PRITHWI:
Let me spice this up a little bit, I know you are very passionate, and you know vocal about your thought and beliefs, and we will try and get some of that out from you as well. What is something you feel or are completely dissatisfied with, or disappointed with the way the industry is structured, or, you know, approaching things in a certain way right now?

ANDREAS:
Well, it’s… this misconception that Customer Success is the department that makes friends with your customers and it’s not a department that is responsible for capturing this recurring revenue stream, or expanding these recurring revenue stream, or selling to the customer and turning an initial investment of sales and marketing, that in many cases is a negative investment if you would stop right here, into a long-term profit.

And so there is some pussyfooting around this… like… well… da da da da da… this! that! and the other, and here Customer Success becomes kind of the… sacrificial lamb of everyone else’s problems without any upsides, as I said before. So that… that is completely wrong from the outside, but then also from inside, within the Customer Success community, many of the declared leaders in Customer Success do not own, not even internally, financial performance metrics, they couldn’t tell how profitable they are, how much they are tracking.

They are tracking all sorts of other metrics but not that, and until you can prove to someone at the Board Level, to your CEO, that you are a profit-generating function and here is your business… as a P&L, right? And mostly as a Profit not just at a Loss, you will never be on par with Sales, because you still have to fight against that long-term belief that Sales is King.