Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

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

20 Feb 2024 · 1 min

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0:42

Excerpt from a YouTube talk by Jason M. Lemkin criticizing how B2B customer success teams shifted focus from customer relationships to short-term revenue, including an anecdote where a leading public company demanded a large upfront payment from a long-time customer. The speaker frames this change as destructive to customer relationships.

Questions this video answers

$299 per month.

$50,000 (demanded up front) .

No — the speaker explicitly said they would not name the company.

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, 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. I know this is going to trigger some people, but it is true. When.