# Craig Blum

Craig Blum writes about leading Customer Success teams in B2B software, with a focus on revenue growth, executive influence, scaled customer engagement, and balancing automation with human judgment.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/craig-blum/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigblum
- LinkedIn followers: 2,855
- Topics: leadership, customer-success
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2025-12-17

## Summary

Craig Blum is most useful for arguments that Customer Success can drive revenue and influence executive decisions.

- Best for: A B2B SaaS company selling CS, engagement, or revenue software, or a CS leadership team.
- Not for: Consumer or broad-market brands buying reach and turnkey paid placements.
- Check first: Confirm whether they offer advisory conversations or paid placements, and ask for post performance.

### Takeaways

- Customer Success should help steer the business, not only protect renewals.
- Growth means finding expansion opportunities, not only preventing churn.
- Use automation for reach, but people for judgment.

## Main ideas

- **Customer Success should help steer the business**: Blum presents CS as more than a support function or renewal owner. Because its teams see adoption, product gaps, customer risk, and expansion opportunities across the customer lifecycle, they can inform decisions by Sales, Product, and company leaders.
- **Growth means finding expansion opportunities, not only preventing churn**: Blum says a team focused only on reducing churn is playing defense. To drive net revenue retention, CS must identify customers ready to expand, choose the right timing, and present new value as a partnership rather than a sales pitch.
- **Scaled service should still feel relevant to each customer**: Blum rejects the idea that serving customers at scale means leaving them to fend for themselves. They describe useful, lower-touch support that adapts to customer needs and helps people make progress without assigning every account a dedicated CSM.
- **Use automation for reach, but people for judgment**: Blum sees automation as useful for saving time and extending outreach, not as a replacement for human attention. Their test is whether a situation calls for a routine message or someone who can notice uncertainty and respond with context.

## Work to read

- [Customer Success is the glue — and the engine](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/craigblum_customersuccessleadership-revenuealignment-activity-7333144303046676480-x5V6)
- [If CS isn't in the exec room, it's in the waiting room](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/craigblum_csleadership-executiveimpact-customersuccess-activity-7333485085872021505-DgUW)
- [If your only CS goal is 'reduce churn,' you're surviving](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/craigblum_expansionrevenue-customersuccess-nrr-activity-7333855709954007043-EdCP)
- [Scaled CS is not ignored accounts](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/craigblum_scaledsuccess-digitalcs-customerengagement-activity-7331317365730594816-dO0G)
- [Automation is great for emails, terrible for empathy](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/craigblum_smartautomation-customerexperience-customersuccessleadership-activity-7330968802995720192-fxhM)

## Brand relationships

- **Slack** (mention)

## Partnerships

No sponsorship packages, rate cards, media kits, or partnership terms appear in Craig Blum's posts here. The five LinkedIn posts address Customer Success leaders and end with invitations to connect or talk, including offers to discuss getting CS into the boardroom and to talk with teams whose CS model is "drowning in sequences but starved for connection." This points toward advisory or consultative conversations rather than published paid placements. Before budgeting, ask Craig directly about partnership formats, pricing, deliverables, and lead times; the posts don't describe them.

## Alternatives

- Chris Patin, MBA, CCSM, CSM: Patin is the stronger choice when the engagement should produce front-line CSM playbooks rather than an executive agenda, and the buyer wants a named client example to anchor the work. Both posts are method-focused series installments. The onboarding post explains how to find quick wins in the first 30 days: identify use cases that solve immediate pain, prioritize features that are easy to adopt but visibly impactful, and celebrate wins through dashboards, shoutouts, and executive summaries. It includes a concrete case: a client had low post-onboarding engagement, but adoption climbed after the team focused on a single reporting feature that saved ten hours a week. The renewal post adds a second routine: treat renewal as a proof point, start the conversation months rather than weeks ahead, and make the case with data, stories, and outcomes. If the deliverable is a playbook of onboarding and renewal procedures CSMs can use next week, Patin's posts lead to that output more directly than Blum's.
- John Gaspar: Gaspar is the stronger choice when the buyer wants a cited, framework-style treatment of the customer journey and lifecycle measurement, with third-party benchmarks to persuade a skeptical audience. The journey post covers value expansion arcs beyond go-live, persona-segmented journeys for admins, executives, and users, lifecycle milestones such as adoption stickiness by month six and business-value realization by month nine, documented ownership of each touchpoint across teams, and embedded proactive risk detection. It attributes figures to named sources—71% of churn occurring post-go-live, and losing an executive sponsor raising churn risk by 2.3x, cited to Gainsight, TSIA, and Totango—and links the design to expansion signals through CSQL tracking. For an engagement centered on journey and metrics design, where benchmark citations carry weight, Gaspar's material is more directly usable than Blum's argumentative posts.
- Priyadarshini Ravichandran: Ravichandran is the stronger choice when the campaign focuses on customer-side change management—helping the customer's organization unlearn old ways, adopt, and realize value—rather than elevating the CS function internally. The two posts develop a consistent argument: every CSM is a change agent who helps customers break old habits, uses influence rather than authority to align departments without direct control, treats measurable value realization rather than mere adoption as the goal, and acts as a human champion during customers' wider digital transformation. The second post cites Gartner's figure that over 70% of digital transformation initiatives miss expectations for lack of change management. If the buyer's problem is adoption resistance inside customer organizations, this material maps more closely to it than Blum's.

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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/