Jason M. Lemkin argues Customer Success should report to the CEO, not sales, because most SaaS companies are too focused on acquiring new customers and ignore retention. The real problem is cultural: organizations don't allocate enough resources to keeping customers happy, which tanks net revenue retention.
But I don't think we've solved this issue of who to customer success report to. When I talk with CEOs and founders, I give the answer. It's got to report to you. Okay. That's got to be the answer. And maybe that's good for customer success professionals because it gives them a seat at the table, but it's not necessarily for the right, the really the right reason. I still think it's tough, but it's not clear exactly who owns what. And I think it leads to a lot of at the edge anxiety in the industry. In, in my experience.
Right. Education there too.
Yes.
I like, I think that's part of it. Like, you know, where you're saying nobody wants to own cs. Well, that's just because there's a lot of confusion as like, what is the value? Honestly, like what is the value that this team brings? And articulating that sometimes is what causes those challenges in my mind.
Yeah. I think that nobody. And then yes, is it that nobody wants to own CS because it's a hard job, a thankless job. Like, what's, what's the, what's the reason, do you think, Jason, for folks not wanting to own cs? Well, look, I think it's two things I think, and you're in the growth phase. We become overwhelmingly sales oriented to a fault. Right. Which I've talked about years. We all become customer or new customer oriented. Right. We say we're focused on our existing base, but once you have a sales team and once the sales team becomes like 30, 40% of your headcount, it tends to dominate every conversation. What's the big deal? What's in the pipeline? What's going on every conversation. And there's not a lot of oxygen left in organizations for maintaining customers. It's all wrong. As we know, in any organization with triple digit nrr, the conversation should be flipped. Right. We should be spending all of our oxygen on making our customers happy and worrying a little bit less about the incremental customer. But it's not the way B2B businesses work. Right. We're just overwhelmed. We're all still either freemium or sells driven. And founders have to fight this. They have to force this almost unnatural way we work as humans because our energy does not reflect our revenue structure. We don't put the amount of energy into customer success that recurring revenue deserves. In SaaS, we don't put the ratios. We don't get the pie chart right.
