I'm going to be direct about something the CS community has been pretending isn't true for a long time.
Customer Success was built as a commercial motion. The goal — from the very beginning — was revenue. Specifically: getting more of it from customers companies had already acquired.
Not to make customers happy as an end in itself. Not to build relationships for relationship's sake. Not because there was some higher purpose in the vendor-client bond. The goal was always expansion revenue, and retention was the prerequisite for getting it.
This should have been obvious to anyone thinking clearly. But somewhere along the way, the CS community decided that commercial intent was incompatible with the role. That the "right" CS professional wasn't thinking about money. That introducing an expansion conversation was a betrayal of the customer relationship.
This was always wrong. And it was expensive.
Here's the actual logic, stripped of the mythology:
Customers that aren't getting value from your product don't stick around. Customers that are locked in but unhappy are not going to expand — they're looking for the exit. Therefore, if you want customers to buy more over time, the prerequisite is making them genuinely successful. Get them to outcomes that matter. Then the commercial results follow naturally.
That is the Customer Success premise. It's commercial all the way down. The "success" part is the mechanism; the commercial outcome is the point.
When the CS community reframed this as "we exist to help customers, full stop, and revenue is a happy side effect," they didn't make the function more virtuous. They made it less effective. They removed the commercial intentionality that makes the whole thing work.
The real damage wasn't philosophical. It was operational.
When CSMs are trained to believe that being commercial undermines their relationship with the customer, they stop having expansion conversations. When they stop having expansion conversations, they miss the moments when the customer is most ready to expand. When they miss those moments, the customer doesn't hear about the next product from their trusted advisor — they hear about it cold, from sales, at the wrong time, framed wrong.
Nobody wins in that scenario. Certainly not the customer.
Being commercial is not in conflict with being customer-centric. It IS being customer-centric — because customers who are not growing their relationship with you are customers who are not getting everything they could from it.
The CSM who withholds the expansion conversation because they don't want to seem salesy is not protecting the customer. They're failing them.
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.