# Craig Vincent

Craig Vincent writes about how companies can make Customer Success teams more measurable and growth-focused, including how to prioritize customer support, identify expansion opportunities, and show the business value of the work.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/craig-vincent/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craiggvincent
- Topics: customer-success, b2b-saas
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-05-19

## Summary

Craig Vincent is most useful for reframing Customer Success metrics and funding around risk, value, and growth.

- Best for: A B2B SaaS company restructuring Customer Success toward revenue growth and seeking a talk or advisory session.
- Not for: Reach-based sponsorship or paid placement campaigns, and entertainment-led or highly produced content.
- Check first: Confirm current audience data and detailed methods behind their linked breakdowns.

### Takeaways

- The problem is the Customer Success model, not the CSMs.
- CS should borrow sales yard markers for account development.
- Split CS into sales-aligned and support-aligned work, and stop covering every account the same way.

## Main ideas

- **The problem is the CS model, not the CSMs**: Vincent names the pressures on CS teams — layoffs, budget cuts, falling net retention and executives asking whether CS is worth funding — and traces them to one cause: CS does not fit into the business equation. Sales has a simple story (more reps, more deals) and marketing has one (more spend, more leads), but nobody can say what the “CSM knob” controls: retention, adoption, expansion or business value. Their conclusion is blunt: the fault lies in a model built for a SaaS world that no longer exists, not in the people doing the work.
- **You cannot tell which customers need help until someone looks**: The "Babysitter's Paradox" is Vincent's explanation of why CS investment feels riskier than sales investment. Some customers will renew and expand with no intervention, others will churn regardless, and there is no way to sort one group from the other without spending CSM time on both. Unlike sales, where return is tied directly to effort, that uncertainty makes executives hesitate to fund CS. Vincent's answer is not to abandon the function but to rethink how CS work is prioritised, scaled, and measured.
- **CS should borrow sales’ yard markers**: Drawing on their pre-sales background, Vincent argues that sales works because its path to victory is clearly marked, so teams can grade effort and locate failure. CS plays a different game, with no yard markers: expansion or avoided churn emerges from many interconnected interactions that do not fit on a scoreboard. That is why CEOs often do not know what CS does. Vincent proposes borrowing from the sales playbook and creating explicit yard markers for account development.
- **Split CS into sales-aligned and support-aligned work, and stop covering every account the same way**: Vincent prescribes a three-part restructure. First, divide CS into a Sales-Aligned function covering expansion and retention, and a Support-Aligned function covering value realisation. Second, automate low-value check-ins so CSMs can focus on real revenue opportunities. Third, tie investment to actual risk and growth rather than arbitrary account coverage. Vincent argues that this structure can help CS produce predictable, scalable revenue, as sales does.
- **CSMs are an underused source of customer intelligence**: Vincent sees information gathering as Customer Success’s most undervalued skill. An existing vendor already holds knowledge competitors cannot match, making CSM conversations a natural place to spot expansion opportunities — if companies use what those conversations surface. This is the commercial, growth-facing side of Vincent’s argument, distinct from the cost and credibility side.

## Work to read

- ["Customer Success is broken — everybody is talking about it"](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/craiggvincent_customer-success-is-broken-everybody-activity-7303509154956984323-5AEm)
- ["The Babysitter's Paradox in Customer Success"](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/craiggvincent_the-babysitters-paradox-in-customer-success-activity-7306045144464535553-7Q6Y)
- [The Super Bowl yard-marker analogy for CS metrics](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/craiggvincent_customersuccess-measuresmatter-superbowl2025-activity-7295580507902251008-FHcf)
- ["Customer Success isn't dying — it's evolving"](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/craiggvincent_customer-success-isnt-dyingits-evolving-activity-7303509429000228864-z1Yp)
- ["The Most Undervalued Superpower in Customer Success? Information Gathering."](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/craiggvincent_the-most-undervalued-superpower-in-customer-activity-7305265029262581760-xmCA)

## Partnerships

Craig Vincent examines Customer Success’ operational challenges, including the lack of clear ROI and measurement standards compared with Sales. They describe its evolution from an old, vague model—sometimes likened to “babysitting” customers—into a true growth engine. They argue that companies should replace arbitrary account coverage with CS investment tied directly to actual risk and growth, and suggest separating CS into Sales-Aligned (focused on expansion/retention) and Support-Aligned (focused on value realization) teams. They also frame information gathering as a Customer Success superpower: understanding a customer’s internal politics, decision-makers, and motivations can drive growth and help identify expansion opportunities.

## Alternatives

- Chris Patin, MBA, CCSM, CSM: Choose Chris Patin for a CS restructuring campaign when the buyer wants the CS team to change what it does week to week, not just how it is measured. Their posts are practitioner playbooks: a five-part onboarding series arguing that early momentum is everything and that quick wins in the first 30 days turn sceptics into believers, and a renewal piece treating renewal as a value proof point to be worked months in advance. The posts are first-person and concrete — they explain how quick wins are identified (use cases that solve immediate pain, features that are easy to adopt but visibly useful, wins publicised through dashboards and executive summaries) and give a client example in which narrowing focus to one reporting feature that saved a team ten hours a week lifted adoption. For a session where the room is CSMs who need to act differently next quarter, that level of specificity is a better starting point than a model-level argument.
- Priyadarshini Ravichandran: Choose Priyadarshini Ravichandran for a CS restructuring campaign when the restructuring problem is really a change problem. Their posts argue that every strong CSM is a change agent, that customers buy transformation rather than features, and that adoption is not the goal — value realisation is. They cover influence without direct authority, helping customers unlearn old ways of working, aligning stakeholders as churn and budgets shift, and the CSM as the stable voice through that instability. For a company whose customers are failing to adopt, or whose CS function needs to guide customer-side change rather than simply report health, this framing is closer to the live problem than a metrics restructuring discussion.
- Mason Moyer: Choose Mason Moyer for a CS restructuring campaign when the immediate gap is posture rather than structure. Moyer's posts define the difference between good and great CS as being proactive — spotting adoption trends before they become renewal risks, understanding a customer's why beyond product usage, building touchpoints that are not driven by urgency, aligning internally, and reaching out before the customer realises help is needed. A second post develops ownership: taking the whole customer journey rather than your piece, driving clarity on goals and success metrics early, following through on commitments, and leading when things are ambiguous. For a CS team that has become reactive and wants the relationship reframed from vendor to partner, this is a more directly usable starting point than a structural redesign.

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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/