Practical frameworks and hard-won perspective from 30 years inside B2B SaaS post-sale organizations.
Written for PE-backed CEOs and operating partners. The central argument: stable GRR is not the same as healthy CS — and the difference shows up at the worst possible time.
NRR above 100% isn’t one story — it’s at least three, and only one of them is the growth story a board assumes it’s seeing. The diagnostic that tells them apart, and the one question that surfaces each.
Read article →Posts 7–8 publish over the coming weeks — what good looks like at $25M vs. $75M ARR, and how to tell if your CS is exit-ready. Follow on LinkedIn to catch each post as it publishes.
Written for CS practitioners — leaders and CSMs who run the function. What the role demands now, why most CS organizations aren’t built for it, and what to do about it.
Having the function isn’t the same as having the model. Here’s the one question that separates a relationship-oriented CS team from an outcome-oriented one — and why it matters before the divergence shows up in your numbers.
Reactive CS and proactive CS can produce identical GRR numbers for 18 months. Then they don’t. Here’s what each model looks like from the CEO’s chair.
PE boards watch GRR and NRR. Almost none of them ask how those numbers are being held. That gap is where risk hides — and where the exit story gets complicated.
GRR improved by 20 points and the board celebrated. Nobody asked how they got there. What purchased inertia actually costs — on one account, over two years.
GRR went from 65% to 85% and everyone exhaled. But stable metrics can mask a broken model. The fix that moves the number isn’t always the fix that builds the business.
For twenty years I opened every CSM JD the same way. The philosophy was right. Everything underneath it wasn’t.
Most CS organizations are caught between two wrong models. Both are wrong. Both fail. Here’s what the right model actually looks like.
When CS leaders push their teams toward commercial conversations, they lose the one thing that actually drives revenue. Trust.
The outputs have never looked better. The judgment gaps have never been harder to see. What AI actually changed about CS — and what it exposed.
We built Customer Success around the wrong definition of success. The three-link chain — business pain, solution value, outcomes achieved — is how we fix it.
Usage data tells you what happened. Business intelligence tells you what matters. The framework that separates strategic partners from account babysitters.
Even today’s overworked PCP has disciplines most CSMs don’t. A framework for proactive customer health monitoring — and how AI makes it possible at scale.
Advocacy is reactive by nature. The CSMs delivering real retention and expansion aren’t advocates — they’re strategic partners.