Listen to your least happy customers or watch your revenue shrink… Many leadership teams claim to value their customers. Then they fund Customer Success like a help desk or outright ignore it altogether, misguided by the confidence that their product alone will win retention, and wonder why net revenue does not move. The tension shows up every budget cycle. Sales and marketing get the glamour budget. Success gets the “support” budget. Yet the largest share of annual revenue usually comes from customers you already have.

If you accept my suggestion that success owns most of the revenue, it should resemble a revenue function. That means clear outcomes, a real operating model, and the budget to make it work at scale. Anything less is avoidable waste.

The job is NOT support

Support resolves accute issues. Success makes customers successful. That sounds obvious, but the difference in practice is enormous. Success is the system that turns what you sell into results for a client. It reduces time to value. It drives adoption. It keeps stakeholders informed. It hears concern before it turns into loss. And it does all of that across hundreds …