The era of rented knowledge in Customer Success

If you’ve been navigating the job market recently, you don’t need me to tell you that 2025 has been one of the most difficult years on record for landing a new role. The cycles are longer, the requirements are stricter, and the competition for every "Head of CS" seat is fierce.

But while the traditional 9-to-5 market feels gridlocked, a new door has quietly swung open beyond selling your knowledge to just one employer.

Customer Success is becoming the model case for a fractional strategy.

What companies often need is targeted expertise, systemisation, outcomes, accountability, and the ability to move fast.

This is exactly where a fractional model shines.

I've had three conversations this week alone that started the same way: "We don't need another full-time hire. We need someone who knows what they're doing."

Something has shifted. And if you're leading a CS team at a scaling B2B SaaS company, you're likely feeling it too.

The question isn't whether fractional customer success is viable anymore. The question is: why has it taken us this long to recognise it as the strategic option it clearly is?

The Labels That Confuse Us

Before we go further, we need to clear something up. Because "fractional" has become a catch-all term that's losing its meaning. When someone says they're bringing in "fractional support," what do they actually mean?

Let me break down what I'm seeing in the market:

The Advisor sits at 30,000 feet. They join your quarterly board meetings, review your strategy decks, and offer high-level guidance. They're brilliant for sense-checking direction, but they're not in the weeds with you. They don't build your playbooks or sit in your segmentation workshops.

The Consultant comes in for a defined project. They diagnose a problem, create a comprehensive recommendation deck, hand it over, and leave. You're left with a beautiful strategy document and the question: "Now who's actually going to do this?"

The Fractional Professional is something entirely different. They're embedded in your business, typically 2-3 days a week. They own outcomes. They're in your Slack channels, your team meetings, your CRM. They're building the segmentation model, training your CSMs on the new playbook, and holding your team accountable to the forecast they helped you create. They're part of your leadership team—just not full-time.

The Full-Time Employee is, well, full-time. Five days a week. Fully dedicated to your company. The traditional model we've all known.

The lines between these have become blurred, and that's causing confusion. But here's what matters: fractional CS, done properly, isn't advice. It's not a consulting project. It's strategic leadership and hands-on execution—just delivered differently.

So why is this model suddenly on the rise?

The Undervalued Function Finally Gets Its Moment

For years—decades, really—customer success has been the unloved middle child of the SaaS business model.

"Acquisition is king" wasn't just a saying; it was gospel. Boards celebrated new logos. Sales teams got the big commissions, the uncapped OTEs, the President's Club trips. Marketing got the flashy budgets for campaigns and events.

And CS? Well, you know what I am talking about.

Think about the revenue bow tie. Acquisition brings customers in one side. CS drives retention, expansion, and advocacy out the other. The gross retention you protect is pure margin preservation.

The numbers are stark: acquiring a new customer costs up to 5-7x more than retaining an existing one. Yet most SaaS companies still allocate budgets as if 2010 never ended.

The real problem? Most organisations don't have embedded CS knowledge. They've spent years building out their go-to-market engine, hiring seasoned sales leaders, battle-tested marketers. But CS? It's often been an afterthought. A VP of Sales who's "interested in the customer journey" gets handed the CS function. A former support manager gets promoted. Nothing against these people—they're often brilliant—but they're learning CS leadership on the job, in your company, with your customers as the test subjects.

That lack of deep, strategic CS expertise is expensive. It shows up in the growth wall you hit at £5M ARR. It shows up in the leaky bucket of churn that's killing your unit economics. It shows up in the board meeting where you can't articulate why your net retention dropped six points last quarter.

What 2025 Actually Demanded (And What 2026 Will Require)

Here's what companies are telling me they actually need right now—not in theory, not in a job description, but in practice:

They need knowledge and expertise to execute on the ground. Not just strategy. Not just oversight. Actual execution. Someone who can look at their customer data, spot the patterns, and say: "Your enterprise segment is masking a disaster in your mid-market book. Here's why, and here's what we're going to do about it."

They need education on what not to do. On how to avoid the expensive mistakes that come from not knowing. Like segmenting by ARR alone. Like building a high-touch motion for customers who'd rather self-serve. Like treating every churn as a "relationship problem" when it's actually a product-market fit issue in a specific vertical.

They need solutions to specific, painful challenges. Fighting the growth wall. Fixing the leaky bucket. Building an expansion motion that doesn't rely entirely on the AE who closed the deal. Creating a forecasting model that the CFO actually trusts.

The gap in the market is knowledge. And for the first time, companies are willing to buy it differently.

Why the Last Three Months Changed Everything

I've been doing this long enough to spot the patterns. And something has undeniably shifted in Q4 2025.

Part of it is prosaic: end-of-year budgets. Companies have £30K left in their annual budget, not enough for a full-time VP of CS salary, but more than enough for three months of support to solve a critical problem.

But the bigger shift is philosophical. I'm hearing a fundamentally different conversation from founders and executives.

It used to be: "We need a body in the seat. We need someone to own this."

Now it's: "We need to buy knowledge. We need someone who's done this before."

The tactical needs are specific and urgent:

"We need to rethink our entire segmentation strategy before Q1 planning."

"We need playbooks built—not theorised about, actually built—for our CSMs."

"Our handover process from Sales to CS is broken, and it's killing our onboarding completion rate."

"We need to refine our ICP for expansion opportunities because we're wasting time on accounts that will never grow."

"We need a forecasting model that doesn't rely on 'gut feel' and Post-it notes."

"We want to implement AI to analyse customer conversations, but we don't know where to start or what's actually useful versus hype."

These aren't full-time roles. These are projects that need VP-level expertise, delivered at a fractional price point, with speed and precision.

And here's the kicker: once companies experience working with a fractional CS leader who actually delivers, who moves fast, who builds things rather than theorising about them—they often don't want to go back to the traditional hiring model. At least not immediately.

Why would you hire a full-time VP when you can get the same strategic expertise, the same hands-on execution, and the same accountability for 40-60% of the cost? Especially when you're not yet at the scale where you need someone in every meeting, every day?

Why I'm Betting on This

Here is what I think: fractional customer success is one of the major strategic opportunities for 2026. Not just for CS professionals looking for flexibility, but for companies trying to scale intelligently.

The model solves real problems:

It gives you access to expertise you couldn't otherwise afford. That VP who's scaled three companies from £2M to £20M ARR? You can't hire her full-time. But you can work with her fractionally.

It gives you speed. No three-month hiring process. No six-month ramp time. You're working with someone who's done it before, who brings patterns and playbooks from other companies, who starts adding value in week one.

It gives you flexibility. You can scale up or down based on need. Heading into a major expansion push? Increase days. Post-restructure and stabilising? Reduce days.

And crucially, it forces outcome-based thinking. When you're paying for two days a week, you're crystal clear on what needs to be delivered. There's no room for "we're working on it" or "building relationships." You need results. Fractional professionals know this. The good ones thrive on it.

I'm committing significant time to this model in 2026—both in my own practice and in helping companies understand how to leverage it effectively. Because I believe we're at an inflection point.

The Conversation We Need to Have

So here's what I want to know from you:

What does your team actually need right now? Not what the org chart says you should have. What would move the needle in the next 90 days?

How do you feel about fractional work—either as a buyer or as a professional, considering the model? What concerns you? What excites you?

And most importantly: could fractional CS be the strategic option your scaling team needs in 2026?

I'm not suggesting fractional is the answer for every company or every situation. There's absolutely a place for full-time CS leadership. But I am suggesting that if you're dismissing fractional out of hand, you might be missing a significant opportunity.

I'd love to hear your point of view. Drop me your thoughts: thomas@thecsacademy.net

Let's talk about it.