I spoke to over 600 leaders in Customer Success / Customer Retention.
Over the course of the next year, 75% of them were no longer in their role.
I know many reasons factored into this (personal situations, other roles, economy etc.), but after chatting with many SaaS CEOs and digging into it further, I uncovered a very troubling theme:
The biggest reason for the turnover was the Customer Success leader’s inability to scale with the growth of the SaaS company.
The way one CEO explained it to me was quite simple, and reflected the majority of the conversations:
We hired the CS Leader to take care of customers and hoped they would grow into the role. As the company grew, they became too involved in the daily operations to recognize the strategic shift. Despite efforts to reconcile this in 1x1s and executive meetings to catch them up to the growth curve, the CS Leader simply wasn’t progressing to the level we needed.
The CEO ultimately felt forced to make a leadership change and to do it quickly.
A sobering reality isn’t it?
If you ever find yourself in “The Scale Spiral”, these are the top 3 things I would recommend immediately:
- If a CEO is providing “advice”, consider it explicit direction (this was a very common theme in my conversations) They won’t ask for an answer, but you are expected to address it later on your own.
- If you’ve ever thought, “Why don’t you just tell me what to do then?” you are at huge risk!
- ALWAYS bring up the topic later, either with clarifying questions or in some way that you’ve used the advice and the result.
- Shift your focus from qualitative stories and customer care to credible and actionable data that executives trust.
- In executive meetings, focus on proving the retention formula and preventing future churn, rather than presenting partial or incomplete data without a conclusion.
Above all, there are alternatives and you can get help – just don’t be afraid to throw yourself the life preserver.
