Fat Bear Tuesday: Is the Fattest Customer Actually Full?

Adam Peddicord

11 minutes ago

6 min read

What the image shows with the headline Is the Fattest Customer Actually Full? on the Customer Success by Design header, illustrating customer expansion readiness.

I love Fat Bear Week.

A celebration of beauty in a beast seeking excessive bounty, with surprisingly useful lessons for Customer Success.

Today is Fat Bear Tuesday, when one very round brown bear in Alaska’s Katmai National Park is crowned champion.

This time of year also gets me thinking about customer expansion and the ever-present question: are they “full”?

Expansion can mean a lot of different things. Have we maxed out revenue growth? Are customers using the product to its fullest? Why or why not?

As we head into the fourth quarter, businesses are asking a familiar question: how do we maximize the opportunities we have left to close the year strong?

Every Customer Success (CS) and Sales leader will be asked about expansion. And when net new sales or renewals are flat or down, the focus quickly shifts to one question: how can expansion make up the delta?

The typical playbook is to call in the account owner and press them to find the extra pound of fish. But if the opportunity is not grounded in what the customer actually needs, that pressure can hurt both the customer and your team.

I know. I’ve run that playbook.

The customer feels it, too, as a flood of emails, calls, and “quick check-ins.” Gartner found that B2B buyers overwhelmed by too much, often contradictory, information were 153 percent more likely to settle for a smaller, less disruptive purchase than they had planned. More noise can mean a smaller meal (or no meal at all).

So how do we approach this? We have a mission to feed the beast! Who’s full, who’s not? And how do we know whether another tasty morsel would actually help?

“Full” is what you make of it

The first challenge with expansion isn’t finding an opportunity. It’s knowing whether the customer is actually ready for one.

Before you ask for more, define what “full” means for this customer, at this stage of their journey.

Why would someone entertain another feature or solution when they’re already maxed out? The cost of that ask goes beyond wasted time. It spends trust.

Most organizations start with simple product measures: logins, number of users, session time. Those can be useful, but they can also hide the real story. High activity might mean customers are getting value. It might also mean they are struggling to use the product effectively. In healthcare, that can look like a care team logging in every shift while still rekeying the same data into the electronic health record (EHR) by hand.

Burton-Jones and Straub (2006, Information Systems Research) showed why measurement choice matters: the wrong usage measure can lead to the wrong conclusion about whether a system is working. For Customer Success, activity counts can read “fully using” while deep, task-level, or strategic use is still thin.

That’s not an expansion opportunity. That’s churn risk.

The better approach is to partner with the customer from the outset to establish value milestones throughout the journey, knowing those milestones may evolve or pivot. This is more than a series of conversations, readouts, and reviews. It is shared knowledge about the outcomes that matter, how they will be measured, and where the customer needs to be to realize them.

You need your product implemented quickly and that first login to happen ASAP. But what’s the value in that to the customer?

McKinsey’s November 2025 study of B2B software companies found that those most advanced in value realization and adoption, only 18 percent of respondents, align with customers at the outset on clear onboarding and adoption goals. Those companies saw net revenue retention around seven percentage points higher than peers with only basic practices in place. “Full” becomes a measurable, agreed state rather than a customer success manager’s hunch.

If you don’t define that state, how can you set ongoing value objectives, let alone know when an expansion conversation is warranted?

Fullness is a stage, not a permanent condition. A customer’s response to the same outreach depends on the stage they’re in. That means knowing your customer, and, when relevant, your customer’s customer, well enough to meet them where they are.

That takes two things working together: rigorous product-usage data and customer-facing teams that understand the customer’s current workflows, mission, and “why.”

Together, they show whether a customer is doing just fine or could use another tasty morsel on their plate.

How does one approach a hungry bear?

Creating clarity from subjective and objective data requires real work and collaboration. Just because you “own the metric and the outcome” doesn’t mean you can get there on your own.

Cross-functional coordination between Product, Sales, and Customer Success is essential not only for identifying opportunities but also for presenting value consistently. Imagine the outcome if every team had its own hot take and made its own pitch to the customer. Chaos. Confusion. Cluster. Not good.

The research also has something to say about timing. Li, Sun, and Montgomery (2011, Journal of Marketing Research) found, in a banking context, that matching offers to a customer’s readiness outperformed calendar-driven campaigns. Campaigns have their place. Just don’t confuse a calendar with customer readiness.

Pushing harder can also backfire. In a randomized field experiment, Ascarza, Iyengar, and Schleicher (2016, Journal of Marketing Research) found that 10 percent of customers who received a proactive plan-recommendation campaign churned within three months, versus 6 percent of those who didn’t. That was not an expansion study, but it is a useful warning: unsolicited “help” can change customer behavior in ways you didn’t intend.

Poke the bear, and it may wake up.

All of this is about being ready to meet the customer’s needs. You may not control whether the opportunity exists, but you do control whether your team is prepared to recognize it when it arrives.

The fat bear isn’t always full. The skinny bear isn’t always hungry.

Good luck taking the same approach to either!

Hibernate at your own risk

I wish I’d learned these lessons the easy way. But as I climbed the leadership ladder, I fell prey to the belief that “the grind” and “pushing harder” could get me over the hump when I didn’t have the luxury of working smarter or getting ahead of it.

Customer call-down blitzes, faux forward email campaigns, and the like followed. They were mad dashes of spray-and-pray that alienated everyone.

The outcomes were flabbergasted colleagues, exhausted staff, and not one meaningful expansion opportunity discovered, let alone closed.

The customers? It was the CSMs who saved the day there. They massaged the scripts and messaging I handed them to fit each customer, which protected those relationships and salvaged the company’s dignity, too.

Never underestimate the significance of human-to-human messaging skills. Ever.

Time and experience bred wisdom, so here’s what I’d suggest leaders do to find their hungry bears:

Treat adoption as a stage, not a finish line. Expect it to evolve over the customer’s lifecycle.
Create moments and milestones to capture and confirm the measurements you and the customer agree will define “full” at a given time.
Build the internal workflows that keep Product, Sales, and Customer Success aligned on customer context, readiness, and the value you are trying to create.
Make sure the business understands the customer journey, where adoption inflection points occur, and which tactics fit each stage, so expansion conversations are triggered by readiness, not the calendar.

I’ll take seconds, please

I like my chances with Bucky.

He beat Walker, one of the biggest bears on the river, in Round 2, and he still hasn’t reached full size. He also looks like he’s packed on the most pounds over the same period of time.

I don’t have the tools to do more than visual guesswork, but this looks like very hungry bear behavior to me.

So my bet is the others will start meandering toward their dens, nibbling on morsels along the way.

Bucky, meanwhile, would gladly hear me out and accept another fresh salmon in exchange for, well, not mauling and eating me.

Enjoy Fat Bear Week! And enjoy the confidence that comes from a thoughtful, collective, value-add approach to your customers.

May you all reap the rewards of these efforts with a well-deserved nap.

Your turn: how does your team define “full” for a customer today, and who gets to decide? Tell me in the comments below. And if you want to back your own bear, final voting closes at 6 PM Pacific today.

If your team is heading into the fourth quarter without a shared definition of “full,” or wants to turn customer data into better adoption, retention, and expansion decisions, that’s the work I do with SaaS and healthcare leaders. If that sounds familiar, let’s talk.

Book 15 min →

Cheers,

Adam Peddicord

Customer Success by Design