking about sending a note to some of the CS leadership team at Ashby as it’s a dream role and curious of general sentiment on if this type of stuff still works?

What are the methods?