Tech CSMs Aren’t Your Marketing Team: Why Customer Success Enablement Needs Strategic Support

If you work at a martech company, you’ve probably heard this before:

“Can our CSM help us build a campaign?”
“We need guidance on messaging—who should we talk to?”
“We’re not seeing results… what should we do differently?”

As a marketer who's worked alongside customer success teams for over a decade, I’ve seen this cycle repeat too many times. CSMs become the de facto strategist, not because they should, but because there’s no one else in place.

The problem is, your CSMs weren’t hired to run strategy. And yet, they’re often the ones left holding the bag when customers need help beyond onboarding. The result is burnout, missed expectations, and churn that could have been avoided with the right customer success enablement system in place.

Customer success teams shouldn’t be the last line of defense for marketing strategy. They need CSM marketing support to help them scale, deepen relationships, and drive results. Wondering how to support CSMs with marketing? Read on.

What CSMs at Martech Companies Are (and Are Not) Responsible For

Let’s draw the line clearly.

Great CSMs own onboarding, feature adoption, and optimization. They’re focused on tactical success—ensuring the customer knows how to use the product, apply best practices, and realize value based on what they purchased.

They don’t own brand positioning, ICP development, campaign strategy, channel mix, or media planning.

And they shouldn’t.

A tool, even a great one, won’t deliver results if the customer lacks a strong marketing foundation. Expecting your CSM to fill this gap in customer success enablement is unfair to them, and risky for your business.

As one marketing partner put it: “If the customer doesn’t have a strategy, the software will fail. And it’s not the CSM’s job to build it for them.” Providing marketing support for your martech CSMs can fix this issue. 

The Risk of Forcing Strategy on a Tactical Role

Pushing strategic responsibility onto your CSM team creates misalignment from day one.

CSMs are evaluated on adoption, not campaign performance. Yet when customers assume the CSM can drive their marketing results, the expectations balloon while support stays flat. That disconnect leads to:

• Burnout and attrition on your CS team
• Poor platform adoption, driven by tactical misuse
• Lower retention and poor NPS scores due to unmet strategic needs

We’ve seen it firsthand. A customer, unsure how to launch their first campaign, leans on the CSM for help. The CSM, doing their best, offers ideas or templates. But the targeting is off. The results disappoint. And now, it’s not just the strategy in question, it’s the product.

Your platform becomes the scapegoat for a lack of foundational CSM marketing support.

Why CSMs Need Marketing Support to Improve Retention

Your software is not a strategy.

Even the most intuitive, powerful tool will fail if the customer lacks clarity around their audience, messaging, or goals. When CSMs try to bridge that gap, they often do so with good intentions, but not the right expertise.

It leads to surface-level recommendations, increased dependency, and misfires that could’ve been avoided. Instead of empowering customers, we inadvertently leave them stuck and frustrated.

There’s a better path: reducing churn through customer success enablement. This can take the form of fractional marketers, vetted agency partners, or self-serve content hubs filled with tools designed to help customers build campaigns before they ever open the dashboard.

What Martech Companies Should Provide Instead

To support your CSMs, drive marketing and CS alignment, and serve your customers better, you need systems, resources, and clear lines of responsibility.

1. Curated marketing strategy resources: Offer playbooks, ICP development templates, persona frameworks, and campaign planning guides. These assets empower customers to clarify their own strategy before leaning on the CSM for feature-level help.
   
   
2. Clear boundaries, communicated with compassion: Train your CSMs to confidently say, “We don’t provide campaign strategy, but here’s a partner that can help.” Then back that up with an agency partner or internal strategy team equipped to step in.
   
   
3. Strategic add-ons or service packages: Not every customer will need them, but the ones who do will thank you. Consider offering a “Client Success+” tier or bundling strategy into onboarding for select customers. Think of it as helping clients walk before they run. A strategic partner like BOL can offer marketing support for martech CSMs, so your team doesn’t have to.

Empowering CSMs Without Asking Them to Be Marketers

Supporting your CSM team starts with internal marketing and CS alignment. Product marketing, CS, and partner teams should co-own a plan for customer success enablement that includes, but doesn’t default to, CSMs as strategy providers.

Success means both adoption and value realization. Adoption is the CSM’s job. Value? That’s where strategic marketing comes in.

Build a handoff model that empowers CSMs to triage requests effectively. When a customer needs strategic help, marketing or a vetted partner steps in. This way, CSMs can focus on what they do best: building relationships, supporting adoption, and delivering a great customer experience.

CSMs Are Your Path to Retention—Don’t Let Strategy Requests Derail That

If your customer success team is constantly fielding marketing questions they weren’t trained, or hired, to answer, it’s time to act. The solution isn’t to retrain your CSMs as marketers. It’s to fill the strategic gaps with real support.

CSMs are incredible relationship builders. Let them thrive in that role. Don’t ask them to fill a marketing role that was never part of the job description.

Want to empower your CSM team without overextending them? We’re here to help.