You have the Right Team. For the Wrong Job

May 27, 2026 • 5 min read

Newsletters

You have the Right Team. For the Wrong Job

Have you checked lately if your Customer Success is driving growth?

I’ve been noticing that Customer Success has the wrong job inside most professional services firms.

The team is probably good at the work.
But the work itself is the WRONG job for a business like yours.

Customer Success – I think both halves of the phrase are wrong.

Customer – because your firm doesn’t grow on customers alone.
It grows on a whole network of relationships.
Customers are just one slice.
Alumni.
Partners.
Referrers.
Advisors.
The senior team’s own networks.
None of them are customers.
All of them are how your next quarter happens.

Success – because those relationships don’t need success scores.
They need someone watching whether they’re still moving forward.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a structural problem with the software professional services firms use to manage relationships. It’s called the Relationship Blind Spot.

Most software only watches customers.
Your firm grows on six or seven other kinds of relationships the software can’t see.

The dollar cost of that gap is what I call your firm’s Revenue Gap.
It is usually several multiples of the revenue you’re currently booking.

I built a calculator that gives you the specific number for your firm.
Takes about 90 seconds.
You can try it here

This is the same problem but surfacing one layer up.
It shows up in the function every professional services firm is now being told to hire – Customer Success.

Over the last year, I’ve watched the same pattern repeat across one consulting firm after another. It starts the same way every time.

The founder hires a Head of Customer Success.
Senior.
Six figures.
Their first dedicated growth hire.
Everyone is proud of the move.
It feels like what a serious firm does.

Eighteen months later, every one of them tells me the same thing.
The new hire has run quarterly business reviews on every account.
Sent NPS surveys.
Built health dashboards.
Every account is “green.”
The internal reporting looks excellent.

And yet the firm’s revenue is roughly where it was when he joined.

The CS playbook isn’t failing.
It’s executing perfectly – but against the wrong target.

You see… Customer Success came out of SaaS.
Every tool in the stack was built for one job.
QBRs.
NPS.
Health scores.
Success plans.
Adoption metrics.
Churn dashboards.
All of them designed around a single assumption – that your relationship with a customer is a renewing subscription that needs protecting.

In a software business with a 12-month contract and 90% gross margins, protecting that subscription is the most important thing the company does. The CS team exists to keep customers from leaving.

But your firm doesn’t work that way.
You don’t sell a subscription.
You sell engagements.
There’s nothing to renew.

When a project ends, the relationship doesn’t pause for twelve months until the next contract. It keeps moving – through a partner intro, an alumni move, a referral.
Or it stops moving entirely.

The work CS was built to do protect renewals – doesn’t exist in your business.
The work that does matter is keeping the network warm and moving.
That has nothing to do with renewals.

This is the Scope Blindness problem I had talked about in my previous email – SAME problem but in a different package.

Customer Success watches customers.
By definition.
It cannot watch alumni, partners, referrers, or advisors.
It cannot watch the prospects who said no last year – the ones who might say yes next.

What your firm needs isn’t a Customer Success function.
It’s a function that watches the whole network.
Not just customers.
Every relationship type owned by someone.
A system that surfaces the ones going cold before they cost you.

That’s a different category of work.
A different category of software.
It’s what the Relationship Growth Platform category was built for.
And what Customer Success was never going to do.

How this shows up in your firm.

A few markers, in case you want to test the diagnosis against your own org:

Your CS lead reports green health scores on every account, and yet your firm hasn’t closed an expansion deal in two quarters.

Your most valuable alumni – now sitting in CTO, VP, and Head-of roles – haven’t heard from your firm in over a year. Meanwhile your CS team is running quarterly check-ins on accounts that aren’t going anywhere.

When a project ends, the account moves from “active client” to “past client,” and nobody at your firm is sure whose job it is to keep the relationship warm.

Your senior partners are still doing all the high-value relationship work. Informally. In their own heads. On their own time. Meanwhile the CS team handles the formal account hygiene.

If any of that sounds familiar, the diagnosis isn’t that your CS team is failing.
The diagnosis is that you have built a team for a function/department that was built for a different business than yours.

I’ve been building a Relationship Growth Platform – QuantmX – for professional services firms exactly because of this gap.

The Pioneer Program is the first small cohort using it. A few seats are still open.

If your firm is feeling the cost of CS-as-growth-function, I’d love to have a conversation.

–

Or hit reply with “Pioneer” in the subject line and I’ll send the details.

I’d also love to hear from any of you who’ve hired a CS function into a services firm.
What worked?
What didn’t?
What did you wish you’d known eighteen months earlier?
Just hit reply.

View More →

You have the Right Team. For the Wrong Job

Keep Reading

Your Firm Isn’t Supposed to Scale

AI Layoffs and What They Mean For You

Inside Deloitte’s Ex-Client Playbook