Stop being liked. Start being undeniable

A dose of truth to start: being liked is not a strategy. Not for software companies, and not for us.

I work in customer success, the part of a software company that makes sure customers actually get value from what they bought. My corner of that world is franchising, so my customers run brands with locations in every sector you can imagine. And the first lesson I saw some of my colleagues learn the hard way was one I learned years ago while I worked in the federal space:

Customers can LOVE you and still leave.

They can love your onsite visits. They can love your energy on the kickoff call. They can love that you remember their kids' names and send the good holiday cards. But if the product doesn't move their business forward, they will leave. If you have not proven that the business outcomes are tied to the product you represent, they will leave. Politely. With a lovely goodbye email. It's business, not personal.

The leaky bucket nobody puts on the slide

The software industry loves to celebrate net revenue retention, the number that includes upsells and expansion. It looks fantastic on a board slide. But the honest number is gross revenue retention: how much revenue you actually KEPT from existing customers before any expansion makeup is applied.

That honest number is slipping. Benchmark data from Aleph and Benchmark it, covering full-year 2025 across 342 SaaS and AI-native companies, puts median gross revenue retention at 84%, down from 88% the year before.

Translation: plenty of customers who were "happy" last year are not customers this year. The relationships didn't save them. Results would have.

I see the exact same pattern in careers.

The career version of churn

Think about the feedback in your last review. "Everyone loves working with you." "You had a great year." "You're such a team player."

Lovely. Frame it. Now try using it in a promotion conversation.

This isn't just my hunch. Stanford researchers Shelley Correll and Caroline Simard analyzed performance reviews and shared their findings in Harvard Business Review in 2016. Women were systematically less likely to receive specific feedback tied to business outcomes. Developmental feedback was linked to outcomes 60% of the time for men and 40% of the time for women. And vague feedback was associated with lower performance ratings for women, but not for men.

So many of us are walking around with a performance review that reads like a relationship health score. Lots of warmth. Very little evidence. Yes, I know what you're thinking: "But Hristina, this was in 2016!" And sadly, this article is still being quoted everywhere because not much has changed. The performance feedback women receive is the career equivalent of a quarterly business review full of login charts: it tells a nice story, but nobody renews on it.

Hot take: you are not your activity

In my field, the classic trap is confusing activity with value. Logins aren't value. Tickets closed aren't value. Check-in calls aren't value. They're activity. Value is whether the customer opened more locations, whether their franchisees performed better, and whether they saved time and made money.

Careers fall into the same trap. Meetings attended. Emails answered within four minutes. Being the person who always says yes to the extra project. All activity. And if your manager can't connect your work to a business outcome, neither can the person deciding your promotion.

We have a saying I live by: if you can't connect your product to the customer's P&L, you're not doing customer success; you're doing customer service with a calendar. Swap "product" for "work," and it applies to every one of us.

AI is about to make this painfully obvious

Here's why this matters more now than it did five years ago. AI is eating the admin: the meeting notes, the follow-up emails, the "just circling back" reminders. I've been close to this at my own company, leading decisions on which AI tools we adopt and working on an AI agent for our customer team. What I've learned is simple. AI won't replace the people who drive outcomes. It will replace the parts of the job that were never the real job.

The research says people aren't going anywhere, but the job is changing. Gartner predicts that by 2027, half of the organizations that expected to significantly cut their customer service workforce because of AI will abandon those plans. It also predicts that no Fortune 500 company will fully replace its human customer service staff with AI by 2028. Gartner's analysts describe the human role that remains as one focused on complex problem-solving and relationship building.

Read that carefully. The relationship part stays. But it now comes attached to judgment, exceptions, and the hard problems. Being pleasant to work with is the floor. It's no longer the ceiling.

If your value was mostly being reliably busy, AI is coming for that. If your value is judgment, outcomes, and knowing what the customer really needs, you have never been more needed.

What I'd tell any ambitious woman reading this

My career has not been a straight line. I've reinvented myself at every stage, and "move and learn" is genuinely how I operate. I've worked in gaming, F&B, franchising, IT, and the federal and private sectors. Every reinvention taught me something that remains valid for my customers today: nobody stays for the vibes. They stay for the results.

So here's my unsolicited advice, one practitioner to another:

1. Translate vague praise into outcomes yourself. When your manager says, "Great year," smile, then ask, "Which result mattered most to the business, and what should I own next?"
2. Write your value story before review season. Not a list of tasks. A list of changes: what was different in the business because you were there.
3. Hand the busywork to the robots. Use AI for the admin and spend the time you win back on problems only you can solve. More bandwidth means nothing if we fill it with more check-in calls.
4. Keep being warm. Seriously. Warmth opens doors. Just don't mistake it for the reason you get to stay in the room.

The renewal is decided long before the renewal call

In customer success, we say renewal is a RESULT, not an event. It's decided in onboarding, in the first wins, and in every moment you show a customer what changed because of you.

Your promotion works the same way. It isn't decided in the review meeting. It's decided in all the months before, every time you pointed to an outcome instead of an effort.

Be liked. Absolutely. But be undeniable.