Reimagining the Customer Success Leadership Network

By Irene Lefton
March 24, 2023

What’s happening in Customer Success? Is it thriving? Is it struggling? What are the big challenges CS Leaders are facing these days? There are many. For a little over a year, the CS Leadership Network (CSLN) Governing Council/Board has held brainstorming and discussion sessions and spoken with many in the CS Community to better understand the current landscape and reimagine how we can continue to provide value.  

When we started CSLN back in 2015, we were a scrappy group of CS Leaders, who met monthly as a peer network to help each other navigate the early days of CS. At that time, there were only a handful of vendors, many companies didn’t have CS teams (even in SaaS companies), and most people didn’t even know what Customer Success meant. Many thought it was an extension of Customer Service. We were clear on what was needed then: education about the function; advocacy for Customer Success; training for leadership; networking opportunities for practitioners and leaders; developing business metrics; and getting a seat at the table. And that is where we focused our efforts. We started with meetups and then added more leadership programming and content in the form of videos and blogs. We created a vibrant Slack community and helped to grow many thought leaders in the space, who now mentor and educate CS practitioners. We were happy to be a part of the first wave of CS Success.  

Since our inception, we’ve seen a seismic shift in the CS landscape. Now, there are more CS organizations, consultants, training opportunities, communities, and awards than ever before. We see new technology emerging, creating an entirely new tech stack for supporting this critical business function. Covid changed the way we interact, allowing for virtual meetups and engagement. It also expanded to CS leaders and practitioners across the United States, driving the function outside of the Bay Area. The speed of such progress is sensational! CS continues to grow up and out, and we served as a catalyst for it. We are so proud!

With this explosion in growth and education about the function, the CSLN took a step back this past year, and we asked ourselves where do we fit in this new CS world order? How can we continue to provide value? Where do we go next? 

While in many ways CS is thriving, we still see challenges. We observe CS struggling to find a stronger foothold within organizations; struggling to communicate and educate fellow cross-functional leaders on the role they play in the success of Customer Success; struggling to be seen as an investment center versus a cost center; struggling to find its voice in the boardroom and in investment circles. 

Many CCO’s and VP’s of CS that we talk to share similar sentiments on these challenges including the need to continuously explain how CS can be a growth engine within their company. They grapple with questions like: why is it that many CEO’s, peer C-Suite Executives (CRO, CPO, COO, CMO, etc), and investors (PE and VC) still don’t understand that CS is mission critical to business success? 

CS is a young business function, so there is a great opportunity and need to educate executive teams about how to align goals, objectives, and compensation to balance customer acquisition with customer retention and expansion. When a CS organization is not well understood, it becomes difficult to sustain growth (not to mention expand revenue). We see these areas of struggle, and it’s through these difficult challenges that the future focus of the CSLN rings clear.

Our original mission was:

To advance understanding and development of leadership in the field of Customer Success through an active, open network which shares knowledge, ideas, and information with the goal of growing leaders who will elevate customer experience and drive business growth.  

We love this mission, and it is still a key part of our ongoing focus.  

We are expanding our CSLN mission to include:  

Provide value and inform investors and business executives outside the CS function about how customer-centric practices can expand revenue, improve margin, and drive advocacy to help companies become and remain profitable, especially in the SaaS world. 

What does this mean for you, our existing CS community?  

Many of you joined us at different times along our evolution. You trust us to bring high quality events, programs and content centered around CS Leadership. You might know us through attending events, participating in webinars, being an active member of our Slack group, or following our blogs on LinkedIn. Most of that won’t change. We still plan to provide content and programming relevant to you. What’s new? We will be broadening our audience “upmarket” to the C-Suite, non CS leaders, and Investors, while still concentrating on advocating for the CS function and helping CS Leaders. 

For our events, we are now focused on smaller invitation only gatherings with mixed audiences of CS Leaders and other C-Suite executives and investors. We will share the content (video recordings, blogs, and more) from these events with our entire community. By broadening our audience and involving C-Suite peers of CS and Investors, we expect to grow the overall understanding of how CS is measured and valued. Won’t it be fantastic to have your product team, marketing team and/or sales team understand your value? We think so!

We appreciate you. And we believe our reimagined CSLN focus of expanding to include other executives and investors will benefit you and the larger CS community. We want everyone to understand that CS is more than just a functional area. It is a team sport that requires all functional areas to rally around one thing: the customer. Having broad understanding of this will go a long way to helping all of us in the CS function continue to grow up into a long term sustainable business function and maybe in another few years, no one will wonder “What is Customer Success?”

We are so excited to embark upon this journey with you! Stay tuned for upcoming content in May and check out our new website. 

As always we encourage you to stay connected with us by reaching out, joining our LinkedIn group, participating in our Slack community, or emailing us at csleadershipgoverningcouncil@gmail.com.