The Different Flavours of Customer Success

Most SaaS companies have a Customer Success team but the go-to-market approach can from one company to another. Understanding the different approaches will lead you towards the best strategy for helping your customer.

When you look at the structure of a lot of companies you can be sure that some things will pretty much the same from one company to the next. Sales is setup to sell, Marketing generates awareness, Product and Engineering... well... builds the product, Support supports the product.

When it comes to Customer Success, what is and isn't done within the scope of the team can look and taste very different from one company to the next. So much so that the fundamentals of the role look completely different and make it hard for post-sales professionals to transition from one company to another because the skills required are also different.

At its core, organisational design will be influenced by a wide range of factors from the type of product or service offering, the size of the deal and average contract value to the stage and size of company, funding, and general go-to-market model and approach. However Sales will always sell, Product will always build product, and so on. So why do some Customer Success teams manage implementation, where as others manage renewals?

When Customer Success professionals meet, one of the first discussion topics will be "so what flavour of Customer Success do you do?" or in other words, "how does your company approach Customer Success?"

Understanding the different approaches is key to building the right Customer Success strategy for your company, with a key part of that being what is within the scope of the Customer Success Manager role, and what is covered by other roles.

🍦Product Customer Success

Focus: Getting a new customer onboarded into your product and getting users activated as quickly as possible. CS actions are towards getting a user community to habitually adopt the product for the long term.

Depending on the type of product and customer, this may either be human-led (by a Customer Success Manager) or a scaled/tech-touch approached setup to execute low-effort, programatic activities, which can be consumed and completed by the end user in bite-sizes or micro to short timeframes. CS focused on adoption, usage, and maximising value from the product itself.

Common Characteristics:

• Prevalent in product-led growth (PLG) or lower-touch SaaS companies where the entry point to purchase and use can be self-service.

• There is heavy use of in-app guidance, automation, and lifecycle journeys, supplemented by education resources and videos.

• CS focuses on proactive nudges and success milestones through the product and may interject in the lifecycle journey where there are exceptions or exits from intended paths at key points.

• CSMs will be assigned to lead or oversee and monitor the product usage and adoption for larger value customers and sales or where greater complexity is inherent due to the nature of the size or scale of usage.

• CSMs reinforce marketing activities by communicating new, large, product feature releases with a goal to get user groups adopting 'sticky features' as soon as possible.

Indicators You Might Be in a Product Customer Success Model:

• Digital journeys or lifecycle emails guide user behaviour. These programs are either owned by Marketing or a specific Digital CS team

• Customer Success teams collaborate closely with Product & Growth teams in your company.

• Low average contract values (ACVs) per customer and high volume of customers.

Questions to Explore when implementing:

• Where is the cut off point as to which customers get a CSMs? How do we segment our customers and assign CSMs to some and not others, which customers do we prioritise?

• What are our key activation milestones and how do we measure that consistently? Which 'aha' moments must every user hit? how will we instrument those in our product analytics? and how does a CSM influence those?

• Do you already have the tools and automation capabilities to drive our low‑touch engagement? if not, how much and how far are you willing to invest in that?

• Do you have an accurate mapping of the entire customer journey, from both your perspective and the customers?

🍨 Commercial Customer Success

Focus: CSMs will be driven by the next commercial milestone and will often cause them to think in a quarterly cycle, with short term, revenue-generating and retention activities as their primary focus. Whilst not limited to these, activities on product adoption and success will become secondary in focus.

Commercial CS owns or influences renewals, expansion, and cross-sell opportunities. They are typically incentivised on achieving quota's, revenue targets or generating new pipeline. In this approach the CSM might not necessarily be compensated on all of these activities but the expectation is set to be driven by it.

Common Characteristics:

• CS often has commercial targets or shared goals with Sales/Account Management, aligning to quarterly numbers, reps, and Sales segmented books of business.

• Strong partnership with CRO or RevOps teams, under this model CS may even report directly into the CRO and as such inherit much of the focus, vision or strategic flavour from the Revenue Leader.

• High awareness of pipeline, churn risk, and upsell opportunities. CSMs will have a greater sense of the commercial structure of their book of business and be able to segment their book based on existing or potential commercial indicators.

• CS may also be engaged in some pre-sales activities as they possess an attractive mix of product knowledge, commercial awareness and customer intimacy of the use case.

Indicators You Might Be in a Commercial CS Model:

• CSMs negotiate renewals or initiate expansions.

• Compensation is tied to revenue outcomes.

• CS reports into Sales, or the CRO.

• The CS approach aligns to a Sales methodology (MEDDIC, SPIN, BANT, NEAT)

Questions to Explore when implementing:

• How are you going to avoid the overlap between Customer Success and Account Management, especially when it comes to managing renewals with expansion? how do you avoid conflicting outreach and customer confusion?

• How do you get CSMs to think more strategically when the very nature of their approach is based on a quarterly cycle or is driven by short-term quotas/targets?

• What commercial metrics will CSMs own? How will you design the compensation plans to provide a mix of incentive that honours the commercial focus but doesn't overlook the need to make customers successful?

• How do you handle objections and escalations that conflict with revenue aspirations? If the customer has a change in circumstance, how are you going to ensure there is a balance of commercial intent with customer health?

🍧 Strategic Customer Success

Focus: A consultative approach, with a hands on prescriptive service where you intimately know the reasons the customer purchased your product, and you're able to translate that into articulable outcomes and return on their investment.

The CSM is positioned and seen as a a 'trusted advisor' and is recognised as such because they invest in a high-touch, relationship-driven approach that focuses on long-term value, business alignment, and executive engagement.

Common Characteristics:

• Typically seen in enterprise B2B SaaS with complex implementations.

• CS teams act as trusted advisors, not just extensions of Support or product experts.

• Focus on ROI, value realisation, and strategic account planning.

• Often aligned to C-level stakeholders in the customer org.

• Well orchestrated and planned timeline and series of touchpoints, throughout the entire post-sales relationship.

  
  

Indicators You Might Be in a Strategic Customer Success Model:

• Onboarding the customer to your product takes several months and may span quarters. This may be done by a separate Implementation or Professional Services team and the CSM is the post-sale point of contact overseeing it.

• CS and customers engage in Executive/Quarterly Business Reviews and joint success planning.

• Customers expect bespoke experiences and consultancy-like engagement.

• High value average contract values, or long sales cycles with large internal involvement.

Questions to explore when implementing:

• What internal structure best supports a strategic model? How does this approach align with Customer Success reporting into a CCO vs. CRO?

• Can you define and measure “strategic value” in the customers terms? What business outcomes (ROI, efficiency gains, new revenue lines) will signal success to the customer in your high‑touch engagements, and how will you track and measure them over time?

• Do your CSM's possess the consultative skills for this approach? Do we have enough industry experience and best practice guidance to be the 'trusted advisor'?

• How does this approach scale as the company grows, without diluting the 'strategic' experience? Do we have to segment our customers or adopt other flavours of CS to supplement?

Hybrid and Evolving Models

You may be thinking "hold on, we do a little of all of those", which may be true, at least aspirationally. It's likely you will lead with one flavour, with supplementary engagement points and tasks from the others.

Many companies blend elements of the above models or evolve over time. This tends to come with company growth and maturity, market longevity, reputation and success. The design and commitment to the approach will also depend on the company priority and strategy at the time.

Evolving from one model to another, or a hybrid mix of two or all three, will change as the company scales. If you are fully entrenched in one approach and have desires to move to another, experiment with tiger teams and micro-projects, rather than lurching from one approach to another, which can have irreparable impact on customer trust.