It's not about your product.
The reason SaaS services and success teams often miss the mark isn't a lack of product knowledge. In fact, most teams know their product inside and out, better than anyone. The real problem is product tunnel vision… they don't deeply understand the customer's world outside of their product.
Think of a CSM for a marketing automation tool. They can explain every feature flawlessly but have no idea how their tool's leads are ingested by the customer's custom Salesforce setup or which downstream analytics platform relies on their data. They have product expertise but lack true customer context.
That context is everything. It's the...
other systems.
other processes.
other people involved.
other data sets.
It's not about your product; it's about how your product interacts with everything else in your customer's company. If you get this right at scale, you have a much better shot at industry-leading retention and significant expansion.
So, how do you enable your teams to break out of the tunnel and see the customer's day-to-day reality?
Hire for Context, Not Just Competence
The fastest way to gain customer context is to hire it. Prioritize candidates who have lived in your customers' world — people who come from the industry you serve. A former HR leader managing an HR tech implementation has an innate understanding that can't be taught in a two-week training. They know the ecosystem, the politics, and the real-world problems.
Train for the Ecosystem, Not Just the Product
Your product training is probably great, but it's incomplete. Your teams need "ecosystem training." If your product integrates with Salesforce and Marketo, your CSMs need to understand the basics of how those platforms work and how your customers use them. This isn't about making them experts in other tools; it's about giving them the contextual awareness to be true strategic advisors.
Embed Contextual Discovery into Your Process
Don't leave context gathering to chance. Make it a mandatory, structured part of your customer lifecycle. Build an "Ecosystem Map" into your onboarding kickoff or QBR prep. Require CSMs to document the adjacent technologies, key personnel, and internal processes that interact with your solution. This turns an abstract idea into a concrete, repeatable action.
Getting this right is the difference between being "just another vendor" and becoming an indispensable partner woven into the fabric of your customer's operations.
How are you enabling your team to see beyond your product and understand the customer's full reality?
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