is your CS team committing malpractice? 🤔

"What do you want to achieve next with our platform?"

Innocuous enough, right? A customer-centric way to start a conversation. But if that's your CSMs are asking your customers, you might be committing CS malpractice.

You're wasting the most valuable asset you have: your cross-customer expertise.

In a world obsessed with customer-centricity, maybe we've overcorrected. We've turned skilled CS professionals into glorified order-takers, often afraid to assert the very expertise that makes them so valuable.

The Expertise Gap

Your customers need more than a relationship manager. They need a guide who has walked the path hundreds of times before. That’s why they’re willing to pay the premium for SaaS.

As CS professionals, we have a perspective no single customer can match:

• We've witnessed the journey of dozens (perhaps even hundreds) of similar companies.

• We know what it takes to surround our product with people, processes, and integrations.

• We've documented which implementation paths succeed and which ones fail.

• We can see around corners that they can't because we've been there before.

And yet, too often, we hesitate to lead confidently, hiding behind questions like:

"How would you like to proceed?"

"What are your priorities for the next phase?"

"Which features are you interested in exploring?"

These questions may sound collaborative, but they often mask a dangerous abdication of responsibility.

Your Customers Are Drowning in Options, Not Starving for Choices

Every feature looks equally crucial on a roadmap. Every use case seems similarly valuable in a capabilities overview. Every success story feels equally relevant in a sales deck.

But they're not.

A clear, optimal path matches each customer's maturity, industry, and constraints. And often, you already know what it is.

The Cost of Order-Taking

The consequences of this passive, order-taking approach are significant:

1. Longer Time-to-Value

Customers inevitably take detours and make mistakes without expert guidance, delaying value realization and impacting retention.

2. Reduced Expansion Opportunities

Customers who do not achieve full value from your core offering are less likely to expand, regardless of how well you've “listened.”

3. CSM Burnout

Watching customers repeat avoidable mistakes while you play facilitator is draining and contributes to the high turnover rates plaguing the CS profession.

4. Commoditization of CS

Positioning ourselves as facilitators rather than experts makes CS interchangeable and undermines its strategic value.

So, how do you help your teams turn the tide? Shift from passive accommodation to active expertise:

1. Establish Your Expertise

Instead of: "What would you like to focus on next?"

Try: "Working with 200+ companies at your stage has shown us that focusing on X typically delivers the fastest ROI. Here's why..." (Confidence born from experience)

2. Present the Clear Next Step

Instead of: "Here are all the features you haven't implemented yet."

Try: "Based on your usage and goals, there's one clear priority that will drive the outcomes you need next. " (Leadership is showing the right path, not all paths)

3. Share the Specific Outcome

Instead of: "This feature has a lot of benefits."

Try: "Customers like you who implement this workflow typically see X improvement within Y timeframe. Let's define how we'll measure that together..." (Specificity demonstrates expertise — you've seen this movie before)

The Expertise Paradox

The irony? Customers receiving direct, expertise-driven guidance often report higher satisfaction than those given endless options and autonomy.

It shouldn't be surprising.

When you go to a doctor, you want a diagnosis and a clear treatment plan backed by expertise, not a catalog of options.

Your customers want the same expert guidance from you.

Making the Shift

Transitioning from order-taker to expert guide requires focused effort:

1. Build confidence in your pattern recognition.

   Document common success/failure paths for customers. Create playbooks based on evidence, not opinions.

2. Develop

   For every customer segment, have a clear perspective on what "good" looks like at each stage of their journey and be ready to articulate it.

3. Practice prescriptive communication

   Role-play these conversations. Practice matters, especially when breaking the habit of prioritizing accommodation.

4. Manage up

   Push back against metrics (like CSAT alone) that reward pleasantness over practical guidance. Advocate for metrics tied to expertise-driven outcomes.

Your job isn't to offer a buffet of options. It's to be the seasoned chef who knows precisely what dish the customer needs next.

Stop asking; start leading.

🤘

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