u/Jamaissa

I’m about six months into a CSM role at a cybersecurity company, with 5+ years of customer facing experience before this.

I understand that my role is to coordinate resources, drive adoption, own follow-ups, and keep things moving. But sometimes I feel like my contribution is just bringing in other people who do the actual work.
On technical calls, the SE or consultant leads the discussion and answers the customer’s questions. I arrange the meeting, provide context, and own the next steps but I leave wondering what value I personally added.

I’m building my technical knowledge, but it’s frustrating to feel so dependent on others while I learn. I want to contribute more in the moment, beyond scheduling , coordinating and following up afterward.

For other CSMs, especially in technical products: how do you build a stronger sense of ownership and feel useful as an orchestrator? What helped you move from feeling like a middleman to feeling like a trusted partner?

I work in cyber and my org has lots of product lines. I keep seeing the same pattern with a subset of my accounts.

They have deployments they want to start or finish and they clearly see the value, but they’re small teams with limited bandwidth, so the actual deployment work keeps sliding month after month, and the products often go unused as a result.

Managed services or a paid rollout option isn’t really on the table since it costs extra and these customers are pretty cost sensitive.

One idea I’m considering: using the last 30 minutes of our existing monthly check-in calls specifically for deployment progress, and bringing in a specialist to knock out small tasks live on the call so we get some quick wins instead of relying on them to find separate time. Not sure if this is the best approach because I don’t want them to start dreading or cancelling our monthly calls.

Has anyone dealt with this before? What’s actually worked for you ? (different cadence, smaller task breakdowns etc)?

Thanks!!

I’ve been in my CSM role for a 8 months and have been dealing with a difficult AM on one of my accounts. He has been ignoring me since I joined with no communication, no briefings, and excluding me from planning entirely.

I found out he falsified activity logs in our CRM and a meeting that never happened was logged as completed. A colleague confirmed the last real customer touchpoint was almost a year ago.

Once he got caught he panicked and suddenly booked a real QBR adding me as an afterthought so the only reason the customer got any engagement was because he was exposed.

After the QBR he won’t even confirm whether he sent a follow up to the customer. I want to send one myself but don’t want to look uncoordinated in front of them if he already did. He still won’t respond to basic messages.

This is the only account I share with him. I’m thinking about asking to be moved off it entirely. Would you stay and fight or walk away?

Has anyone else noticed that Aysha and her husband haven't been posting content together lately at all?

It feels like it's been a minute since we’ve seen him on her feed or stories, or any photos of them together. I know influencers go through phases with how much they show their partners, but the sudden lack of couple posts lately definitely caught my attention.

Did I miss something, or have they just gone completely silent on the couple content recently? What do you guys think?

Hey everyone,

I’m reaching out because I’m at my wit's end trying to get my accounts to actually engage during our touchpoints.

Right now, I have monthly cadence calls, plus formal business reviews (QBRs) quarterly or twice a year. My QBR agenda is the standard stuff: usage data, roadmap updates, and trends. They are bored out of their minds, and it feels like a total box-checking exercise.

We also have Success Plans. On paper, we are tracking their goals, but even with that framework in place, they are totally checked out. It feels like I’m just talking at them about their own goals, and they just nod along or don't care.

I’m ready to completely pitch a new approach to leadership, but I need to know what actually works in the real world.

If you scrapped the traditional QBR/monthly status check model or if you managed to actually make Success Plans work dynamically what specifically did you do?

What are some actionable activities that bring measurable ROI?

I want to stop doing these passive PowerPoint presentations and start doing things that drive real impact. Would love to hear what worked for you guys.

I need to get this off my chest because I am deeply angry and exhausted looking at the reality of what’s happening back home. We need to have an honest, unfiltered conversation about the complete failure of our society to protect its most vulnerable: our women and children.

Somalia is not a morally intact society right now. The level of danger, abuse, neglect, and systemic silencing that women and children face daily is absolutely sickening. What makes it even worse is the staggering hypocrisy that covers it all up.

We pride ourselves on being a deeply religious nation, but let’s be real. Most people don’t actually know the Deen. They are just performing it. They copy what they see around them and repeat the motions without understanding the actual weight of justice, mercy, and human rights in Islam. Because they genuinely do not know the true essence of the faith, they don't even realize the massive contradiction in their own behavior.

It has become a society of empty rituals. People will police women’s clothing, show up for prayers, and throw around religious phrases, but the actual core of Islamic ethics, protecting the vulnerable and standing up against oppression, is completely dead in practice. How can a population claim to love Allah and His Messenger when the streets, and even homes, are unsafe for children and women?

Instead of treating women with the honor Islam commands, they are subjected to violence and then forced into silence to protect family honor. Instead of nurturing children, they are exploited, abused, and left with zero safety nets. When crimes happen, the community protects the perpetrators and shames the victims.

It is cowardly, and it is a total distortion of the faith people claim to hold so dear.

Reducing religion to an outward performance while allowing your own society to rot from the inside out is the definition of hypocrisy. We are failing the next generation, and we are failing Islam.

How do we break through this toxic culture of performative religiosity and actually start demanding real justice and safety?

Hi everyone,

So, I am a CSM at a cybersecurity company and started here about 3 months ago. Right now, our team and department really struggle with success planning, because everything is currently very task based and reactive.

I want to do things differently. My goal is to go to each customer site and pitch the actual value of a success plan using data. On average, it takes my organization about 3 weeks to build a really solid, comprehensive plan once we get started.

I have an onsite meeting with a customer this week, and here is the agenda structure I have put together to pitch the concept and kick off that process:

1. What is a success plan? (Defining the framework)

2. Why leading organizations do it (The strategic value and data driven benefits)

3. Real world examples (Showing what success actually looks like)

4. An invitation to start planning together (The call to action to kick off that 3 week building phase)

I think my team’s biggest struggle is getting customer buy in and convincing them to care about or see the value in dedicating time to this.

What are your thoughts on this pitch for my upcoming onsite? Any tips on how to shift a
customer's mindset from purely tactical to strategic success planning, especially when it requires a multi week commitment to build it out?

Hi everyone!

So I started at a new company about 3 months ago and have been onboarding since then. In this org, our role is heavily measured by retention.

The problem is, the relationship with the Account Managers is incredibly shaky. They gatekeep constantly and try to keep CSMs out of accounts as much as they possibly can. I’ve never experienced this before in my career, because in my prior roles, everyone had a team first mindset.

On a call with one of the AMs (the very first time meeting him, by the way), he fully said right to my face that he doesn’t see the value in me at all, that he's given up on the CSM function, and his attitude was just incredibly bad.

Unfortunately, I share a few accounts with him, and it honestly feels like he wants to watch me fail. Hard. Because my metrics are tied to keeping these accounts around, his gatekeeping feels like a direct threat to my performance.

I’ve accepted that I will not get any helpful information or collaboration from him. My strategy now is to find a way to build a relationship with the customers that is just as strong, if not stronger, than his, so I can actually track health and protect retention.

Fortunately, leadership completely sees the value in us (it's supported top down), and we have their full backing. But day to day, dealing with this friction is exhausting.

Has anyone dealt with this level of internal hostility before? What tips or strategies helped you successfully get into accounts and drive retention when the AM is trying to lock the door?

More importantly, can you actually still succeed and hit your goals without them?

Hey y'all, following up on the Drew discussion because it hits on another point: Is anyone else genuinely shocked Bravo even handed her a peach for Season 17?

Given how entirely invisible she was during the Season 16 press cycle and how production basically treated her like background noise, I was almost certain she was getting demoted to "Friend Of" or dropped entirely. The network clearly didn't prioritize her last year, which makes her presence this season even more confusing when they're still giving her the exact same icy treatment.

And the thing is, I actually like Drew! I want to see her win and get her shine, which makes watching production alienate her like this so frustrating. It’s hard to see a housewife you enjoy get totally frozen out by the network.

If production is this over her, why keep her on the main roster for two consecutive seasons?

Been on a serious portal fantasy and time travel romance kick lately and I am HOOKED. But my brain will not stop doing this thing where I start projecting real world history onto the story.

Like the FMC portals into a medieval kingdom, or regency era, or some fantasy world clearly inspired by a real historical period and my mind just wanders. Because we know how those worlds actually treated Black people and POC.

I’m not trying to insert myself into the story. I’m not trying to ruin the fantasy. My mind just can’t help but wander to the “what if the FMC looked different” place and once it goes there it’s hard to come back.

Does anyone else experience this? especially Black or POC readers? Do you push through it or does it genuinely affect how much you enjoy certain settings? And if you have recs for portal/time travel romantasy with Black or POC FMCs please DROP THEM.

Has anyone read this series? Assassin nuns for the god of Death! That book completely took the first spot for me.

I read it back in 2013, and it was my absolute introduction to romantic fantasy. At the time, I was going through cancer treatment, and these books were such an incredible escape.

I especially loved the second book (Dark Triumph), which features Sybella. She was such a total badass, full of rage, and deeply complex.

Does anyone have recommendations for fantasy romance books with a Female Main Character (FMC) similar to her? I'd love to find another heroine with that same fierce, angry energy, but someone whose anger is justified and compelling, without being annoying?

I have 4 years as a CSM in productivity SaaS, just made the jump to cybersecurity at an F500 account two weeks ago. Still in the shadowing phase, so I’m mostly just watching and absorbing right now.

And already my brain is breaking a little.

In my pervious role I was constantly proving value. Every QBR was building the case on adoption numbers, time saved, here’s why you need us etc. The customer needed to be convinced on a rolling basis.

Shadowing on calls here, when we pull up the dashboard with the customer they see that thousands of threats blocked, clear as day.

They get it. Nobody’s questioning the product.

And then they just… don’t engage.

I’m realizing the skill set is almost inverted. I spent 4 years getting good at demonstrating value and here the value is already in front of them. But the customer is a CISO with 47 other problems and they’re not looking for someone to narrate their own dashboard back to them.

I’m still early and still shadowing so maybe I’m missing something. But my gut says the CSM motion here is less about value proof and more about being useful differently like retention, risk gaps, helping them tell the story upward internally.

Anyone make a similar transition? What actually changed for you?