What your personal trainer and your CSM have in common

It may come as a shock to no one that some tasks, even with the best intentions behind them, rarely make it to the finish line without a guiding hand.

Sometimes we need someone in our corner to help us get from A to B.

Take fitness. Many of us have had the same experience. We sign up to a gym full of motivation. We buy the shoes, maybe even the smartwatch, and tell ourselves that this time will be different.

And then life happens. The membership renews, but the visits quietly decline. The plan still exists, but the habit does not.

That is often where a good personal trainer makes the difference. Not because they magically do the work for you, but because they help you stay accountable, adapt the plan when life gets in the way, and keep moving towards the goal you said mattered.

The parallels with customer success are hard to ignore.

A customer success manager (CSM) does something remarkably similar. They guide customers through their journey, keep them focused on the outcomes they wanted in the first place, and help make sure they actually get value from what they have invested in.

In this article, I want to explore those parallels using the LAER model: Land, Adopt, Expand and Renew.

But more importantly, I want to connect it to what I have learned from working with customers in enterprise software, where success rarely happens just because the contract was signed.

Land: Building the foundation

A good personal trainer doesn't hand you a generic plan on day one. They ask questions first.

What are you working towards? What have you tried before? What does your schedule actually look like? Do you want to lose weight, build strength, run a marathon, or simply stop feeling tired all the time? Only then do they build something that fits you. A CSM’s first move should be the same.

The Land phase is about laying the groundwork. It is about understanding what the customer is genuinely trying to achieve, what they have already invested in, what success looks like for them, and where the real blockers might be.

And sometimes, what the customer asks for at the beginning is not always what they actually need.

I have seen this many times in my own role. A customer may come into the conversation saying they want better tool adoption, more licenses, or a smoother implementation. But once you spend time in proper discovery, the real need often sits somewhere deeper: clearer processes, stronger executive alignment, or making sure different engineering teams are finally working from the same source of truth.

One example that stayed with me was with a customer in the autonomous mobility space in Australia. The initial conversation could easily have stayed at the level of software usage and renewal. But when we went deeper, the real business challenge was about keeping a fast-growing engineering organization aligned across multiple tools, teams, and locations (Australia, Asia, and Europe).

That changed the conversation completely.

It was no longer just about adoption. It became about creating a more scalable engineering digital backbone, connecting the right Siemens teams, and helping the customer move with more confidence towards their long-term goals.

That is why groundwork matters.

If you get this phase right, everything that follows is built on a solid footing. If you rush it, you often spend the rest of the journey repairing trust, clarifying expectations, or solving problems that could have been avoided at the beginning.

Adopt: Making something stick

Signing up is the easy part.

The harder thing, in fitness and in software, is making something stick.

A good trainer does not just hand over a schedule and wish you luck. They check in. They adjust. If a certain exercise is not working for your body or your week, they find another way to get you to the same outcome.

The goal isn't perfect obedience to the plan. The goal is progress and adoption works the same way.

A smooth go-live is important, but it is not the finish line. The real question is what happens afterwards. Are people using the solution? Do they understand how it fits into their work? Are they seeing value? Or has the system technically gone live, while the old ways of working continue quietly in the background?

In my experience, this is where customer success earns its place.

One thing I have changed in how I approach onboarding and adoption is that I no longer see enablement as a one-off training activity. A kickoff, a slide deck, or a generic training session is good but not enough. People need role-based guidance. They need examples that reflect their actual processes. They need to understand not just which button to click, but why the new way of working matters.

With enterprise customers, I have seen adoption go sideways when the groundwork was not specific enough. The implementation may be technically correct, but if users don't understand how it connects to their day-to-day work, they will find a workaround. And once workarounds become normal, they are hard to reverse.

The recovery usually starts with going back to basics: listening to the users, understanding where the friction really is, and rewriting the adoption plan. Sometimes that means more targeted enablement. Sometimes it means bringing in services, support, or product experts. Sometimes it means helping the customer’s internal champions communicate the value better inside their own organization.

Good adoption work is rarely glamorous.

It is the consistent weekly check-ins, the small adjustments, the repeated conversations, the user feedback, the training refreshers, and the willingness to notice when something is not landing.

Just like in fitness, consistency beats intensity.

Expand: Finding the next summit

There's a moment in any good fitness journey where the original goal stops feeling ambitious.

You hit the milestone. You gain muscle. You finish the marathon. You build the routine. Then you look up and realize there's more you could do. A great trainer sees that moment coming.

They don't push the next challenge too early, but they're ready when you are. Maybe it is your first 10K, then a half marathon, then a triathlon, then an Ironman. The next step feels natural because it comes from progress, rather than pressure.

That is what a good Expand conversation should feel like in customer success.

It shouldn't feel like a sales pitch. It should never feel like the customer has been moved from one funnel to another. It should feel like a continuation of the value journey.

This is where timing matters.

When an expansion conversation goes well, the customer often recognizes the need before you fully articulate it. They can see the next bottleneck. They understand the value already delivered. They trust that the recommendation is connected to their goals.

When it goes badly, it usually feels too early, too generic, or too sales-led.

The customer hears: “What else can we sell you?”

Instead of: “Here is the next problem we can help you solve.”

In my work, the best expansion conversations usually start from business progress, not product features. For example, once a customer has established a strong foundation with one part of their engineering or product lifecycle, the natural next question becomes: what adjacent process is still disconnected? Where is the next source of manual work, rework, or delay? Which team is still outside the digital thread?

That is when expansion becomes meaningful.

New features, new use cases, or additional parts of the business should not be positioned as more software. They should be positioned as the next logical step in the customer’s own maturity journey.

Expansions should feel like the customer was already half-thinking about it, and the CSM helped put the opportunity into words.

Renew: The result of everything that came before

Here is the thing about renewals: by the time the renewal conversation happens, the outcome is often already decided.

That may sound uncomfortable, but it's true.

If the groundwork was laid well, if adoption was real, if the customer has been hitting their milestones, and if the relationship has been managed properly, the renewal conversation isn't usually a dramatic rescue mission. Renewal is a continuation. But if those things didn't happen, no amount of charm in the final meeting will save it.

It's the same with a long-term gym client. Retention isn't won at the annual review. It's won in every session, every check-in, every small adjustment, and every moment where the trainer helps the client keep going.

The renewal conversation is where all of that work becomes visible.

I've seen renewal conversations become much harder than they should've been when adoption hadn't fully landed or when the customer could not clearly connect the solution to measurable value. And I've also seen the opposite: renewals that became natural transitions because the customer could point to progress, internal alignment, and a clear path forward.

That is why I think CSMs need to treat renewal as something that starts on day one. Not 90 days before the contract ends. Not when procurement gets involved. Not when there is already a risk.

Renewal is built through every customer interaction that creates trust, removes friction, and reinforces value.

The whole team on the gym floor

A personal trainer may be the constant in the journey, but they aren't the whole gym.

Behind them is the wider infrastructure: the equipment, the classes, the nutrition advice, the recovery support, and sometimes even the person at the front desk who makes you feel welcome enough to come back.

Customer success works the same way.

The CSM may be the constant face to the customer, but they are backed by sales, marketing, services, support, product, learning, and leadership. The customer experiences all of this as one relationship, even if internally it involves many teams.

And making it feel coherent takes real coordination.

This is especially true in enterprise software, where customer outcomes rarely sit inside one team’s responsibility. A customer may need technical support, implementation guidance, executive alignment, training, roadmap clarity, and commercial flexibility at different moments in the journey.

If those teams are disconnected, the customer feels it immediately. If they're aligned, the customer feels that too.

One of the best parts of customer success, at least for me, is when this coordination works.

When the CSM can bring the right people together at the right time and the customer feels that everyone is moving in the same direction. Like an orchestra coordinated by the CSM. That is when customer success stops being a function and starts becoming a company-wide operating model. Every customer can tell the difference. They notice quickly when they are being handed from department to department.

They also know when there's a team around them that understands their goals and is genuinely trying to help them succeed.

What has changed

One trend I am seeing more and more across customers is that adoption is no longer just about usage.

Customers are under pressure to show business impact faster. They don't just want to know whether people logged into the system. They want to understand whether the solution helped reduce friction, improve collaboration, support better decisions, or accelerate a business outcome.

That changes the role of the CSM. It's no longer enough to say: “The system is live and users are active.” We need to be able to ask better questions.

What changed because of this solution? Which process improved? Which team is now working differently? What decision can the customer make today that they could not make before? How does success turn into ROI?

That is also why the personal trainer analogy works so well for me.

A trainer doesn't only count how many times you show up at the gym. They look at whether you are getting stronger, whether your recovery is improving, whether your energy is better, and whether the plan is actually moving you towards your goal.

Customer success needs to do the same. Usage matters, but outcomes matter more.

The takeaway

The LAER model is not just a framework for managing accounts. It's a mindset for building relationships that last.

• Land is where you understand the real goal.
• Adopt is where you help the customer turn intention into habit.
• Expand is where you identify the next meaningful step.
• Renew is where the work you have done all along becomes visible.

And the CSM, like any great personal trainer, is the person who helps make that journey real. Not by following a script, but by knowing the customer well enough to adapt, challenge, support, and celebrate with them at every stage.

Customer success is like building muscle. You can't fake it at the final weigh-in. The strength is built in the reps no one sees: the early discovery, the adoption work, the difficult conversations, the small adjustments, and the consistency over time.

That's why customers stay. That's why they grow. And that's why they advocate.