The Death of Customer Success as We Knew It — And What the CLG Awards Tell Us About What's Next

TL;DR: The rebranding of the CMA 100 to the CLG 100 Awards is not just a name change. It is a signal that the industry has crossed a line. Customer Success can no longer afford to be just a retention function. The future belongs to CS teams that think in growth motions, not health scores. Nominations close February 20th.

An award program almost died. That should tell you something.

Base AI's CEO Gal Biran recently shared something refreshingly honest: they almost killed the TOP 100 CMA Awards. Four years of celebrating customer marketing leaders, thousands of nominations, real careers elevated, and the hand was on the kill button.

Why? Because the award had become disconnected from where the industry was heading.

So instead of killing it, they evolved it. The CMA 100 became the CLG 100, the TOP 100 Customer-Led Growth Awards. Not just a rebrand. A redefinition of what great looks like in post-sale. Nominations are open now through February 20th. Submit yours here before the window closes.

If you are a CS leader reading this, you should be paying very close attention.

The shift hiding in plain sight

For years, Customer Success and Customer Marketing lived in parallel universes. CS owned the account, prevented churn, and measured health scores. CM owned the person, created advocates, and measured pipeline influence. We wrote about this tension recently, exploring the fundamental difference in how these two functions see the same customer. CS asks how is this account doing? CM asks who at this account can we activate? Same customer. Completely different questions.

But here is what has changed: those questions are no longer enough on their own.

The companies winning right now are not the ones with the best CSMs or the best advocacy programs. They are the ones that have fused both into a single growth motion. And that motion has a name: Customer-Led Growth.

What CLG actually means (and why CS leaders should care)

CLG is not a buzzword. It is a structural shift in how post-sale organizations create revenue.

Think about what the CLG Awards are now recognizing. Not just advocacy. Not just community. Not just retention. The categories tell the whole story: advocacy and community, referrals and customer-led acquisition, upsell and expansion, CX and digital CS, AI in customer programs, VOC and feedback loops.

That is not a customer marketing award. That is a post-sale growth award. And the people nominated are not just customer marketers. They are community managers, customer program managers, and digital CS leaders.

Read that last part again. Digital CS leaders are now competing in the same arena as customer marketing leaders. The walls are not just coming down. They are already gone.

The uncomfortable truth for CS teams

If you are running a CS org in 2026 and your team's primary metric is still keep customers from leaving, you are playing defense in a game that has moved to offense.

The CLG framework does not eliminate retention. It repositions it. Retention becomes the floor, not the ceiling. The real value is in what happens after you have earned the right to keep the customer: expansion, advocacy, referrals, community influence, product feedback loops that drive roadmap, and social proof that accelerates new pipeline.

This is why the CLG Awards matter beyond the ceremony. They are defining a new competency model. The winners will not just be great at one program. They will be great at orchestrating a system of programs that compound into revenue.

What CS teams can steal from this playbook

You do not need to rebrand your team to start thinking in CLG terms. But you do need to change how you operate.

Stop managing accounts. Start activating people. Your healthiest account might contain your best untapped advocate. Your biggest logo might have zero referenceable champions. The account view is necessary but insufficient. You need a people layer on top of it. Who are the humans inside these accounts willing to grow with you?

Connect your metrics to revenue, not just outcomes. NRR is a start. But can you trace a reference call to a closed deal? Can you show that a customer community post drove a feature adoption spike that prevented churn? The CLG winners will be the people who can draw these lines.

Treat every customer touchpoint as a growth opportunity. A QBR is not just a health check. It is a chance to identify expansion signals and advocacy potential. An onboarding flow is not just time-to-value. It is the first moment you can start building the kind of trust that turns users into champions. Every interaction is either building growth momentum or losing it.

Use AI to connect what was previously disconnected. The CLG Awards added a category for AI in customer programs, and that is not accidental. AI is the connective tissue that makes CLG possible at scale, surfacing the right signal from the right person at the right time, across health data, advocacy data, community data, and product usage data. This is exactly the kind of infrastructure we are building at EverAfter: connecting customer experience, engagement data, and post-sale journeys into a single system that CS, CM, and digital success teams can all run on.

This is not the future. It is the present.

Three years ago, Base defined CLG as their north star. At the time, it felt aspirational. Today, it feels obvious.

The companies that still separate customer success from customer marketing, that still treat post-sale as a cost center rather than a growth engine, are already falling behind. The CLG Awards are simply holding up a mirror.

If you are a CS leader, a digital CS manager, a community leader, or a customer program manager who has been quietly driving growth motions across the lifecycle, this is your moment. The industry is finally building the recognition framework for the work you have been doing all along.

Nominations for the 2026 TOP 100 CLG Awards are open now through February 20th. Whether you nominate yourself or a colleague, the act of documenting what you have built, the programs, the metrics, the cross-functional impact, is valuable regardless of the outcome. Because the exercise of articulating your CLG story is the first step toward owning it.