"We're not personally friends. We are talking about an exchange of value."

Your CSMs think they're building relationships. What they're actually building — most of the time — is likability. And likability doesn't renew accounts.

Sreedhar Peddineni has built three companies from scratch, including Gainsight, where he served as CTO for eight years and helped coin the term "customer success manager." His newest company, GTM Buddy, exists because he kept running into the same failure mode at every stage: teams that are relationally warm and contextually empty — likable, but unable to hold the actual state of 60 different client relationships in their heads at once.

This conversation is about the gap between personal rapport and business rapport, why "comfortable" QBRs are a symptom of avoidance rather than trust, and how co ...