Lincoln Murphy's Recent LinkedIn Posts

Your AI wrote a perfect email. Their AI wrote a perfect response. Nobody said anything. You know exactly which thread I'm talking about. A customer was crashing out over email. Every message was longer, more detailed, more structured. And more useless. He was using AI to write his emails. I caught myself going to AI to respond. Two robots talking past each other while two humans sat there frustrated. So I broke the pattern. I said, "bro, we can keep letting AI argue for us or we can get on a call and work this out like humans." We got on a call. Fixed it in 15 minutes. Simple. I've analyzed churn across hundreds of companies. The throughline is almost always the same. Poor communication. That's it. That's the simple fix everyone skips over because it doesn't feel strategic enough. And now we have AI writing our emails, scripting our calls, building our SOPs, generating our presentations. Communication should be getting better. It's not. Because the problem was never the words. It was the willingness to actually talk to each other. AI made us better writers. It didn't make us better communicators. And those are not the same thing.

You think AI removes the humanity from Customer Success. Actually, it's how we scale it. But you have to do it right. Relying on your CSMs to catch every signal your customers drop is not a strategy. It's a hope. The offhand remark. The passing comment about new leadership. The thing a customer mentions because they trust you and you were actually listening. Your CSM heard it. Probably. But did it make it into the action items? Did anyone follow up? Or did it get lost because they're juggling 50 accounts and they're human and humans miss things? AI doesn't replace the relationship that made the customer say the thing. It makes sure the thing actually gets heard, acted on, and the customer feels it. That's not removing humanity from CS. That's the opposite. Done right, Agentic Workflows mean your CSMs show up to every conversation with more context, more bandwidth, and more capacity to go deeper than ever before. Not with fewer customers. With more. And not at the cost of the relationship. Because of it. If you think AI in CS means throwing a chatbot in front of your customers, you are so far from where this we are today. Your humans are the moat. AI is how you scale them. Lewis Thompson and I will introduce you to Agentic Workflows for Customer Success on March 25, 2026 at 12PM Eastern. Link in the comments.

In jiu-jitsu, when someone taps, you let go. Always. Except when letting go is what hurts them. There's a difference between a real tap and a panic tap. A panic tap is when someone new gets caught in a choke, freaks out, and starts flailing. They're not in danger. They're just uncomfortable and scared. If I let go every time someone panic taps, they never learn how to fight out of it. They never learn that discomfort isn't danger. They quit before they grow. So instead of letting go completely, I ease up and ask if I can show them something. Then I teach them how to hand fight. How to create space. How to survive long enough to escape. Same thing happens with customers. They sign up. They don't get instant results. They freak out. They want to cancel. That's a panic tap. If you just let them go, they walk away having learned nothing. They'll do the same thing with the next vendor. My job isn't to let you quit. My job is to not let you give up on yourself. Ease up the pressure. Ask if you can show them something. Then teach them how to fight through it. That's customer success.

A UVV recebeu Lincoln Murphy, um dos maiores estrategistas globais de #CustomerSuccess e crescimento recorrente, para falar sobre o conceito que está transformando o mercado: #GrowthComportamental. Lincoln é professor do nosso MBA em Gestão Estratégica do Cliente. 🎓 Conheça o MBA em Gestão Estratégica do Cliente da UVV e prepare-se para liderar a próxima geração de estratégias orientadas ao cliente. Mais informações em uvv.br. https://lnkd.in/dZuCm6dZ

Talking about AI the way I do is literally the most Customer Success thing I've ever said. But some people want me to just "focus on CS." Cool. Let's talk about CS. Customer Success exists to get customers to stay longer, buy more, and advocate for you. That's what drives higher NRR, LTV, and more efficient CAC. Customer Success Management ensures customers achieve their goal through their Appropriate Experience (AX). Get the AX right and customers do the things CS exists to deliver. Get it wrong and no amount of health scores or check-in calls saves you. If you think talking about AI, automation, and agentic workflows is somehow at odds with that, you're getting in your own way. And I say that with love. Because here's what I see in most CS operations: CSMs who know something is wrong but can't surface it fast enough because the signal is buried in three different systems. Onboarding that should be bespoke but gets templated because there's no other way to scale it. Renewal conversations that should be about value but become about justifying a license count because that's what the platform tracks. That's not an AI problem. That's a Customer Success problem. It has always been a Customer Success problem. If you think agentic workflows are just tech touch 2.0, next gen Digital CS, chatbots at scale — you're not seeing the big picture. Unless your customer's AX has shifted, throwing a bot in front of someone who needs a human conversation is a perfect way to send them packing. That's not agentic CS. That's just bad CS with a better tech stack. Agentic workflows close the gap between what your team knows needs to happen for a customer and their ability to make it happen. The agent executes. The CSM owns. The customer gets the AX they need. That's not AI for AI's sake. That's Customer Success finally getting the infrastructure it always deserved. This is the first time in fifteen years I've seen something that actually closes the gap. Join me and Lewis Thompson tomrorow, Wednesday March 25 at 12PM Eastern for Introduction to Agentic Workflows for Customer Success. Signup link in the comments.

Every day someone posts about replacing their CS team with AI agents. And every day you feel a little more behind and overwhelmed. That feeling is the product. It's designed to keep you anxious enough to keep consuming and paralyzed enough to never actually build anything. Here's what's actually true: The technology is changing fast. It will keep changing. That's not a reason to wait and it's not a reason to panic -- it's just the environment we're operating in now. What doesn't change is the question you need to answer first: "What am I actually trying to do for my customers?" My suggestion is to go further and ask, "What am I actually trying to do for my customers that I couldn't do before?" Not efficiency gains. Not automating the stuff you're already doing. The things you always wanted to do but wrote off as impossible. Start there. Then you can figure out the right technology. Not the other way around. And as the technology keeps improving -- which it will -- you'll iterate and update and take advantage of those changes. But if you're still trying to keep up with every model release, every framework update, very new Claude Skill,... you're solving the wrong problem. That's noise that keeps you busy and stuck at the same time. Slow down enough to figure out what you're actually building toward. Then come build it with us. Introduction to Agentic Workflows for Customer Success. Wednesday March 25, 2026. 12PM Eastern. Free. Live. With Lewis Thompson Link in the comments...

We built five AI agents for Customer Success and we're giving them away for free. Not because we're feeling generous. Because if you can't see what's possible, you won't show up on Wednesday to our webinar ready to build something real. Here's what's in the repo: The Invisible Handoff -- briefs your CSM from the sales call transcript before the first customer call. The gap between sales and CS disappears. The customer never feels it. The Trust Radar -- joins win-back calls and monitors in real time for manipulation versus genuine loss of trust. Tells your CSM whether to keep working the relationship or walk away. The Expansion Signal Detector -- scans call transcripts post-call for language that signals expansion readiness. Surfaces the upsell before it passes. The Churn Risk Summarizer -- pulls recent activity, tickets, and engagement data and generates a plain-language risk narrative before a QBR or renewal. Not a health score. An actual story. The Earned Ask -- detects positive sentiment and a milestone met, then drafts the review request email. You earned the right to ask. Here it is. Five workflows. Free. No strings. If you're already registered for Wednesday's webinar, you'll get the repo Monday morning. If you're not registered yet, what are you waiting for. Link in comments.

Is your Customer Success job designed to be replaced by AI? Not "will AI change CS?" -- that ship has sailed. The real question is whether there's a human in that role because the work requires one -- or because they just haven't been automated out of the job yet. There's a quick way to find out. Paste the job description into this tool I built and it shows you exactly what agentic workflows are coming for -- and what's left for the human when they get there. Some people hesitate to paste their own job description in. That hesitation is information. Link in the comments

CS is at a crossroads. Again. Economy slows down. Cut CS. AI arrives. Replace CS with agents. In March 2026, we've got both. The response is always the same: defend, justify, prove your worth. There's a better response. And agentic workflows are how you get there. Not faster emails. Not a daily brief. Things that were genuinely impossible before AI that change what your team can do for customers and change the conversation about what CS is worth to the company. My partner Lewis Thompson and I are doing a free live introduction on March 25 at 12pm Eastern. We'll show you what's actually real, what the hype is obscuring, and two workflows we built and deployed that simply weren't possible before AI. You don't need a technical background. You just need to show up with an open mind. This is the first real chance CS has ever had to become untouchable. Don't sit this one out. Link in comments.

The tools running your CS org are limiting you. You know that. Your team knows it. Your customers feel it. Your KPIs reflect it. And the worst part? You're the one who championed them. You bought the platform. Ran the implementation. Trained everyone on the best practices. Sold it internally. Got everyone aligned. And it still doesn't feel like enough. Because it isn't. Purpose-built CS tools are not designed for the unique way you operate. Like any software built for a broad market, they have to be generic. Which means to use the tool, you have to modify your operation to conform to it. To get you to do that, they label these compromises "best practices." But every CS tool has their own set of "best practices" because they each have a specific way they need you to operate in order to use the tool. It's not a standard. It's just their standard. And you've been bending your operation to meet it. Your operation isn't average. The way you onboard isn't average. The signals that actually predict churn in your book aren't average. The way your team builds relationships, runs onboarding, catches an account before it goes sideways -- none of that is average. It's yours. It's what makes you good at this. And for the entire history of this profession, CS teams have had to compress all of that into someone else's schema. Yes, a lot of CS tools added AI. That's real. But it's AI that lives inside their operating model, their data structures, their workflows, their idea of what Customer Success looks like. It's a faster horse. It's still their horse. Agentic Workflows are the No-Compromise approach to Customer Success. For the first time, you define how you work. The agent is built around that. Your CS platform, your CRM, your product data, your unstructured context -- they all become nodes in a workflow you control instead of boxes you fit yourself into. The tool fits you. Not the other way around. Imagine building your onboarding motion exactly the way you know it should work. Your health signals defined by what actually matters in your book, not what the platform decided to measure. Your team spending their time on the relationships that matter instead of working around the tool. That's what agentic workflows make possible. And it's not theoretical. That's what Lewis Thompson and I are showing you this Wednesday, March 25 in our Introduction to Agentic Workflows for Customer Success webinar. Signup link in the comments.

The best use of AI I've seen today isn't on a laptop. It's on a stage in front of me. I'm at Startup Day 2026 in Vitória, ES watching Geisiane Leão, MSc. from Base27 crush a presentation right now. She clearly used AI to prepare. The narrative is tight, the slides are clean, and because she wasn't buried in formatting and outline anxiety she had time to actually practice. To find her stories. To show up as a human being instead of someone reading their own notes for the first time. The room is with her. Not because of the slides. Because of her. Everyone here has access to the same AI she used. They could generate a version of this presentation themselves in a few minutes. The information stopped being the differentiator the moment everyone got the same tools. What they can't replicate is her. Her stories. Her experience. Her. When AI is in literally everything -- and we're almost there -- it stops being a competitive advantage and starts being table stakes. The new question isn't whether to use AI. It's what you do with the time and capacity it gives you back. If you're afraid of AI and decide not to use it, you're not protecting the human element. You're limiting it. You're showing up under-prepared and over-burdened with less capacity for the one thing AI can never replace. Use the tools. Do the human work better. I wrote this post while I watched her presentation. Dumped my stream of consciousness into Claude on my phone and shaped the thought without leaving the room. Stayed present. Let the tool do the structural work. That's exactly what this Wednesday's webinar is about -- Introduction to Agentic Workflows for Customer Success -- leveraging AI to unlock our humanity. You need to be in that room. Link in comments.

An article about toxic relationships and dating just described your customer success motion. Word for word. It's called ghostlighting. Ghosting plus gaslighting. You disappear, then come back acting like nothing happened. And when they bring up the silence? You rewrite history. Onboarding wraps. CSM goes quiet. Emails slow down. Then stop. Months pass. Renewal shows up on the calendar. Cheerful Slack message: "Hey! Just checking in! 🙂" Customer brings up the silence. "You said you had it handled and I didn't want to bother you." That's not customer success. That's gaslighting with a logo on it. Dating experts put it perfectly: "Ghosting is avoidance. Ghostlighting adds distortion by manipulating the facts so you doubt your own reality." Your customers aren't crazy. You made them feel that way. The fix is simple. When you come back after going dark, own the gap. "I disappeared. Here's what happened. Here's what changes going forward." Your customers aren't asking you to be perfect. They're just asking you not to make them feel insane when you're not. Stop ghostlighting your accounts.

"We already tried that." Did you though? Did you try it with the right people? The right timing? The right execution? Or did you half-ass it once, it didn't work, and now it's dead forever? "We tried that" isn't wisdom. It's a thought-terminating cliche dressed up as experience. What you're really saying: I don't want to revisit something that might expose the fact that the problem was never the idea. It was us. Companies evolve fast. What didn't work six months ago might crush today. Different ops. Different experience. Different mindset. But "we tried that" shuts the door. And the person with the idea stops bringing ideas. You'll never know what you killed. Forever.

I'm scared AI is going to ruin everything we've built. I was too. Then this happened... I had a hunch that we were spending more time trying to get our customers to do things they can't or don't want to do than it would take if we just did it for them. AI makes that possible. Which means, while SaaS stocks got destroyed because of the threat of AI, we were spinning up AI agents at ListKit that make our team 5x more productive. We have agentic workflows that allow our team to do the work for our customers, allowing us to open up an entirely new revenue stream. We pivoted our underlying infrastructure to optimize for AI, which unlocked customer-facing product enhancements we couldn't have shipped before. Our customers are getting better results. They're staying longer. They're buying more. ARR and LTV are growing. AI is an opportunity, not a threat. But in ways you might not have considered yet. Tomorrow (Wednesday) I'm going to talk about exactly what we did and how you can do the same thing. Johan Nilsson and I go live at 8 AM PST / 11 AM EST / 5 PM CET in the podcast: The NRR Battle of 2026. Link in comments.

We resist simple changes with big impact. We retreat to complexity because it's safer. If the fix is complex and you don't do it, that's logistics. Resources. Timing. Reasonable. If the fix is simple and you don't do it, that's a choice. Your choice. So we hide. We'll pay for a 40-page playbook before we'll change one conversation. We'll overhaul our entire tech stack before we'll just follow up faster. We'll build a 17-tool GTM stack before we'll just write emails that sound like a human. Complexity gives you cover. "It was a lot to implement." Simplicity leaves you exposed. "You just decided not to." That's the real reason simple advice gets rejected. Not because it won't work. Because it might. And then you'd have to admit you were hiding the whole time.

You wrote something important. Your team pasted it into AI and asked what you meant. And that bothers you. Here's why. You're writing for people who don't exist. The ones who sit down, read 20 pages, absorb it, and execute perfectly. That person is not on your team. That person is not on anyone's team. Here's what actually happens. Your team takes your strategy doc, pastes it into ChatGPT or Claude, and says "WTF is this person telling me to do?" And you know what? Let them. Because your SOP is not a document for a human to read. Your SOP is a directive for the AI that will help the next person take appropriate action. That reframes everything. Stop writing like your team is going to read it. Start writing like AI is going to translate it into their next move. Structure your docs so they parse clean and spit out something your team can actually execute on. Today. Without asking you to clarify. You're not dumbing anything down. You're finally designing for how your team actually operates instead of how you wish they did. And if that bothers you, the SOP isn't your problem.

You already know what needs to change. You've known for a while. You keep searching for justification to not act. You just keep listening to podcasts hoping someone will tell you something different. Founder talks about building unicorns. He says churn is a lagging indicator. He says you don't build a multi-billion dollar company by getting really good at saving customers who are already out the door. You hear: "try to save customers before they cancel." So now you're building dashboards. Writing SOPs. Creating win-back flows. Training the team on intervention tactics. Months of work to operationalize a low-percentage activity designed to stop shrinking. Meanwhile, there are simple fixes in sales. In the handoff. In the kickoff call. In onboarding. In how you set expectations on day one. But those point upstream. At product. At process. At promises made that can't be kept. At you. So you retreat into complexity at end-of-life instead. Dashboards take quarters to build. SOPs take weeks to write. You can point at them in meetings and say "look, we're doing something." The upstream fix might take a conversation. A script change. A different question on the kickoff call. Simple. Fast. And if it doesn't work, there's nowhere to hide.

"The team won't do it" is rarely about them. It's about you. We were talking about having CSMs tell customers when they're getting in their own way. Not being rude. Just direct. "We can only help you if you do your part." One of my leaders said "I don't think the team will do it." I stopped the meeting. This is how leaders become the bottleneck. Not by blocking things. By never asking in the first place. The team will push back on a customer if you show them how. They'll have the direct conversation if you give them the words. They'll hold the line if you make it clear that's the job. But not if you've already decided they won't. "They won't do it" is not insight. It's an excuse. And it's usually the leader's discomfort disguised as the team's resistance. You're not protecting your team. You're projecting onto them. Your assumptions about your team become their ceiling.

"We'll just use Claude, bro." That sentence should terrify every SaaS company on the planet right now. And the stock market just proved it. Last week, $300 billion in value got wiped from software stocks in two days. Figma. Salesforce. ServiceNow. Adobe. LegalZoom. All hammered. This wasn't a bad earnings report. Revenue at most of these companies is still strong. The market didn't punish their performance. It punished their future value. It looked at what AI can do right now, today, and said: we don't believe these businesses will matter the same way in five years. And your customers are already thinking that, too. That legal research tool you sell? "We'll just use Gemini." That analytics dashboard? "We'll just use ChatGPT." That workflow automation platform? "We'll just use OpenClaw." That content tool? That reporting layer? That entire category of software you've built your company around? "We'll just use Claude, bro." They might be wrong. For now. But that's not the point. The point is they're already saying it. And once a customer believes they can replace you with a general-purpose AI tool, your renewal conversation just changed completely. You're no longer proving value. You're defending your existence. If you're running CS, CX, or you're a CEO of a SaaS company, this is the fight that just landed on your desk. Whether you wanted it or not. That's what Johan Nilsson and I are going live to talk about on February 18th. The NRR Battle of 2026. What actually changed. Why NRR is about to get brutally harder. And what you need to do right now before your customers start saying that sentence to your face. This isn't a polished webinar. It's a live conversation. Bring your questions. Bring the stuff keeping you up at night. Link in comments.

Your "save" playbook is a crutch. Your win-back sequence is a safety net. And they're both giving you permission to fail your customers. What would you do differently now if you weren't allowed to fix it later? No save motion when they try to cancel. No win-back campaign after they churn. No second chance to make it right. What would change? You'd stop building your operation around failure recovery. You'd realize earning the renewal should have been table stakes all along. Not saving them at the end. Earning their stay the whole time. And if you do it really right, you don't just earn the renewal. You earn the upsell too. Let's be real, though: save motions are low-percentage plays anyway. When they "work," they usually just kick the can down the road and cause a bigger crash out later. Take the safety net away. Fix the upstream problems. See what you're actually capable of.

Sunk cost fallacy isn't a logic problem. It's fear dressed up as logic. "I've put too much into this to quit now" sounds like math. It's not. It's emotion pretending to be rational. The actual logical move is: this isn't serving me anymore. I'm letting it go. That sounds like faith. But it's the only rational decision. Holding on to something that's actively holding you back because you already spent money and resources on it? That's the emotional choice. Letting go so you can move forward? That's the math. We just got it backwards.

"Nice product you got there. Sure would be a shame if someone vibe coded a replacement this weekend." That's the energy in SaaS renewals right now. Your customers don't actually want to build it themselves. They don't want the headache. They don't want to maintain it. They just want you to know they could. "Give me a discount and this whole idea goes away." It's a shakedown. And it works. A 200-line markdown file from Anthropic did the same work an entire legal tech category charges thousands a month for. Thompson Reuters dropped 16% in a day. People who aren't engineers are shipping working tools in hours on Lovable. Your customer used 10% of your features and paid for all of them. The 90% they never touch isn't a moat. It's overhead. The part they actually use? That's a weekend project now. They don't need to leave. They just need to lean across the table and let you know they could. And that's enough for you to change your price, your margin, and your entire renewal conversation. Can you smile and hold your price? Or do you fold? My Impact Academy cofounder Johan Nilsson and I are going live Wednesday, February 18th to talk about this and more in the NRR Battle 2026 live podcast. Link in comments.

You can sit there and name every blocker between you and where you want to be. That's why you keep running into them. I don't know anything about skiing. I hate the cold. But a skier taught me something I think about every week. When skiers fly through trees at full speed, you'd assume they're watching the trees. Tracking the obstacles. Trying not to hit them. They're not. They're looking at the space between the trees. The openings. Because if you focus on the tree, you hit the tree. Every time. Now think about your week. Your quarter. Your business. What are you focused on? The blockers or the openings? Most people can list every obstacle between them and where they want to be. The budget problem. The team problem. The market problem. They can describe every tree in the forest in detail. And they keep hitting them. Over and over. Cartoon character with a jet pack flying into the same brick wall, bouncing off, flying right back into it. That's not bad luck. That's target fixation. You go where you look. The people who move fast aren't ignoring the trees. They see them. They just refuse to stare at them. They're locked in on the gap. The opening. The next move. Winners focus on openings. Losers focus on blockers.

Nobody talks about this part of leadership. You do the work. But there's a weight underneath it no one sees. When I leave, will this be better because I was here? Not "did I hit my numbers." Not "did I get promoted." Not "did people like me." Did I actually leave it better than I found it? I worry about this constantly. It's not something I talk about with my team. It's not something that shows up in a performance review. But it's there. Every day. The systems I'm building. The people I'm developing. The culture I'm protecting. Will any of it matter when I'm gone? That's the weight of actually giving a shit. You don't just do the job. You carry the question.

Just to close the loop on this; the ListKit customer that inspired this post is now CRUSHING it because we talked him into running campaigns in the "off season."