From Customer Success to Customer Growth: The Next Evolution of SaaS

Why this matters

The SaaS model transferred adoption risk from the customer back to the vendor. Customer Success was the response — not out of altruism, but out of panic about revenue at risk. That is still the foundation most CS teams are built on today. The problem is that retention is no longer enough. With tighter budgets, CFO scrutiny and pressure to show commercial impact, CS teams that cannot connect their work to growth are being questioned, cut or restructured. This episode is about what needs to change — and why it is more than a rename.

Key ideas

CS was born as risk mitigation, not customer care. When SaaS replaced on-premise software, vendors could no longer take the money and move on. Customers who did not see value simply did not renew. CS was created to manage that risk. Understanding that origin matters because it explains why so much of CS is still defensive — built around activity and relationship management rather than commercial outcomes.

The traditional model is activity-based, not outcome-based. QBRs, health scores, check-in calls — most of the standard CS playbook was invented when no one really knew what worked. There were no proof points. It just sounded good. Now, companies that cut CS teams and see no material change in retention or revenue are starting to ask the right question: what are we actually getting for this?

Customers cannot get value from technology on their own. This is the uncomfortable truth at the centre of the CS problem. If customers were naturally good at adopting software and driving outcomes from it, there would be no need for CS in the first place. Most buyers have deep domain expertise in their field — sales, marketing, support — but lack the skills to lead a technology transformation. CS that ignores this structural gap and assumes customers will figure it out is setting everyone up to fail.

Go-live is not the end milestone — it is the starting line. If a technology implementation is really a multi-year business transformation, the go-live date is somewhere in month three or six of a five-year journey. Everything after that — changing job descriptions, onboarding new employees into evolving processes, shifting how teams work — is what actually delivers the outcomes. Almost no one maps or measures that part.

This is not just a name change. Moving from Customer Success to Customer Growth requires different skills, different compensation structures, different metrics and a different relationship between CS and the commercial side of the business. You cannot bolt a growth mandate onto a team hired and incentivised to manage relationships. The structure has to follow the strategy.

Sales has to change too. Most software demos sell a utopia — pristine data, frictionless workflows, none of the organisational chaos that actually exists in the customer's business. If you are selling a two-year contract, that might work. If you are selling a five-year transformation, you need a different conversation — one that acknowledges the hard parts upfront and sets expectations around milestones, not calendar dates.

The Breakthrough Challenge

If your sales team stopped selling to new customers tomorrow, what changes would you make so that your existing customers could help grow your business? And how do you shift the conversation with those customers from short-term deliverables to a longer-term, transformational relationship?

Questions for SaaS leaders

• Are your CS team's KPIs built around activity or commercial outcomes? What would need to change to align them with growth?
• Where in your customer journey do you help customers understand and prepare for the transformation they are really buying — not just the implementation?
• If you mapped out everything a customer needs to do over five years to get full value from your product, how much of that are you actively supporting?