your CSM:customer ratio is a trap

"What’s your CSM to Customer ratio model?"

Hint: you’re asking a 2015 question.

For years, CS leaders have benchmarked themselves with ratios like 1 CSM to 1000 accounts or 1 CSM to $XXm in revenue. But these "standards" are a trap. They anchor you to a linear growth model: as customers increase, headcount must also increase. In today's economy, that's an unsustainable path.

The key to scaling customer success in 2025 isn’t just hiring more CSMs to lower a ratio. It's time to move beyond the traditional CSM role and build a digital customer success program powered by a team with diverse skills.

Here are some other roles your scaled CS team actually needs…

Build the content & education foundation

Your CSMs shouldn't be creating one-off QBR decks or rewriting the same five emails every day. You need a team dedicated to creating scalable, one-to-many resources. This means hiring content creators who build engaging material for customers, educators or trainers who design adoption-focused courses, and technical writers who keep your knowledge base pristine.

Invest in engagement & community

Great content is useless if customers never see it. You need experts who can get your resources in front of the right people at the right time. This is where customer marketing comes in, distributing programs through the right channels. It's also where a great community manager can build peer-to-peer experiences, allowing customers to engage and learn from each other.

Power it all with operations & intelligence

This is the engine that makes your digital program run. Instead of asking CSMs to be part-time data wizards and workflow builders, you need specialists. Hire AI and automation engineers to reimagine internal processes, dedicated CS ops professionals to support the team with tech and operations, and data analysts to find the signals in the noise and point your team toward the right accounts.

This shift can feel daunting. Begin here:

• Audit your CSMs' time. Where are your relationship experts spending time on work that isn't their core strength (e.g., building content, pulling data, manual follow-up)? That's your first clue for which specialist to hire.

• Reframe your budget request. You're not just asking for another headcount. You're asking for an investment in a scalable system that will improve your unit economics and break the linear growth trap.

The key to scaling customer success is building a team that can enable scale. That’s often not someone whose primary skillset has been focused on 1:1 relationships.

What roles are you building on your scaled customer teams?

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