# Chase Tinkham

Chase Tinkham works in Customer Success, sharing practical advice on onboarding into a customer book, understanding products and customers, and spotting retention risks. Tinkham has also described leading digital-transformation projects at a small automotive distributor.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/chase-tinkham/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chasetinkham
- LinkedIn followers: 5,270
- Topics: healthcare, customer-success, digital-transformation
- Based on 10 dated posts, latest 2026-10-07

## Summary

Chase Tinkham is most useful for practical Customer Success content on onboarding, product adoption, and retention risks.

- Best for: A B2B SaaS customer-success or onboarding platform wanting a practitioner-led LinkedIn content series.
- Not for: A consumer automotive accessories brand seeking short-form video reach and direct product sales.
- Check first: Confirm audience demographics, reach, engagement, and sponsorship terms before committing budget.

### Takeaways

- Required QBRs and meeting-attendance targets can reflect vendor priorities, not customer success.
- Product use, not upselling or feature requests, was key issue in SMB churn example.
- Five-step approach: learn product and customer history, adapt before recommending changes, investigate risks.

## Main ideas

- **Customer health scores should measure the customer's success, not the vendor's process**: Tinkham describes management teams defining a "good customer" through measures such as required quarterly business reviews, how many stakeholders a CSM could bring onto one call, and compensation tied to that headcount. Those measures rarely worked as early-warning signals: they reflected the vendor's definition of success, not the customer's. The fix is to work with frontline CSMs who carry the accounts, identify the signals they already trust, and rebuild the scorecard around them while retaining one or two management metrics. The result, Tinkham says, was a more energized, bought-in team—not just a stripped-down dashboard.
- **If customers don't use the product, they can't succeed—so usage is the retention signal**: Tinkham sees product usage as the leading indicator of whether a customer will stay, particularly in a segment that requires consistency. Teaching customers to use what they bought, naming non-usage directly, and making extra effort to help them cross the line produces renewals and expansion, even when it doesn't yield the best monthly numbers.
- **Product and account knowledge are what make a CSM useful**: Tinkham argues that understanding the product and why people bought it helps a CSM solve problems within the purchased solution, design stop-gap workarounds when product delivery slips, and show how the solution contributes to the customer's return on investment. Account knowledge matters just as much: knowing who the customer is, why they are in business, and their full history with the organization. Customers dislike repeating themselves, and a CSM who already knows the file shows ownership from day one.
- **Learn the new organization before you advise it**: Tinkham's first-90-days method follows a deliberate order: coffee chats with colleagues to learn what drives them and what would change the game for their customers, followed by product study, account history, and adaptation to the new company's workflows. Advice and suggestions come only after that understanding is in place. The point is to contribute from the new context, not import a previous playbook.
- **Customer-facing skills cross industry lines**: Tinkham sees customer success and frontline service as a connected labour market, not separate tracks. They tell hiring managers that a Customer Success Manager's methodologies and skills are likely to transfer to roles such as Service Advisor, and that applicants with that title deserve a close look.
- **Range over title: run the whole operation when the business needs it**: In a career update, Tinkham describes an 18-month stint leading digital transformation at KT Automotive Products, a Wynn's distributor. The work included revamping go-to-market materials, implementing a rewards system, moving to automation, deploying a knowledge base to drive sales, and modernising the digital presence. After Tinkham's father broke both heels in an accident, they also took on customer visits, sales, finance, HR and marketing. The stated plan was a short stop before returning to SaaS; the priority was finishing foundational systems that serve the company and its customers.

## Work to read

- [Five things I'd do immediately coming into a new company and book of business as a Customer Success Manager](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chasetinkham_five-things-id-do-immediately-coming-into-activity-7274786013942583296-0m7Q)
- [Always pained me when I'd chat with management teams in Customer Success…](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chasetinkham_always-pained-me-when-id-chat-with-management-activity-7266814840134946816-pgSr)
- [A Journey of Growth, Family, and Gratitude](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chasetinkham_opentowork-activity-7283533135487635457-io5n)
- [If you see someone applying for a 'Service Advisor' position with the current or former title of 'Customer Success Manager'](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chasetinkham_hiring-dealership-recruitment-activity-7249143376028086273-Tue2)

## Brand relationships

- **KT Automotive Products — Wynn's Distributor** (employment)

## Partnerships

Chase Tinkham's four posts offer no sponsorship or partnership terms. They cover Customer Success advice, a hiring note and a personal career update, but specify no formats, rates, deliverables, exclusivity terms or way to inquire about working together. The only commercial-adjacent detail is their employment at KT Automotive Products, a Wynn's distributor, where they led digital-transformation work while their family ran the business and they owned a customer book. This is an employment and family-business relationship, not a sponsorship arrangement. Brands should treat the format list as open and ask directly whether Tinkham accepts paid work; if so, they should establish scope, deliverables and disclosure.

## Alternatives

- Brittany Casey: Choose Casey when the series needs a senior customer-success leadership voice on where the function is heading, rather than field-level mechanics. The two posts argue that AI is absorbing the operational layer of customer success work, making the human element more important, and turning advisory boards, strong community voices, and purposefully designed customer experiences into requirements for holding large accounts. Casey also argues that CS leadership now has to define value early and often, and that contracting should move toward outcomes rather than activity. Alongside that is a tested case for community as a working asset: a personal think tank, a referral network built over five years of intentional connection, and a place to test how AI and human effort combine. A sponsor running a CS leadership, advocacy, or community programme gets that framing ready-made and can give Casey a stage-style argument rather than a lesson plan.
- Tamie Green: Choose Green when the series should teach CSMs to turn the numbers they already report into language an executive will act on. The 30 June 2026 post is built for exactly that exercise: pick one metric you report regularly, ask why anyone in the room should care, answer what it protects, prevents, or unlocks in a single sentence, then practise that question on every number you touch that week. It distinguishes reporting a metric from advising with it, and argues that CSMs who do this well are translators rather than statisticians. Structurally, it is already a serial — a challenge yesterday, the skill today, a tool tomorrow — that maps onto a multi-part LinkedIn series with a daily cadence the format has demonstrated.
- Swati Garg: Choose Garg when the campaign decision is about people rather than practice: who companies are hiring, how CS teams and roles are being restructured, what skills are newly required, what a role is worth in compensation and negotiation, or how to convene a room of CS leaders. The posts show someone speaking and organising at NY Success Week, running a mentorship track and workshop, putting on a virtual compensation and negotiation session, and tying it all back to a published resource, The Customer Success Talent Playbook, now a year old. The recap post also poses a pointed industry question: whether a commercial organisation rebuilt today would still run sales, success, support, and services as separate departments. It pairs that question with a budget statistic. For a sponsor whose product sells to CS leaders on team design, or a recruiting or enablement platform, that is closer to a campaign aimed at CS leaders than a practitioner how-to series.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/