Your Next Manager Might Already Have This Brief. Does Your Work Meet It?
This week, Entrust appointed Erika Cowen as SVP of Customer Success.
The CS community will celebrate it. Another senior appointment. Another signal that CS is getting its seat at the table.
Read the actual brief before you celebrate.
Cowen’s mandate at Entrust covers customer success management, technical support, and professional services.
All of it. Reporting directly to the CEO.
Her stated focus: driving measurable outcomes that produce long-term customer retention and growth.
Her own words: “Customer success is built on trust and partnership, but it’s measured through the outcomes we help our customers achieve.”
That second sentence is the brief. And it is not the brief most CSMs are currently operating against.
This is the second major signal in two weeks.
SAP merged its Customer Success and Customer Services organizations into a single board-level unit under a Chief Customer Officer with the same commercial mandate.
Two separate companies. Two separate sectors. The same structural decision.
A pattern is forming.
CS is being handed the full post-sale revenue motion and told to own outcomes, not just relationships.
The function is not being leveled up in the way most CSMs picture it.
It is being redefined around a commercial standard that the majority of the CS workforce has never been formally evaluated against.
The appointment itself is not the story. What happens to the CSMs sitting underneath a leader with this mandate is the story.
When a company hires an SVP of CS with ownership of support, services, and a growth brief, the evaluation lens for every CSM on that team shifts.
Activity metrics lose weight. Meeting counts stop mattering.
The question that gets asked in every review, every QBR debrief, every renewal conversation is the same: what did this CSM produce that moved retention or growth?
CSMs who are already operating commercially, controlling renewal timelines, surfacing expansion signals before sales does, building exec relationships that produce decisions rather than updates, are positioned for this shift.
Their work already answers that question.
The CFO-level renewal framing most CSMs still treat as advanced is the baseline in the model these leaders are building.
The CSMs still operating on the old brief are facing a harder reality.
The new standard does not announce itself.
It arrives in the form of a new manager with a different lens, a restructured comp plan, and a set of expectations the team has never been formally prepared for.
Most CSMs will read the Entrust announcement and move on.
The ones paying attention will ask a different question: when a leader with this brief reviews my book next quarter, what does she see?
If the answer is uncertain, that uncertainty is the risk.
The standard has shifted.
The gap between where you operate today and where Cowen’s brief sets the bar is closeable.
The CSMs who close it do not get reevaluated. They become the example used to evaluate everyone else.
Inside is the system to get there: a scored diagnostic that shows you exactly where you stand, a 60-day account-level playbook to shift what leadership sees, and a visibility framework that makes your contribution the one that requires no translation.
The CS Commercial Brief Toolkit runs all three.
Download it once. Use it every quarter →