When you think about it, the functional name “customer success” is a little frustrating in itself because it insinuates that the people who work in customer success are solely focused on the customer, but customer success is there to help all departments better serve the customer along their journey. Sales comes in, sells, and moves on to another

Customer retention means being continuously focused on the customers’ desired outcomes. It means understanding your customers thoroughly, more than just their goals and desired outcomes. You need to know their personalities. Is the stakeholder driven by ego? Are they altruistic? Recognizing these nuances will change the way you approach an account.

I once was on the client side and worked with a CSM who was so invested in my business (and understood my challenges and industry so well) they were able to point to other products and services in the market that existed to help me. These weren’t products their company offered, just products the CSM knew I needed. That CSM was the greatest CSM in

Finally, I have seen CSMs manage the entire renewal process. In addition to their regular responsibilities (such as understanding and driving value, creating operational dependence, nurturing and finding advocates, etc.), they are also responsible for the renewal transaction with the customer. This means upselling, cross-selling, changes to SLAs,

Once you approach $100 million in ARR, I highly recommend creating a dedicated renewals team whose sole job is to manage contract renewals. At that point, you have enough revenue to justify role specialization. The number of uses will differ depending on whether

This company uses a very different method than Salesforce to determine customer health (and it requires a sophisticated understanding of your product and what differentiates it and its features from competitors in the market), but it works all the same.

At a super-high confidence level, this score predicted customer churn nine months in advance giving their customer success team enough time to change the paradigm and retain their customers. It also predicted potential problems, triggered notifications to the right people, and delivered playbooks of proven best practices in order to solve those

leading customers to success. (A lot more on this later in this book.)

built an algorithm called EWS (early warning system) that factored in over 120 different inputs to calculate a customer health score.