SHOT
Customer Success is the key to scaling your business.
CHASER
Not if it turns your company into a dog on a leash.
Customer Success (CS) often starts with a clear purpose: onboarding clients, driving adoption, and providing support. But as growing tech businesses (in our industry especially) seek product-market fit, they discover that certain clients—particularly big, beloved enterprise logos—don’t just need support. They demand execution.
These execution-heavy clients can be worth the effort, but they can also bring your business to its knees. Their bespoke needs and ways of working will turn CS into an expensive, reactive service arm that quickly becomes a drag on growth and margins.
INSIGHT
When you swap enablement for execution, you don’t automatically kill scalability—but you do need to tread carefully.
Not every client is a fit for CS. Stay true to your Ideal Client Profiles (ICPs) and know where service is essential to winning, rather than a ‘nice to have.’ While the ideal scenario is to insert yourself into the client’s established workflow, make sure that they do the same—meaning that they are using your platform in repeatable, predictable, what-it-is-meant-to-do ways. (See more on this in my article on flexibility.) This is the bare minimum. For CS to truly contribute to scale, you must relentlessly pursue efficiency through product and process improvements.
Finally, make sure you have an easily understood pricing model. Service isn’t free. Execution-heavy work should be a structured, chargeable offering—not absorbed as a cost of doing business.
Scaling CS requires clarity and discipline. Done right, it’s a powerful engine for growth. Done poorly, it becomes a drag on the business.