The Dark Side of Customer Success: When Revenue Takes Priority Over Relationships

Name: The Dark Side of Customer Success: When Revenue Takes Priority Over Relationships
Uploaded: 2024-02-20T16:39:41+00:00
Duration: 41 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: In this excerpt from his YouTube monologue, Jason M. Lemkin critiques the recent shift in B2B customer‑success teams from a focus on happy, long‑term…

20 Feb 2024 · 1 min

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In this excerpt from his YouTube monologue, Jason M. Lemkin critiques the recent shift in B2B customer‑success teams from a focus on happy, long‑term relationships to a hard‑line revenue‑generation mandate. He argues that forcing customer‑success teams to prioritize upsell revenue "weaponizes" the function, turning it into a threat rather than a partnership. Lemkin illustrates his point with a concrete anecdote: a long‑standing vendor that charged his team $299 / month suddenly demanded a $50,000 upfront payment under threat of shutting the service off within a week. He uses this story to highlight how such aggressive revenue‑first tactics erode trust, damage relationships, and ultimately undermine the purpose of customer success.

Chapters

how many logos stay. That was your only job. Happy customers, happy customers. Then things got harder in many areas of B2B and every customer success team last year, their goal was revenue. You need to bring in more revenue from existing base and it destroyed customer relationships. It had, there is a leading public company. I will not name them. I'm a positive guy. I will tell you a company we all have used for years and loved. Okay. And they did this to their customer success team. And they came to us last year. We paid $299 a month for this product for our team. They asked us for $50,000 up front or said they would turn it off that day, that week. Maybe it was that week. $50,000. That's what happens when you weaponize. And so customer success, and I know this is gonna trigger some people, but it is true.