Customer success

In B2B the money sits in the renewal. A customer who never uses what they paid for will not renew. Cutting monthly churn from 5 per cent to 2 per cent changes a business from leaking growth to compounding it. Done well, existing customers expand faster than others leave, which is what a net revenue retention above 100 per cent describes.

It also settles a tension. Sales is paid to close. Customer success is paid for the health of the relationship afterwards, so the two cannot be traded off against each other by accident.

• Give each new customer one named person who walks them to a first real outcome, ideally within 30 days.
• Track early signals such as login frequency, feature breadth and active users. Treat a dip as a prompt to act now.
• Build onboarding as a repeatable path written down, not one person's memory, so every account follows the same proven route.
• Review each account on a schedule, showing value already gained and features not yet tried. That is usually where expansion comes from.
• Match the model to the economics: a handful of accounts per person for large enterprise customers, dozens for mid-market, automation for self-serve.
• Work a churn risk like a sales lead, promptly, not after the account has gone quiet.

Sales wins the customer. Support fixes problems when they are raised. Customer success works in between and after: it makes sure the customer gets the result they bought for, before they have to complain. In practice that means onboarding, regular check-ins, spotting accounts that are drifting away and finding where more value could be delivered.

The role fits subscription products best, because revenue arrives through renewal, not the first invoice.