What are CSMs supposed to do?

We often underestimate the impact of churn, leading to underinvestment in preventing it.

Churn isn’t just lost MRR or ARR for one time period; it’s lost long-term recurring revenue AND potential expansion. With low churn and strong expansion, the urgency for new business growth decreases.

Despite this, companies invest far more in new business marketing than in customer marketing.

If your product has serious flaws or was sold to the wrong customers, churn may be inevitable. But much churn is preventable and shouldn’t rely on last-minute efforts at renewal.

Early on, start forming hypotheses about the types of product adoption that make your product sticky.

For example, in customer engagement or marketing automation tools, the number of different automations in use indicates adoption and reduces churn, since migrating these setups would be time-intensive. Another example could be the number of custom integrations with a customer’s other data tools.

This creates a clear plan for CSMs: helping customers get maximum value from the tool by increasing adoption in ways that reduce churn and increase future expansion. For instance, CSMs can work with customers on custom integrations and provide best practices for automations.

Founders often ask about CSM vs. AE responsibilities for farming. My simple structure: CSMs focus on driving adoption and value discovery to support renewal, while AEs are responsible for closing the renewal.

Steps:

-- Identify product adoption patterns that deliver value and stickiness.

-- Make CSMs’ primary goal to ensure adoption of these patterns—this can be the sole metric tracked if you only want 1 KPI.

-- As a secondary goal, create a checklist for relationship building between CSMs, users, and execs, which CSMs should complete.

If the right type of product adoption + improved personal relationships with the customer can't reduce your churn, then nothing can.