On [Un]Churned, Adnan Rahman says Paycor's value framework starts from outcomes like reducing time to hire, rolled out to 28 enterprise and 17 mid-market CSMs.
Dan Lee said Nooks keeps a Slack channel with every customer and regularly checks how each is doing against its goals, such as sales productivity targets, and how Nooks can help. He said the CSM is effectively working for the customer, checking things like whether reps are performing well on calls, whether call scripts are good and whether the data is correct.
“So we have a slack channel with every customer.”
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Ariel Risman said CS at Notion acts as a thought leader in helping customers define what value looks like, and it depends on the team's biggest issue at the moment. For some it is cutting time spent on administrative tasks. For others it is reducing friction between teams that didn't work well together, so they can move with the velocity AI demands. He said to identify those issues, improve them, then iterate.
“value could be just reducing friction between teams”
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After Advantive's most recent acquisition, Nerad spent a couple of months working with a senior CSM who had been at the acquired company for 15 years and knows its customers well. Together they worked through what drives those customers and what outcomes they intended when they bought the software. Nerad said the understanding of risk and retention follows from that customer understanding.
“I have a senior CSM who's part of my team who she's been with this company 15 years. She knows the customers really well.”
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London says CSMs should try to stay tied to what the customer describes as company priorities, up to board level if possible. His reasoning is that this shows how your value aligns with the customer's business, not just with the person you happen to be speaking with, who may leave or change roles.
“so you can see how your value aligns not just with the person with whom you're speaking, the customer contact who may leave or change, but their business.”
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Asked how a leader knows the team struggles with above-the-line conversations, London says the first thing that comes to mind is unhealthy customers or predicted churn. He attributes this to CS and sales teams being trained to push what they offer and to define value the way internal training told them to. In his view, that training leaves no room for customers to say how they define value on their own terms.
“the diagnosis of that, which sometimes is an autopsy after the fact, is that we just simply didn't understand value the way the customer defines value.”
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At Microsoft, Brian says customers who had not planned how they would use the product did not consume what they had committed to, which affected later commitments. He recommends a function that helps customers set a vision of the value they will create, with the vendor's product built into that plan.
“The fact that our customers didn't have a vision for how they're going to use our product and how it was going to benefit them was a problem.”
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Kellie said the company ties the customer's business outcomes through the whole relationship with checkpoints, starting in pre-sales. For existing customers, the team revisits outcomes because they shift over time and should not be assumed to be the same. She said these outcomes guide the initial scope and where the team starts with a customer. The team still does the typical things like customer satisfaction pulsing.
“So we really try to start in the pre -sales and identifying what the customer's business outcomes are.”
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Adnan says the categories should be about challenges and outcomes, not features, and should start high level without boiling the ocean. He recommends interviewing best customers, top-performing CSMs, solutions engineers, account executives and the learning team, with categories emerging from the patterns in those conversations.
“Yeah, the first step is You got to start by asking what are the top reasons customers buy our product, right?”
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At Paycor, Adnan says CSMs without a framework default to product usage, feature adoption and support cases, which he calls means rather than an end. The framework starts with outcomes such as reducing time to hire, cutting errors or improving employee retention in HCM, then works backwards to the product. He presents this as the core of the approach, which has been rolled out to 28 enterprise CSMs and expanded to 17 mid-market CSMs.
“And so the value framework forces The CSM to start with the customer's desired business outcome whether that's reducing their time to hire”
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He says the company should make sure it knows how customers will measure value each year and that customers understand and agree on that measurement. He notes that the measure changes each year, so it has to be re-agreed at the start of each year to deliver incremental value.
“Make sure you know how your customers are going to measure value each year and then growth is going to come organically from that.”
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SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound, and Christine introduced it to the team a few months before the episode. She says the framework lets the team define the goals that matter to a customer and then say whether they were met, which removes vagueness about whether the customer got value. She calls it a leading behavior and indicator and one of her two big priorities for 2026.
“It takes the vagueness out of did I get value from Conga's products? Well, we defined that these particular goals were really important to you and we absolutely nailed it on these three or we didn't.”
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She says her team recently ran a training session on what value looks like to the customer and how to have conversations that let them measure outcomes. The aim is to connect Conga to the customer's root business goals rather than describing it as a product that does things. She describes this as a leading behavior that she expects to lead to better retention.
“we focused on learning and talking about what does value look like to our customer and how do we have the right conversations with that customer so we can ultimately measure their outcomes.”
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On [Un]Churned, Jean de Villiers says Unit4's high-touch customers show about a 50-point higher NPS than self-serve customers, in an ERP market where NPS typically sits between zero and plus 15.
She said Deltek could automate support with AI agents, but she doesn't think customers would love that. She asked where the balance is between going faster and the point at which customers simply want to talk to someone. She also mentioned that usage data can show why a customer's usage dropped.
“I don't think our customers are going to love that right?”
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He said Deltek's AI work is aimed at accelerating time to value and enhancing customer stickiness, and that the two have to be balanced. A touchless implementation that doesn't give customers what they want could create churn risk at their next renewal, because they feel disconnected from Deltek people. He said the company still needs to work out where AI should apply.
“we could develop something that is a touchless implementation that doesn't actually give the customer what they want or provide them a great experience and then there are immediately a churn risk at their next renewal”
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He said there is about a 50-point difference in net promotion between customers on the high-touch professional model and those on self-serve. He said ERP NPS typically sits between zero and plus 15, so a 50-point gap is very large. He linked the gap to customers being led, challenged and shown value realisation.
“there is about a 50 -point difference in net promotion.”
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She said some customers do not want to talk to the company, renew, and are happy as long as they get what they need, and that choice is up to them. She described the over-rotation as going in the wrong direction a little bit, mainly with the long-tail group of customers. She said the new platform is being used to re-create the engagement that had fallen by the wayside, and that it has taken a while but results are starting to show.
“we over -rotated it in the wrong direction a little bit”
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He presented customer demographics as the third factor limiting automation. He said this affects how much conversation can be contained, because some customers in airline and healthcare insurance segments simply prefer humans.
“if you're dealing with the young demographics, they're probably more open to digital channel interaction, chatbot, talking to chatbot, versus much older demographics, they will potentially will really prefer in -person interactions.”
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On [Un]Churned, Eric Gilpin said G2 pings account owners in Slack daily when their customer is shopping a competitor, naming the competitor being viewed.
Kellie said the team cannot engage every customer all the time, so it uses data and digital engagement to identify when a CSM should step in. Once the blocker is removed or the next step is taken, the customer goes back to working on their own. This is how she describes the balance between digital and human engagement.
“you can use the data, the digital engagement and all the things that you're doing to then identify, hey, now it's time we should, you know, step in”
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Chael says Lawrence, who runs the long-tail digital motion, looks at data signals in the install base by customer to find where they are not adopting, where they are adopted, and where they are stalled. Early-career staff are deployed to have conversations about why and how to help. Chael says this began a couple of years ago and that AI now helps these staff get smarter faster.
“look for data signals in that install base and by customer, where are they not adopting?”
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Jordan says his nightly runs identify the accounts flagging the most issues, and that with an understanding of why customers stay or churn, some accounts are worth 10 times more than others. He says the other 90% are ones intervention will not save, while accounts that say a priority will come in six to 12 months are worth engaging.
“And so ignore this 90%. These 90%. These are the ones where actually intervention can help.”
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Eric described a churn-signal integration with Slack: if you own an account at G2, you are pinged every day when your customer is shopping on someone else, and told who they are looking at. He said account owners prioritize this in their own time, and G2 teaches customers to do the same.
“we will ping you every day. If your customer is shopping on someone else, we'll tell you who they're looking at”
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Carsten says that with thousands of customers, teams cannot simply call each customer and try to judge sentiment. He argues that risk management and detection need to come from data, using AI.
“So we, we can't just jump on a call and and and try to figure out whether with a sentiment, OK, how's the customer doing.”
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On Grit, Ping Wu said some contact center conversations should not exist, and that United Airlines uses Cresta to find their root causes and fix them.
He said this worked in HubSpot's first ten years because it was transactional with thousands of customers. Each cohort mirrored the whole base for size, industry and region, so monthly scores reflected new patterns of promoters and detractors. The top detractor reasons went straight to the roadmap, and the team could see whether they moved.
“We split the customers into six cohorts, all of which were representative of the entire base”
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Karri Saarinen says that in many companies product and customer teams are isolated, and Linear has a customer feature and a customer request feature so that product teams can see customer problems, blockers and deal issues. He says a Salesforce integration lets customer requests be pulled into Linear, where anyone can view what a customer or segment is saying, and that sales and customer teams can then tell customers when a fix ships.
“we have also like a Salesforce integration now to help with this like those those nodes can be like captured from Salesforce and then like you can pull them into linear”
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He describes a user who has to change personal settings, configuration or workflow rules, and says the frustration gets logged as a request or heard by a CSM. He says it may show up in the product nine months later. He offers this as an example of how feedback travels in the old model.
“what that gets logged as a request or CSM hears it. Maybe it shows up in a product nine months later”
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Ping Wu said these conversations arise from failed processes, broken products or confusing statements. He said AI's role here is to give full observability across channels, find the root cause and fix it, and gave United Airlines as an example of doing this with Cresta.
“The first bucket are the conversation that shouldn't even be automated or augmented. They should not even exist.”
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Ranked by how many independent voices make each point and how specific their evidence is. Co-hosts of a show count as one voice, and a point needs at least two shows to appear here.
said Margo Martin ([Un]Churned), Ghazi Masood ([Un]Churned), Amanda Kahlow (Revenue Builders), Abbas Haider Ali ([Un]Churned)
She said the roles are blending with AI, and that at some point a single person could handle onboarding, implementation, support and renewal for an ERP customer. That raised the question of how to move from three separate organizations to one coherent customer experience. She uses the term convergence for this blending.
“like you may at some point with an ERP system have the same person onboard you, implement you, support you, and maybe even do your renewal”
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Internally the role is called account manager and externally product advocate. The advocate onboards the customer and works with the field engineering organisation to keep bringing new things to build on Replit. Ghazi describes it as designed with an AI-first mindset rather than the classic CSM and renewal structure.
“And basically you, you will get assigned A Replit product advocate the moment you become a customer.”
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She said roles exist because humans have limits on time, capacity and recall, but the buyer does not change roles. HubSpot began its superhuman in qualification and closing for SMB, then found customers needed support answers, and it kept the same superhuman rather than switching. She said the superhuman picks up where earlier conversations left off, so customers don't start over.
“But our superhumans supersede across all of the roles because your buyer is the same buyer across that whole journey.”
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He said he tested the idea with teams at an event in New York. The person covers support, services consulting and technical CSM questions, so the customer is not handed off to many people. He said the specialists who previously handled these questions stop dealing with repeated problems and move up the value chain. He described this as one of the newer ideas he is testing.
“They're generalists in the concept of post sales and they can apply them across all these disciplines.”
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said Carsten Schütz ([Un]Churned), Jim Richmond ([Un]Churned)
Carsten describes how his previous company, once it had more customers, moved from one pool of generalist CSMs to team leads and specialist roles. He says customer success engineers were there from the beginning, and CS Ops was added later, which helped develop and mature the organisation.
“So not everyone can be a CSM. Not everyone can be the generalist.”
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Richmond described a CSM at a small company doing an annual business review, then a deep technical troubleshooting call, then an onboarding conversation, because people are still proving themselves in the market. He said that as Smartling moved to an enterprise localization play, that model had to give way to specialized roles.
“you got to be willing to do everything right.”
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Richmond said he does not want CSMs to be generalists and wants them to be excellent at what directly affects core metrics. Smartling's model has an onboarding team focused on getting customers to value quickly, a tech team that knows the platform and resolves issues, and a value team focused on commercials, renewals and economic buyers.
“the only real way to get operational leverage is is to specialize those roles.”
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The generalist view assumes AI tooling absorbs breadth, while the specialist view reflects pre-AI scaling of complex enterprise products where depth drives core metrics.
What one named guest described doing or seeing. Each is a single account, not a point several operators agree on.
“they're fearful their market margin is going to go down three or four percent in the next year. Their goal is not to go up. Their goal is to only go down one or two. They're calling it beat the market.”
“Maybe the first week is a sales pitch. Maybe the second week, they still try to look good. But when it goes week over week, every week, you get your deliverables. They hold your hand.”
“It's true that probably over 60 % of customer support requests, especially the first line of defense, can be handled with AI. But when it especially comes to B2B, like, AI just doesn't work.”
“we're actually building workflows for those respective teams that may not have been using Notion today. And that kind of feeds into this expand motion that we have as a business.”
“There are lots of times where there are handshakes and family friends that did business together.”
“our Tier 5 accounts, which were our call them like our 2 to 5000 ARR deals had a very, very high rate of churn. And then our tier one, which were 30k plus, we had best in class retention around those.”
London's renewal-stage alternative: 'If you got a call or outreach from one of our competitors tomorrow, on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you react?' A 1 means ignoring or deleting it; a 10 means making a point of getting back to them for any reason. The customer only has to give a number, and you don't name a specific competitor. London says he came up with the question by accident and that numerous CS leaders have told him it is the best risk predictor they have. He also says the answers have more to do with candor than with competition.
“Let's just say you got a call or an outreach from one of our competitors tomorrow, on A scale of 1 to 10, how would you react? A 1 is you would ignore it, delete the message.”
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London says that across roughly 3,000 discovery conversations and his teaching, customers answer close to seven on average, which scares most teams. His recommended response to a seven or eight is to thank the customer for their candor and ask what's behind the number. The typical answer, as he summarizes it, is that customers are not shopping around; as one person using one solution for one use case, they see competitors as a source of insight on other capabilities and best practices.
“It's close to a seven, but most teams are scared by that.”
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After asking what's behind the number, London asks whether a competitor could bring up anything that would be a real head turner: a problem solved or a capability the customer hasn't heard of. He says not to lead them. His example answer: a customer expanding globally notes that the vendor's global capability was on the roadmap but they haven't heard about it in a while. He says customers often add that they'd bring what they heard back to their current CSM rather than switch.
“is there something a competitor might bring up in their outreach or in a conversation that would just be a real head turner for you”
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Adnan says the competitor question helped the team get past their fear of asking about renewal. He ties it to the team's shift toward having more direct renewal conversations. He presents it as one of the disruptive questions from the UBR training.
“If a competitor called you right now, you know, would you answer and what would you say?”
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Adnan says the categories should be about challenges and outcomes, not features, and should start high level without boiling the ocean. He recommends interviewing best customers, top-performing CSMs, solutions engineers, account executives and the learning team, with categories emerging from the patterns in those conversations.
“Yeah, the first step is You got to start by asking what are the top reasons customers buy our product, right?”
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Adnan says outcomes should be concrete enough to measure but broad enough to apply across the customer base. Leading metrics serve as an early warning system and coaching tool for CSMs, while lagging metrics are what gets discussed with the executive sponsor. He says this is what gives the framework teeth.
“And your leading metrics will be early warning system and coaching tool, lagging metrics, the things that you're going to talk to about with your executive sponsor.”
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At Paycor, Adnan says CSMs without a framework default to product usage, feature adoption and support cases, which he calls means rather than an end. The framework starts with outcomes such as reducing time to hire, cutting errors or improving employee retention in HCM, then works backwards to the product. He presents this as the core of the approach, which has been rolled out to 28 enterprise CSMs and expanded to 17 mid-market CSMs.
“And so the value framework forces The CSM to start with the customer's desired business outcome whether that's reducing their time to hire”
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He says the company should make sure it knows how customers will measure value each year and that customers understand and agree on that measurement. He notes that the measure changes each year, so it has to be re-agreed at the start of each year to deliver incremental value.
“Make sure you know how your customers are going to measure value each year and then growth is going to come organically from that.”
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Samantha McKenna uses a Sales Navigator list rather than a saved search: any stakeholder multi-threaded into a closed deal is added to a list called existing customer job hopper. Unlike the territory searches, this tracks every departure, not only moves into your territory. For extra credit, when a past buyer lands in an account owned by a peer, she tells that peer, which she says builds morale and camaraderie.
“every single time somebody closes a deal with us, any of the stakeholders, the people that we're multi -threaded into, they get saved into a list.”
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Evan gave this as his estimate, hedged with 'I think'. He cited it as evidence that customers are a major source of opportunity generation as well as product input. He said this was one reason the company planned to build a customer marketing function.
“I think 40% of our customers in our biggest quarter last quarter were former customers that just are moving to a new company and bringing us in.”
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Nerad said themes such as cancellation, at-risk and downsell are common across companies, so Advantive developed a standard process for them across acquisitions. The at-risk ticket is intentionally simple so that anyone, not only CS, can log something they heard from a customer. It captures product specifics and reason codes, which route it to the right team and allow trend analysis across lines of business. Advantive also built save plays that apply across all lines of business.
“So it's intentionally simple and being able to log an at -risk ticket. This is where a human is actually saying, hey, I heard a customer say this”
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Rob said CSMs have targets for their book of business, aiming to advance a certain percentage of customers from one stage to the next in a given quarter. He said this gives a clear mandate for measuring progress. He contrasted it with counting whether a QBR happened or how often the customer was talked to, and said the measure is actual adoption metrics.
“So our CSMS actually have targets for their book of business to say on a given quarter, I want, I want to see them advance their book of business a certain number of percent of customers from one stage to the next.”
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Pradeep says Microsoft defines its top-level customer success KPI as what percentage of customers who have committed to move to Azure or deploy a project are completed or deployed on time with full value. He says this metric is tracked weekly, monthly, by country, by workload and by every other slice. He calls it the key metric the business is run on.
“That is the job. One metric is a what is the commit to consume percentage for this week, this month, by country, by workload, by by all of the slices.”
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Manish said a CSM's GRR goal comes from bottom-up numbers plus a top-down allocation of company GRR or attrition goals. Expansion within the portfolio is a second goal, and health, meaning value, usage and customer success, is a third, so CSMs look beyond the upcoming renewal. He also said a lead generation commission was added to these targets.
“So if you have a portfolio of accounts as a CSM, then you have a GRR goal based on, of course, the bottoms up as well as or top down allocation based on the company goals for GRR, or, or attrition.”
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He described the early warning output as a helpful narrative: a risk summary for each account, its key issues, and recommendations for the next steps the CSM should take. He said this helps teams focus their attention on which accounts need it and what to do for each. He contrasted this with the traditional red, yellow and green health score.
“With AI, you can also create a helpful narrative.”
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Mark Vovsi said the AI reviews conversational data, support cases and risk signals to draft plans with tight objectives and milestones, rather than bullet points. Plans load directly into the CSP, and for large customers with many products, each product gets its own adoption and risk focus. He said the goal is to create objectives people would not otherwise have thought of, and that it saves hours.
“we want to automatically load success plans for every single customer if they don't have one, or based on certain criteria, every quarter refresh it.”
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He says the cause is usually a lack of structure keeping sellers disciplined on ICP customers, setting good expectations and setting up customer success properly. His example for Roadrunner's context: a rep who closes a CPQ deal without involving IT leaves CS facing an IT team that may politically try to kill the project. He said involving IT probably triples the likelihood of a high-LTV account, but reps paid only on quarterly revenue aren't incentivized to do it.
“instinctively, most people think the retention causes product deficiencies or customer onboarding deficiencies. That's the minority in my experience. It's mostly a sales issue”
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Cassie Young says that even early on, investors look at gross and net retention because founders are asserting an ICP and need evidence that they can protect the base. She notes that later-stage boards often split net retention into current ICP and legacy customers, since early customers usually take time to show they were the wrong fit.
“usually what happens is people sign up as early customers and it takes a little while for them to learn that they weren't the right customers.”
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AJ Bruno says sales incentives are typically not aligned to company objectives, so a company targeting 80% GRR should ask what its incentives would need to look like to get there. QuotaPath's thesis is that building and aligning those incentives, with month-over-month and quarter-over-quarter strategic guidance from an AI-native service, could close a gap such as 70% to 80% GRR. He frames this as an unproven question rather than a result: 'the $100 billion question.'
“can we actually help an organization go from 70 % GRR to 80 % GRR by building the right incentive structure and using an AI native service backing to help strategically guide that month over month, quarter over quarter. That's the $100 billion question”
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She said that when a customer says it is going to a competitor, Supermetrics offers an offboarding plan. She said that nine times out of ten, once the customer is on a stay-alive contract, it sees that implementation takes longer than expected and that the product over-promised and under-delivered, so it cannot switch off and keeps the system live at a lower spend. She described this as managing the relationship to the end.
“nine times out of 10, when we have a stay alive contract is what we kind of call them, they'll see that they actually can't”
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Eleanora White said that when a customer is turned, the company sets a time period in which a return to the business does not affect team GRR but does affect retention. She said the window has to be time-bound, because otherwise CSMs might stop doing renewals on time.
“we have a set time period that if that customer comes back to the business, it doesn't impact GRR numbers for the team, but it does impact that retention”
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said Dan Lee (The Science of Scaling), Ariel Risman ([Un]Churned), Rebecca Nerad ([Un]Churned), Bob London ([Un]Churned), Brian Evergreen ([Un]Churned), Kellie Snyder ([Un]Churned) and 3 more
said Margo Martin ([Un]Churned), Jason Goldsmith ([Un]Churned), Jean de Villiers ([Un]Churned), Kellie Snyder ([Un]Churned), Ping Wu (Grit)
said Kellie Snyder ([Un]Churned), Chael Banks ([Un]Churned), Jordan Crawford (Topline), Eric Gilpin ([Un]Churned), Carsten Schütz ([Un]Churned)
said Mark Roberge (Topline), Karri Saarinen (Grit), Brett Queener ([Un]Churned), Ping Wu (Grit)
said Grant Clarke ([Un]Churned), Amanda Kahlow (Topline), Chuck Ganapathi ([Un]Churned), Cassie Vaughn ([Un]Churned), Ping Wu (Grit)
said Snehal Nimje (Topline), Mark Roberge (Grit), Pablo Dominguez (Topline), Dan Sperring (The Science of Scaling)
said Tomasz Tunguz (Topline), Ian Tickle (The Revenue Leadership Podcast), Sam Slevin (Topline), Carsten Schütz ([Un]Churned)
said Christopher O'Donnell (The Science of Scaling), Jason Goldsmith ([Un]Churned), Carsten Schütz ([Un]Churned), Usha Iyer (The Revenue Leadership Podcast)
said Margo Martin ([Un]Churned), Ghazi Masood ([Un]Churned), Amanda Kahlow (Revenue Builders), Abbas Haider Ali ([Un]Churned)
said Josh Schachter ([Un]Churned), Adnan Rahman ([Un]Churned), Cassie Young (Topline)
said Lauren Hughes (The Revenue Leadership Podcast), Kellie Snyder ([Un]Churned), Monika Saha ([Un]Churned), Adnan Rahman ([Un]Churned)
said Christina Parra ([Un]Churned), Sam Slevin (Topline), Manish Chawla ([Un]Churned)
said Seong Park (Revenue Builders), Rob Edmondson ([Un]Churned), Eric Gilpin ([Un]Churned)
said Andy Mowat ([Un]Churned), Cassie Young (Topline), Pablo Dominguez (Topline)
said Monika Saha ([Un]Churned), Sam Slevin (Topline), Brad Casemore ([Un]Churned), Manish Chawla ([Un]Churned)
said Samantha McKenna (30 Minutes to President's Club), Evan Huck (Topline)
said Margo Martin ([Un]Churned), Adrian Rosenkranz (The Revenue Leadership Podcast)
said Ghazi Masood (The Revenue Leadership Podcast), Dan Sperring (Revenue Builders)
said Seong Park (Revenue Builders), Chael Banks ([Un]Churned), Darren McKee ([Un]Churned), Christine Lavery ([Un]Churned)
said Steve Cox (Topline), Adnan Rahman ([Un]Churned), Brad Casemore ([Un]Churned)
said Christina Parra ([Un]Churned), Seong Park (Revenue Builders), Eleanora White ([Un]Churned)
said Mark Vovsi ([Un]Churned), Simon Farthing ([Un]Churned), Diane Wu ([Un]Churned), Manish Chawla ([Un]Churned)
said Josh Schachter ([Un]Churned), Grant Clarke ([Un]Churned), Chuck Ganapathi ([Un]Churned), Chael Banks ([Un]Churned)
said Amanda Moran ([Un]Churned), Samantha Murray ([Un]Churned), Eleanora White ([Un]Churned), Christine Lavery ([Un]Churned)
said Brian Evergreen ([Un]Churned), Rob Edmondson ([Un]Churned), Pradeep Raman ([Un]Churned)
said Bob London ([Un]Churned), Josh Schachter ([Un]Churned), Adnan Rahman ([Un]Churned)
said Kellie Woodin ([Un]Churned), Christina Meng ([Un]Churned), Christine Lavery ([Un]Churned)
said Garrett Marker ([Un]Churned), Mark Vovsi ([Un]Churned), Jean de Villiers ([Un]Churned)
said Bob London ([Un]Churned), Adnan Rahman ([Un]Churned)
said Jean de Villiers ([Un]Churned), Chael Banks ([Un]Churned), Adnan Rahman ([Un]Churned)
said Carsten Schütz ([Un]Churned), Jim Richmond ([Un]Churned)
said Eleanora White ([Un]Churned), Guy Galon ([Un]Churned)
said Adnan Rahman ([Un]Churned), Carsten Schütz ([Un]Churned)
said Jared Collins ([Un]Churned), Abbas Haider Ali ([Un]Churned)
Actions written 10 Oct 2026 from the most useful of 362 recent insights and checked against them.
Josh Schachter says Gainsight's pitch is that customers sign and Gainsight owns their end-to-end renewal, running the renewal playbook through Gainsight with AI and humans in the loop. For the long tail it promises to take GRR from X to Y, which he calls low-hanging fruit because unassigned accounts can be given 'AI human in a loop' coverage. It will not sell on calls made or plays run, but on outcomes like 'we renewed this guy.'
“You sign on the dotted line, we are owning your end -to -end renewal.”
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He says expecting legal and customer support to be mostly replaced, and so not ramping those teams quickly, was one of Higgsfield's main operational mistakes. Higgsfield now has over 10 people in legal and over 40 in customer success, all heavy AI users, and he sees no elimination in those roles. Because the company launches products roughly weekly, agents' context and rules change about twice a week, which makes a smart, coordinated human team important.
“It's true that probably over 60 % of customer support requests, especially the first line of defense, can be handled with AI. But when it especially comes to B2B, like, AI just doesn't work.”
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Mashrabov says the remainder of non-business revenue comes largely from aspiring creators and freelancers learning video AI to earn money. He describes them as 'a little churny' but says most come back within a year. Higgsfield invests in Higgsfield Academy and a YouTube channel to educate them as a future AI-native workforce. The West accounts for well over 70% of revenue; Seoul is the largest city by usage and the US the largest country.
“It's true that their behavior is a little churny. Within a year, most of them actually come back to try again.”
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Kellie Woodin said Notion moved from a 'scaled' segment to 'commercial', which she described as less scaled and more hyper-prioritized. Because the team now owns renewals, she buckets accounts by who is renewing this quarter or next, who is onboarding, and who is in an active workflow implementation, and gives those high-touch attention. The team relies on agents and operational rigor for velocity and leans on async and self-serve resources for everyone else. Workshops, onsites and office visits are reserved for selected accounts.
“who's renewing, who's onboarding and who we're in any workflow implementations with, and those become our prioritization buckets.”
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The plans keep the usual success-plan elements: business objectives, pain points and success metrics. They add a walkthrough of the AI maturity model to diagnose where the customer is and where they want to go. That feeds a mutual action plan listing the workflows to build together, plus recommended workflows based on the customer's objectives. The speaker said the growing library of best-in-class customer workflows lets the team be prescriptive, which customers are asking for. Some customers still get them labelled as success plans.
“We diagnose where they are and we have a conversation about like where do you want to go and how can we help you get there. And so then we pull together a mutual action plan.”
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Christina Parra described a first 'CS Evolution' that merged relationship managers and renewal managers with CSMs to bring the commercial piece into CS. The next evolution adds the technical piece. Her reasoning is that adoption, consumption, commercials and value are inextricably tied, so one team can be a consultative partner across all of them.
“we launched CS Evolution where we actually merged our relationship manager renewal manager motion with our CSM motion. So we brought together the commercial piece. And then this next evolution is bringing the technical piece in.”
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Kellie Woodin said Notion's role shifted from developing use cases to developing workflows, because Notion is a blank canvas once tools, AI and agents are connected. The team now runs workshop-style co-build sessions rather than one-to-many trainings, so customers get end-to-end workflows running and start saving time right away. That is why the title changed from customer success manager to 'outcomes architect'.
“Now we're not selling software, we're selling work.”
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Nerad said acquired companies engaged their small customers in very different ways, which is hard to fold into one model. Advantive is moving the long tail to one-to-many outreach in partnership with product marketing, segmenting by customer tier rather than by line of business. She credits marketing with strong general outreach. What has been tougher is the next level: tailoring to each customer's products and what is meaningful to them.
“Less about it being one LOB versus the other and more about how do we segment to be able to serve those customers appropriately.”
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Nerad said that, whatever they are called, structured reviews to engage and listen to the largest customers remain valuable at Advantive. She said that is a different motion from how the long tail should be served.
“yes, we still do find value in QBRs. I know that's hotly debated in customer success”
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Nerad said themes such as cancellation, at-risk and downsell are common across companies, so Advantive developed a standard process for them across acquisitions. The at-risk ticket is intentionally simple so that anyone, not only CS, can log something they heard from a customer. It captures product specifics and reason codes, which route it to the right team and allow trend analysis across lines of business. Advantive also built save plays that apply across all lines of business.
“So it's intentionally simple and being able to log an at -risk ticket. This is where a human is actually saying, hey, I heard a customer say this”
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Nerad pushes CSMs to think about moving the customer's numbers, not just internal numbers like retention. She teaches them to consider the persona and experience of the person complaining, and to listen for what the customer isn't saying. She does this at a CS-only day attached to sales kickoff and in day-to-day moments, such as reviewing an email response that missed a customer's frustration.
“some of it's just challenging the so what? Right? Making sure that we are thinking of things through the customer's metrics, right? Moving the customer's number, not just our number like retention”
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Nerad said Advantive has too many products for CSMs to advise on solutions and outcomes across very different ones. Within a product family there is enough overlap that CSMs must be able to tell products apart and cross-reference them; a ProPlanner manufacturing customer may also be interested in Pinpoint, for example. Advantive's enablement covers both CS skills and product knowledge. Josh suggested three to six products per line of business and Nerad agreed.
“there are too many products for the CSMs to really be able to advise on the solutions and the outcomes across very different products.”
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After Advantive's most recent acquisition, Nerad spent a couple of months working with a senior CSM who had been at the acquired company for 15 years and knows its customers well. Together they worked through what drives those customers and what outcomes they intended when they bought the software. Nerad said the understanding of risk and retention follows from that customer understanding.
“I have a senior CSM who's part of my team who she's been with this company 15 years. She knows the customers really well.”
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Nerad said Advantive restructured by line of business once it reached a certain size, because the way to serve customers differs a lot between them. Each GM oversees sales, support and professional services. Nerad owns the entire renewal and CS function and partners with the GMs. She owns overall retention, ARR renewal rates and uplift.
“We have four LOBs here, yet at the same time, I own the entire renewal CS function, and so I partner with those GMs on how to serve them.”
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She wants to stitch every customer's touchpoints across marketing, sales, support calls and quarterly success reviews, which currently exist only in pockets. She also plans to bring the same friction-removal focus to post-sales support, where Justworks is an early adopter of an AI tool and has made deflection gains. She noted the AI-native support platform market is moving fast.
“I'm excited about this concept of customer 360.”
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She said instructional designers spent time turning launches into classroom experiences, but people now learn from LinkedIn, podcasts and peers, and reps on Zoom training often do not pay attention. Justworks shifted to learning reps can consume on the go that connects to what is happening in the market.
“So we really needed to move towards like bite-sized learning.”
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Previously only revenue enablement updated Confluence, which she said required 32 people. Product, product marketing and customer education now update content directly. AI measures how recently content was updated, alerts owners when it goes stale and suggests refreshes.
“We needed 32 people to keep Confluence updated.”
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He said Brex has increased NRR a lot in the last couple of years, but that what it did before probably will not get it to a further increase. He presented the changes he described as examples of what would be needed. The figure is his stated ambition, not a forecast of results.
“if we want to go increase NRR by another 10, 20, 30 points in the next couple of years”
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Garrett said the gain came not from product changes but from reorienting the customer success team toward the business process of closing the books and how it fits with ERP and other tools. He said the reason someone does or doesn't adopt is often not whether the tool works, but unease about changing a process they cannot afford to get wrong. He said the team needs to get better at doing the same for other cross-functional workflows.
“we actually basically changed the way that our customer success team was oriented and talking to people about it”
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Mark Vovsi said one person reports to the head of customer success and has a foot partly in his team, focused on process, templates by customer segment and product ownership. Feedback from CSMs flows to her, and similar owners exist for other customer teams and for renewals. Josh likened her role to a product manager working through a backlog of iterations.
“It's almost like she's the product manager now with a backlog of iterations to make, I would suppose, on the success plan.”
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Mark Vovsi said the AI reviews conversational data, support cases and risk signals to draft plans with tight objectives and milestones, rather than bullet points. Plans load directly into the CSP, and for large customers with many products, each product gets its own adoption and risk focus. He said the goal is to create objectives people would not otherwise have thought of, and that it saves hours.
“we want to automatically load success plans for every single customer if they don't have one, or based on certain criteria, every quarter refresh it.”
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Mark Vovsi said CSMs at Proofpoint were product experts but were not focused on success plans, QBRs or renewal outcomes. Before the rebuild, the account manager led each account and a CSM was brought in only when risk, health or adoption questions came up. Proofpoint brought in a new CS leader to stand up the organisation, then launched a CSP, high-touch playbooks and digital campaigns.
“We didn't even have assigned, you know, accounts for our CSMs.”
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Mark said RSA converted inside sellers into people who talked to customers about the attack and trained tech support staff to have customer conversations. Every call needed someone from legal, product and sales to make sure the company was positioning and explaining exactly what had happened. He said the effort ran for about a year, and some EMC leaders worked from the RSA offices for weeks.
“You had to have legal, someone from product and someone from sales on every call to make sure you were positioning and explaining exactly what took place.”
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Ian raises the open question of what account management and customer success should look like going forward, including a role combining the two. He says he is very happy with his current account management and CS teams. A few long-tail segments are trialling the combined model and testing whether technology can make it more effective.
“And we don't have an answer for that at the moment I'm very happy with my account management and customer success team”
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Simon said lifecycle programs have been somewhat disconnected between customer marketing and CS, with well-intended programs run by his team and by customer marketing that were quite different. He is excited about combining them, saying AI makes the connection more possible, which should help the team act faster on intent and stay aligned in how it communicates with customers.
“right now, lifecycle programs have been somewhat disconnected between customer marketing and CS.”
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Simon said Bloomreach does not have a traditional long tail, and its smallest customers are really important and are not customers paying $2,000 a year. The efficiency approach isn't just about building a digital-only tier but about making CSMs more effective and valuable across more accounts, with agentic AI extending the team to smaller customers.
“it isn't about just building a digital only tier, it's about making sure that CSMs can be more effective and more valuable across more accounts.”
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Simon said Bloomreach is not quite there yet but is experimenting with the FDE role, which he expects to grow into. The plan is to start with the largest enterprise customers and prove the value before scaling from there.
“we're going to start with our largest enterprise customers.”
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Simon said some CSMs were already more commercially expansion-focused, which suited them, while others come from a neutral position of making sure the customer gets every ounce out of what they already purchased. He said he does not want the team to lose that focus and that it is more important than ever, while linking new product features to what fits each customer.
“make sure the customer get every single ounce out of what they've already purchased.”
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Saumyo deliberately calls Gainsight a system of interaction rather than a system of record, because he wants CSMs to spend their day in that platform. If data needed by CSMs is not in Gainsight, his team fetches it from places such as Snowflake or external AI tools like Staircase AI, and surfaces it on that platform. He says he would almost never want CSMs to not have a platform.
“I very carefully call it System Of Interaction, not a System Of Record because I want the user group which is CSM in this example, CSMs to basically spend their day within that platform”
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Saumyo's ideal is that a CSM logs into one platform in the morning and logs off at the end of the day without going anywhere else. Reps need some outside research, but he says the goal is to avoid swivel-chair work, where people copy and paste between apps, which he sees as context switching that makes CSMs less happy. He says this ideal is not going to happen anytime soon, but he believes in-app intelligence will be a significant efficiency booster.
“if I have to kind of swivel chair go to a different app and launch something and do something and copy paste something and come back here.”
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