Is Customer Success the same as Account Management?

The short answer is no. The longer answer is that the best account managers take a customer success approach to working with their customers, and the best customer success managers handle commercial work like account managers have traditionally done.

The real difference between the roles is the focus. In tech, account management has been around longer because back when the business model was on-premises software, someone still had to collect the annual service contract revenue. Companies didn’t want their expensive sales reps focusing on anything but closing new business, so account managers took on the role of selling anything that came after the initial sale. The focus of an account manager has always been commercial. Any relationship-building they did or help they provided to the customer was secondary to the revenue they brought in.

With the introduction of the SaaS model, the revenue shifted from being heavily up front, to being spread across the lifecycle of the customer. To retain customers, companies realized that they needed to continually provide and prove value. The role of customer success manager was introduced as the bridge between the customer and the value the company was providing. The focus of the customer success role was on customer value with an eye to retaining and growing revenue in the long term.

So, do you need both roles today? Possibly. I believe that in earlier stage companies or companies with a smaller customer base, the customer success manager is often best positioned to fulfill both roles. By providing and proving value to customers, they are in a natural position to sell new solutions and close renewals without it feeling like a sales pitch. Customers generally prefer to buy from the person they trust, and customer success professionals are trusted advisors. Of course, CSMs with revenue responsibility need to be trained in selling best practices, but these are skills that can be learned.

As the company’s customer base gets bigger, a product suite becomes larger, or the contract and pricing get more complex, the introduction of a commercial partner to the CSM can become important. This partner might be called an account manager or a renewal specialist, and their role is to assist the customer success team with the commercial aspects of working with existing customers so that the customer success managers can continue to focus on proving value to customers. In this case the CSM should still be the primary strategic contact for the customer, while the account manager handles the tactical aspects of moving a deal toward close.

In this economy, should you replace your CSMs with Account Managers? Absolutely not. Doing so means you’ll have nobody demonstrating long-term value to your customers. This is a recipe for lost customers, who need to see value from your solution in order to continue to work with you. Too often in the past 6 months, I see CEO’s making the mistake of sacrificing their customer success teams because they think that “Sales will handle it.” This is short-sighted. If you think that your customer success team needs improvement in their selling ability, you would be better off training them to sell better and managing them in a more disciplined way. Anyone can learn to sell. It is much harder to build long-term relationships with customers that demonstrate ongoing value.