With football season here, we’re looking at how customer success can prepare for their own season — one quarter at a time. Check out what happened in the first quarter.
The old adage says “you play to win the game.” Using your CRM to handle your CS isn’t playing to win. It’s playing out of position.
Using a CRM for CS is like having your franchise QB play linebacker.
Imagine a coach walking into the locker room an hour before kickoff and telling the franchise QB: “Change of plans. You’re also playing linebacker today.” The team goes quiet. The plan is destined to fail. Immediately. Yet every season, revenue leaders make the software equivalent of that call without blinking.
Your customer success team can’t wait for the right tool. Your sales team might have scored plenty of points using your CRM tool. But those deals mean nothing if you can’t keep them. And while your CRM is great for winning deals, it’s not the one that’s best equipped for customer success.
Here’s three reasons your CRM won’t set you up to win:
1. It’s built for a different play.
A CRM tracks deals to close: pipeline stages, win rates, forecasted bookings. Customer success needs a different read entirely: usage signals, sentiment, renewal risk. Same field. Completely different jobs.
How it looks on the field: A CSM opens the CRM before a renewal call and finds deal stages and a close date. Nothing about whether the customer’s using the product or drifting toward churn. The CRM answers the questions sales asks, not the answers a CSM needs. With ChurnZero, the same CSM opens the account and sees a ChurnScore with the specific reasons behind it, a timeline of recent activity, and what to do next.
2. Different stats matter on defense.
A CRM’s built-in scoreboard tracks deals won and revenue booked. It doesn’t track what CS needs to watch. Tom Brady threw touchdown passes for a living. He didn’t sack quarterbacks. Ask a CRM to run customer success, and that’s exactly the ask you’re making.
How it looks on the field: A customer’s usage drops for three straight weeks. The CRM doesn’t notice. Nothing flags it. Nothing alerts the CSM. The team finds out at renewal time when it’s too late to do anything about it. ChurnZero catches the drop the moment it starts, flags the account, and puts it in front of the CSM while there’s still time to act.
Playing both ways costs you at both positions.
Force a CRM to do double duty, and you don’t get a stronger offense or a stronger defense. You get a diminished version of both: a burnt-out QB and a leaky defense.
How it looks on the field: A CSM spends their week building manual trackers and reminders inside a tool that was never meant to hold health scores or renewal risk instead of working accounts. The workaround becomes the job. With ChurnZero, the health scoring and renewal tracking already exist. The CSM’s time goes back to the accounts, where it belongs.
Customer success isn’t lead scoring. Upsell isn’t closing. Preventing churn is nothing like prospecting. You wouldn’t move your best sales rep to customer success. Configuring your CRM to do what CS does is deciding your QB should also play defense. That’s not strategy. That’s asking to lose.
The longer this goes unfixed, the more revenue is exposed. Can you risk unforeseen delays, unknown obstacles, and undiscovered risks that put your biggest sales win in jeopardy? It will cost you twice: you lose the account, and you lose the rep who watches a deal they fought to close disappear because nobody was covering it.
Right now, the scoreboard reads HOME: 0. CHURN: ZERO. Full team. Right positions. Game on. Next week, Quarter 3: How to turn your defense into offense.
Want the whole game plan? Register for the Playing to Win: The Customer Success Post-Game Show webinar on September 23rd.
