What's In It for Them? A Customer Success Philosophy
In customer success, the most important question isn't what you want to say — it's what your customer actually needs to hear.
In customer success, the most important question isn't what you want to say. It's what your customer actually needs to hear.
A few years ago, I inherited a relationship that was quietly falling apart.
The account was a strategic pharmaceutical customer worth roughly $1.5 million a year. On paper, nothing was catastrophically broken. But every time we delivered a product upgrade, something failed — and with each failure, a little more of their confidence drained away. By the time the account reached me, the customer had stopped asking when the next upgrade would make things better. They had started asking whether they needed us at all.
It would have been easy to respond the way teams often do: with a status update, a roadmap, a list of the fixes we were planning and the features we were proud of. Everything we wanted to say.
Instead, I started with a different question — the one I've come to believe matters more than any other in this work: What's in it for them?
The trap of the internal lens
Most customer conversations are built, without anyone meaning to, around an internal point of view. What do I need to convey? What update do I want to share? Which feature do I want them to adopt?
It feels efficient. It is also, quietly, the reason so many relationships stall. Customers are not short on information — they are short on value. When every touchpoint is framed around what we want them to know, we cast ourselves as a service provider: useful, replaceable, judged on tickets closed. When we reframe every touchpoint around what they are trying to achieve, something changes. We become a partner.
That shift — from service to value, from provider to partner — is the entire job.
What the question actually does
Asking "what's in it for them?" before every meeting, every email, every review isn't a courtesy. It does specific, compounding work:
It creates relevance. When you tailor what you say to what the customer is measured on — their KPIs, their risks, their goals — you earn their attention instead of demanding it. Relevance is how trust begins.
It strengthens the relationship. People want to feel understood. When a customer senses that you genuinely grasp their situation, the relationship stops being transactional and starts being personal. And personal relationships don't churn on a price comparison.
It drives real adoption. Nobody adopts a feature because it exists. They adopt it because it solves something. The moment you stop demonstrating capabilities and start connecting them to outcomes the customer cares about, usage follows.
Back to the pharma account
With that customer, the internal lens would have had me explaining our upgrade process and asking for patience. The honest answer to "what's in it for them?" was different and uncomfortable: nothing yet. What they needed wasn't a roadmap — it was to stop being afraid of their own upgrades.
So that became the goal. I ran a cross-functional root-cause analysis with engineering and professional services and traced the failures to customizations no one had accounted for. We stood up a dedicated services pod, built a pre-upgrade validation checklist, and I personally oversaw the next upgrade. Then we put monthly success reviews in place — not to showcase our work, but to keep answering their question.
The next upgrade ran with zero failures. Confidence came back. The account didn't just renew — it expanded. And the process we built to rescue one relationship became a repeatable playbook we used across other enterprise accounts.
None of that started with a better feature. It started with a better question.
How to make it a habit
You don't need a framework to practice this — you need a reflex. Before any customer interaction, three prompts get you most of the way there:
- What are they actually trying to achieve this quarter?
- What's keeping them up at night — and can I make it smaller?
- If they asked "so what?" at the end of this, would I have an answer?
Then measure what they care about, not only what your dashboard counts. Are they seeing ROI? Is their experience getting easier? Those are the numbers that predict renewals.
The bottom line
Customer success has a reputation as a relationship game, and it is — but not in the soft sense. The relationship is built on a discipline: relentlessly orienting around the other side of the table. Every account I've turned around started the same way, by trading "here's what we want to tell you" for "here's what this means for you."
Because in the end, customer success isn't about you. It's about them. Get that right, consistently, and you stop being a vendor they evaluate — and become a partner they keep.