CS moving from customer Ally to Nemesis?
One of our podcast listeners asked, “I would love to get your view on Jason Lemkin’s assessment that customer success is moving from the customer's ally to its nemesis.”
Jason Lemkin is a VC and is very influential in the SaaS world; for better or worse (worse being when he said in 2012 that CSMs should manage $2M/ARR and people took that as a legit benchmark. Many people still mistakenly believe that's valid.).
So Jason's view that "Customer Success Has Gone from The Customer’s Ally To Its Nemesis" (which is contained in a blog post - that reads like an emotional response to a bad experience - and is linked in the show notes of our latest podcast episode), definitely caught a lot of people's attention.
We really dug into this from different angles in the latest episode of our Impact Weekly podcast that just dropped today.
in this episode, we explore:
- The definition of an Ally and Nemesis in this context
- Why the negative things Jason is citing aren't actually Customer Success
- Challenges faced by companies in a downturn market and the pressure to increase revenue
- The significance of raising concerns to leadership and seeking a customer-centric approach
- And much more!
I was in Brazil for the past two weeks - 7 airports, 9 flights - and I caught a cold. Unfortunately, you can tell that in my voice on this episode. Sorry about that.
~Lincoln
BTW: Our Annual Customer Success survey is still open and we'd love to know how you'd answer questions like these:
- How fulfilled do you feel in your role in Customer Success?
- Do you think the leadership of your company practices what they preach when it comes to Customer Success?
- Do you/your team have the necessary capacity to make your customers successful?
- How much do you use GenAI (like ChatGPT) in your day-to-day job in Customer Success today?
So we put together this survey on Typeform to help fill in those - and other - gaps in the collective understanding of the CS community.
While the information we're collecting is super-important - and of course we'll share it with you and the community when we're done collecting it - the survey itself will only take a few minutes to complete.
Please share your experience with the community here.
Thanks in advance!
...
Lincoln Murphy
I help SaaS companies Maximize LTV through Customer-centric Upselling
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On Monday, you find out. Join our Head of CS training starting October 20, 2025. This is one of the most impactful programs we offer because it focuses on the critical aspects of Leadership, Management, and Coaching that every Head of Customer Success needs to leverage to drive real business impact. Our live sessions are going to focus on the big shifts AI is having on everything we do in Customer Success. While the core, underlying principles of building, running, and scaling a CS org...