The Seven Pillars of Customer Success: A Proven Framework to Drive Impactful Client Outcomes for Your Company

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 t

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.

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.

The ability to get a customer to adopt your software is one of the most preeminent components of retention, expansion, and advocacy; through training and certifications, software adoption was the main function of my job.

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

And due to the interconnectivity of both the CSM and renewal manager role, I recommend these two functions live under the same leader (head of customer success or chief customer officer).

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 pro

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

I also learned that customer success was much broader than the customer success function itself, because I managed all the internal teams responsible for enabling a successful customer. I learned where customer success needed to integrate and share metrics with other functions within the company to amplify its ability to be effective, impactful, an