Let's start with a confession.

I've spent the better part of four decades in post-sales leadership. I've built teams, redesigned them, and rebuilt them again. And somewhere in all that experience, I kept having the same debates, running the same playbooks, and wondering why things weren't clicking the way I wanted.

Here's what I've finally come to terms with: I was asking CSMs to do the wrong job. Not because they weren't capable, not because the people we hired weren't talented, but because I designed the role incorrectly, then kept defending that design instead of questioning it.

The good news? I think most of us made the same mistake. So let's talk about what went wrong, and what the job should actually look like.

The debate we keep having

You know the conversation. It happens in boardrooms, in leadership offsites, on Slack threads at 11pm.

  • Do we need more CSMs, or fewer?
  • Should CSMs own revenue, or stick to account management?
  • Do we even need CSMs at all, or should we just hire forward-deployed engineers?

I've sat through that debate more times than I can count. And what I've realized is that as long as we're stuck debating, we're not doing the actual work. Something has to change.

To understand what needs to change, you have to be honest about how we got here.

How we designed ourselves into this corner

When SaaS companies started scaling their customer bases, there was a real and legitimate need to address retention. Customers were churning. Revenue was at risk. So we created a function whose primary purpose was making sure nobody left.

We became, as I like to put it, really good goaltenders. Excellent at stopping things from going wrong. There's nothing inherently bad about that instinct, but it shaped everything about how the CSM role was designed. We built a defensive function when what we actually needed was an offensive one.

From that foundation, we layered on responsibility after responsibility:

  • Support triage, because CSMs "owned the relationship" and were on the hook whenever something went sideways.
  • Business reviews, because we needed a structured moment to show the customer we were paying attention.
  • Regular check-ins, because staying engaged felt like the right thing to do.
  • Firefighting, because when a crisis hit, CSMs were the ones who ran toward it.

None of those things are wrong on their own. But together, they created a role that was reactive, relationship-dependent, and very difficult to measure in any meaningful way.