Customer Success

Net revenue retention is the closest thing SaaS has to a compounding growth engine. Improving it is the cheapest growth most companies can find. But "improve NRR" is too often heard as "sell more upsells," which quietly makes the problem worse. This is a practical guide to the levers that actually move the number, in the order that works. Net revenue retention rewards patience. Small improvements repeat every year and compound, so a few points of NRR separate businesses drama

The renewal conversation is where a year of work gets confirmed or lost. If you have done the groundwork it should feel like a formality, but it is still easy to fumble. This is a practical guide to running the conversation itself: how to prepare, how to structure the call, what to say and how to handle the objections you are most likely to hear. A renewal conversation carries more weight than its length suggests. Handled well, it confirms the value you have delivered and set

Gross and net revenue retention sound like the same idea measured two ways. They are not. One tells you whether you are keeping what you have. The other can hide the answer. Here is what each number means, how to calculate them, what good looks like and which one your board should really be asking for. Written to be useful whether this is new to you or not. Most SaaS teams track net revenue retention because it is the number investors ask about. Fewer track gross revenue rete

A curated reading list for the people who build and lead customer success, not a dump of every title on the subject. These are the books that actually change how you think about retention, expansion and the economics of keeping customers. It sits alongside our list of the best customer service books, because the strongest leaders read across both. There is no shortage of lists telling you to read every book with the words customer success on the cover. This is not that. It is

Ask most SaaS leaders what good net revenue retention looks like and you will hear 120%. The median private B2B SaaS company is nowhere near that and the gap is not a performance problem. It is a benchmarking problem. Here is what the data actually says, why a single number is close to useless without context and what your board should be asking instead. There is a number that follows SaaS leaders around. Good net revenue retention is 120%. It gets repeated in board meetings,

If you are starting the renewal conversation at 90 days, the accounts that matter are already decided. The renewal is a lagging indicator of a year of value delivered or not delivered. This is a leader's guide to building a 90-day renewal system so no renewal is ever a surprise and so the window is used to confirm and expand rather than rescue. There is a version of the renewal that most playbooks describe. A rep opens a conversation ninety days out, runs a value recap, handl

AI is being bolted onto customer success and support faster than almost any other business function. For a discipline built on relationships and outcomes, that's both the opportunity and the trap. Here's an honest, leader-level read on what exists today, where it's heading and what's genuinely worth weighing, good and bad. There is a peculiar tension at the heart of putting AI into customer success and support. Support has always had a volume problem that automation is well s

You send a check-in email. No reply. You try again two weeks later. Nothing. Their usage data shows they logged in once last month. The renewal is four months away and you have no idea where you stand. Every B2B SaaS founder and CSM know this feeling. A customer who was once engaged, responsive and visibly getting value from the product has gone quiet. Not angry quiet. Not complaint-filing quiet. Just... absent. The instinct is often to give them space, wait until closer to r

Most "Customer Success" Roles Are Not What They Seem: Understanding the True Nature of Customer Success If you spend any time reading customer success job descriptions today, from CSM to Head of Customer Success, you start to notice a shift in language. Terms like "Own a quota," "Drive expansion revenue," and "Identify and close upsell opportunities" appear frequently. By the third paragraph, you might feel like you're reading a job specification for an account executive with

Engaging customers well is not a nice-to-have. For any business that wants to grow and keep loyal clients, it is the difference between retention and churn. Clear, effective communication builds trust, encourages loyalty, and turns one-time buyers into long-term advocates. But communication that does all of this does not happen by accident. It is the result of a deliberate customer communication plan. This post walks through what makes a communication plan effective, how to b

Customer retention does not happen by accident. It is the result of deliberate, consistent decisions about how you look after the people who have already chosen to buy from you. And yet most businesses put the majority of their energy into acquisition — chasing new customers while quietly losing the ones they already have. The economics of this do not make sense. Retaining a customer costs significantly less than acquiring a new one. Retained customers spend more over time, r

We have been talking about feedback for the past couple of weeks. Now this article will go one step further to discuss one of those valuable feedback tools we have available in Customer Success Teams. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty and satisfaction measurement. It is determined by asking customers how likely they are to recommend a product or service to others on a scale of 0-10. The NPS score is then calculated by taking the percentage of promoters (score