---
title: "Have People Forgotten About Customer Success?"
episode: 3
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Cameron Legge"
guest_title: "Engagement Manager, LeanScale"
date_published: 2023-04-25
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:11:37
word_count: 1983
topics: ["revenue-operations", "gtm-strategy", "sales-leadership", "brand-positioning", "demand-generation"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/cameron-legge-customer-success/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# Have People Forgotten About Customer Success? — Full Transcript

> Episode 3 of The LeanScale Podcast, with Cameron Legge.
> Published April 25, 2023 · 00:11:37 · 1,983 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/cameron-legge-customer-success/

## 00:00 — Cold open: everything RevOps

**[0:00]** Hi, I'm Anthony. Welcome to The LeanScale Podcast where we talk about everything RevOps. Thanks for listening.

## 00:21 — Welcome and meet Cameron Legge

**[0:21]** Welcome, everybody, to The LeanScale Podcast where we talk about everything RevOps. Today, we're going to be talking about the seeming lack of attention to customer success. And I have a special guest with me today, former CS professional, current LeanScale Engagement Manager, most importantly, part-time basketball coach, Cameron Leggi. Cameron, welcome. Thanks, Anthony. Pumped to be here. Obviously, super excited about starting the podcast. It's a huge venture for LeanScale and excited for all the things to come. I know we've got some awesome guests coming up soon. So the train is on the tracks and we're ready to keep rolling with the podcast.

## 00:57 — Why does CS get treated as an afterthought?

**[0:57]** Absolutely. I think we're going to have a lot of good topics, especially timely for the customers that we work with. And for those listening, if you have topics you'd like to talk about, feel free to send them our way anytime. But let's dive into it. So I see this not just with the customers we work with, but even before starting LeanScale, companies that I was working in, there always seemed to be a lot of attention to sales, a lot of attention to marketing, and CS always felt like a bit of an afterthought. And I want to take, I want to know your take on it. Why do you think that is?

## 01:34 — Enamored with new logos vs. the existing-base farm

**[1:34]** Yeah, I think from a customer success standpoint, I think people just take it for granted, right? People are, you know, in a lot of early stage companies enamored with the new logos, right? We've all seen the pitch decks where a company shows their logo wall, right? And they want those new logos to be able to speak to, you know, the buy in and the value of their product and service. And so they think that that's the best way to expand. And they don't realize that the existing customer base can be a huge boon of a farm for being able to add more revenues to the business and just being able to unlock more out of the existing customer base.

## 02:16 — Why good customer success is hard to measure

**[2:16]** It's also tough to measure good customer success and what winning looks like. So we know from a sales and marketing angle, everybody knows the buy the book metrics, right? Your closed one, your created pipeline, marketing, creating MQLs for the sales team to go out and look at and convert. And it's hard to measure what good customer success looks like. There's not a ton of metrics that people are measuring in a good way of good customer success. So I think that also makes it difficult to interpret, right, to your board or to investors of what good customer success looks like and how you're winning with customer success.

## 02:56 — The front-porch analogy

**[2:56]** I also think just to use an analogy, right, I think about and you mentioned I was a basketball coach, so I'll use a sports analogy with a championship win. Mentality, mentality, first of all. But I think, you know, an analogy that I like to use is I use an analogy where people like to say college sports and athletics is the front porch of a university, right? It's what people see a lot more than a lot of the academics, honestly, that goes on a lot of times. And customer success is the front porch for your business, right? And people don't really think about that or lock in on that a lot of times because your customer success managers

**[3:37]** are what the end user and customer of your business is hearing, seeing, feeling on a daily basis outside of the product, right? So it's so important to make a huge investment into customer success and also just being able to report on how you're doing with the existing customer base, I think is really important. That's a really good point. I didn't even I didn't even really think about that, but you're right. If you invest in a football team, if you have a winning football team or right now, the Phoenix Suns are doing well, too. So maybe Phoenix is getting some good attention just based on investing there.

## 04:15 — What you miss without CS: expansion, case studies, referrals

**[4:15]** And I think you're right. I think the CSMs that are on the front line with customers every single day are working with the customers who are also talking about your product or service in the marketplace, too. So having the level of visibility there has a lot of different effects that I don't think come up in the boardroom metrics necessarily and are not typically measured that well. So for companies that aren't investing as much in customer success. Tangibly not not high level, you know, not not the typical strategic things that you're talking about, but but tangibly, what opportunities are they missing out on?

**[4:57]** Yeah, well, one I already hit on is revenue, right? Expansion upsell. Those are the things that everybody is going to care about as it relates to customer success and getting more out of your existing base and adds to the bottom line. But also think about all the other great things that can come from it that are going to help sales and marketing straight out of your customer success function. So things like case studies, right? The marketing team is always jazzed to get on a call with a customer and hear about all the great things that they're doing with the product and putting it on the website.

**[5:29]** Right. So case studies are a huge one. Referrals are another big one. Whether it's a tangible referral where it's a direct lead and you then have something to hand to sales to start working from a new business perspective. But also think about all the word of mouth branding, you know, that customer that you're working with is at a trade show and just talking about how great the experience has been with your product or service. That's invaluable. And a lot of times can't be measured, but just from a brand perspective, so big right from a referral standpoint.

## 05:59 — CS as the product-feedback line and bridge to product

**[5:59]** And then also just the direct line of product feedback that you're able to get by really having a scaled out customer success team and being able to really lock into customer success is just so important. There's no better way to get product feedback than through your regular engagements that your customer success team and customer success managers are having with their end customer.

**[6:22]** So that's just another huge win. You're going to keep evolving the product, make your service better. And all that package together, I think, is just so many of the tangible things that you're able to unlock when you're really focused and investing in customer success. I like the part that you brought up about getting product feedback because that's something that's not easy to do. And you can really get explicit, tangible feedback in the weeds feedback when you have CSMs working directly with customers and your CS team.

**[6:56]** This is how I always looked at it. CS should be really between the revenue organization and the product organization because there's nobody better equipped than the team on the front line with customers working through problems, helping them get the most value out of the product every single day to give feedback to the product team for what needs to be developed next. So at the end of the day, these companies are here to buy your product or service. And if you can make it better, that's the strategy for winning. So we know it's important. We know it might not be getting the attention that it deserves. What should we do?

## 07:34 — Building a world-class CS org: hire and fund the best leader

**[7:34]** How do you create a world class customer success organization? Right. So we started with why is CS forgotten about in a lot of the big picture business topics, right? But what should we do about it? I think one huge thing is hiring the best customer success leader that you absolutely can. So from a budget perspective, making sure that the budget is there to attract that top talent. But the trickle down effect, I mean, I've been talking about how the CSMs make a huge impact on the customer experience, right?

**[8:10]** So the trickle down from what that leader values, the tactics that they want to put in place with their team, you know, what are the pillars of that team? That's going to matter. Right. And that's going to trickle down to the end user experience, which is so important. Right. You want to be sticky. You want to retain customers by no means. Everybody thinks about customer success. And I think they want to figure out what churn looks like. Right. That's a huge metric. Do we have that leaky bucket from our customer base? And so how are we going to address that?

## 08:44 — Retention, churn, and measuring the customer journey

**[8:44]** But also, you know, how are we going to give them a good experience where we're not adding new logos and focused on growth, right? And adding new business into our book, but then also being able to retain and not just having new business fill the empty void that a customer may have left by churning. So I think that's important. And then also making sure that we're measuring what matters. Right. So are we defining the customer journey? How can we measure where customers are in the journey and where they're headed and how well we're doing in each step that matters?

## 09:17 — Hot take: make CS the best-resourced seat on the revenue team

**[9:17]** And then just defining what good customer success looks like at your company is so important. So I think those are some of the big things that you can tackle immediately of, hey, this is this is what we need out of our customer success function. Can I say something controversial? Because I think something that you mentioned at the beginning, I want to dive a little bit deeper and double click on it. Bring in the best leader that you can. I might take that a step further. Have the leader on your revenue organization be the best person on the team.

**[9:50]** Meaning you invest the most resources into that position versus sales, marketing or other revenue positions that you have. What do you think of that? I love it. I know customer success is near and dear to our heart, but let's put that aside and take out the biases. I love it. Right. And as I mentioned in the beginning, that front porch analogy, right? Like there's just so much you can get out of your business by having a really, really dynamic customer success leader and making them a part and a big part of the revenue org as well as giving them the resources to succeed and really not holding back of giving them any resources to succeed.

**[10:31]** It can pay off just major dividends. So I will high five you on that hot take. And yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think I think any sales and marketing leader would agree if you were full of referrals, full of a customer base that absolutely loved your product and your product team had all of the feedback categorized, organized and brought directly from the customer base that you have. I think everybody would be more successful. So let's just wrap it up. I can't think so much for being here. This was a really, really good session. I appreciate it.

## 11:07 — Wrap-up

**[11:07]** Customer success doesn't get the attention it deserves. It can absolutely unlock the most value in your business if you give it the right focus and resource. And if you do invest in it, the trickle down effect across the entire organization is going to be profound. So, Cam, thanks again. I appreciate it. And for those listening, thanks for tuning in. Awesome. Thanks.