Just had a check-in call with a $50k a year vendor we use for SaaStr
They sent a new sales rep to call who didn't know the account
They just walked through a deck with data they didn't collect or know
That we'd already read
What a waste of everyone's time
The Death of the…
— Jason ✨👾SaaStr 2025 is May 13-15✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) October 2, 2024
So a trend that personally makes me cry, but I do understand it, is Customer Success reporting into Sales.
It makes some short term sense, especially when revenue slows. And this is when I see the change most often. When revenue slows, there is more and more pressure to grow revenue from the base vs. new logos. And then sales more and more wants to own customer success and maximize the revenue from upsells. I call it the Weaponizing of Customer Success, because IMHO at least, it leads to a fairly terrible CS experience. Personally, every QBR and CS call I go to that is run by sales or account management or a CS exec looking for upsell … is terrible. The meeting is never about solving my problems. I no longer go to them … at all.
OK but how real is this trend? Very much so.
Per the latest report from ChurnZero, the trend of CS reporting to the CRO is up a stunning +38% this year!
33% of heads of CS now report to the CRO, up from 24%-25% the past 2 years. That’s a big, big change.
As ChurnZero notes, it’s the least common in early-stage startups, which makes sense. First, they don’t have a full management team anyway in most cases. And second, they often are 100% about acquiring net new logos. Not harvesting the base.
Anyhow I don’t like. I encourage you to resist this trend as long as you can, because I personally never see it leading to a better customer experience.
But it’s the world we are in, in 2024-2025. Customer Success more and more isn’t about making the customer successful. It’s about making more money from them.
More from ChurnZero here.
And a related post here:
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Jason Lemkin, Khareem Sudlow
