Abstract
Customer success management is gaining momen-
tum in business markets. From an initial focus on
selected industries, such as software-as-a-service,
interest in customer success is spreading among
business-to-business marketing practitioners. To
date, academia has largely neglected this concept
and its organizational implementation. Based on
extant managerial literature and research on value
in use in business markets, we distinguish between
customer success as a customer-perceived con-
struct, customer success management as a joint
customer-supplier management process, and the
emerging job position of customer success manag-
ers in supplier organizations. Based on the case of a
provider of IoT devices, software and services in de-
cision agriculture, we illustrate how customer suc-
cess management is practiced in a business market-
ing context and refine our understanding of cus-
tomer success management and its constituents.
Finally, we suggest promising avenues for future re-
search in this managerially important, under-re-
searched and rapidly growing domain.
