Here's a pattern I've watched in company after company and almost never see discussed.
A customer gets sold something. The sale is optimistic, maybe more than optimistic. Delivery struggles. A CSM or account manager spends months cleaning it up, absorbing the frustration, doing the actual work of making the thing produce a result.
Then something else goes wrong, and the customer picks up the phone and calls the salesperson.
Not the person who has been helping them for six months. The person who caused the problem.
Why That Isn't Irrational
The easy read is that customers are bad at attribution. That's wrong, and it stops you from fixing anything.
Start with what the salesperson actually did. Their whole job was to understand this person, connect with them, and build a relationship inside a few conversations. They were good at it. The customer experienced something that felt personal and specific to them.
It was also happening across ten other prospects at the same time, with the same warmth, but the customer has no way to see that and no reason to look. From where they sit, they have a relationship.
Now look at what the CSM did. They arrived after the deal and asked the customer to do things. Configure this. Gather that. Change how your team works. Attend this session. Nobody buys a product in order to do an implementation. Everybody knows it's coming and nobody wants it.
So the CSM is the one saying no, the one asking for work, the one reminding them what happens if they don't. The salesperson sold them the outcome. The CSM is selling them the effort.
One of them handed the customer hope. The other one hands them homework. When the next problem lands, they call the hope.
And Frequently the Customer Is Right
This is the part that stings, because it isn't only about feelings.
A top salesperson can get things done. They escalate to management, to executives, to founders, and everyone pays attention, because that person generates revenue and everyone in the building knows it. A CSM raising the same issue goes into a queue.
The customer may not know that consciously. They learned it once, or they sensed it, or they simply noticed that things move when they call one number and don't when they call the other.
So the behavior is adaptive. They're routing their problem to the person who can solve it, and you built the map that taught them where to route it.
What This Costs
Every expansion conversation your CSM or AM is supposed to have runs on a relationship the customer thinks belongs to somebody else.
That's the real bill. Not the awkwardness. Expansion needs an active want, and wanting more requires believing the first thing worked and trusting whoever is telling you about the next thing. If the trust is parked with the person who sold the first deal, the expansion conversation is being had by the wrong human, and it will feel like a pitch no matter how well it's run.
It also quietly explains a comp argument. Route the expansion back to the AE because "the customer knows them," and you've confirmed the map. Next year the trust is even more concentrated, and the account gets new-business mechanics applied to it twice.
What Actually Fixes It
Not charisma training. The answer isn't to make your CSMs more likeable.
Capacity is the first honest constraint. A rep works ten live opportunities. A CSM works a hundred accounts. Telling that person to build ten relationships worth of depth across a hundred customers isn't a coaching problem, it's arithmetic. Sometimes it genuinely is a cop-out, and often it isn't.
So stop asking for depth everywhere and buy it where it matters. That's what readiness milestones are for. A CSM who knows which twelve accounts are approaching something has twelve conversations to prepare for instead of a hundred to monitor, and depth becomes possible because it's bounded.
Give them something to deliver rather than something to ask for. The reason the salesperson is trusted is that they arrived carrying an outcome. A CSM who shows up with a result the customer hadn't noticed is doing the same thing. A CSM who shows up with a task list is not.
And name the handoff out loud, in advance. If the person who sold the deal is going to step back, say so on the sales call, say who takes over, and use their name. An unannounced handoff reads to a customer as being passed off, and people route around the person they were passed to.
The Uncomfortable Version
New-business selling contains real skill and it's worth naming honestly, because the reflex in Customer Success is to treat it as manipulation and stop thinking.
Sometimes it is a strong charm rather than a strong arm, and it still works, and pretending otherwise costs you the lesson. What's actually happening is that a person made another person feel understood inside twenty minutes. That's a competence.
The question I keep coming back to is why the function that spends years with a customer produces less felt connection than the function that spent three weeks with them. It usually isn't because they care less. It's because nothing in their week was designed to produce it, and nobody bought them the room to.
Lincoln Murphy formally named and popularized Customer Success starting in 2010 and has spent 15 years connecting it to expansion revenue and commercial outcomes. Read The Premise.