The 4-step guide to making customer success indispensable to growth

The era of cheap money is over

For over a decade, SaaS businesses grew up in a world of artificially low interest rates. Even after the 2008 financial crash, capital was still cheap and easy to access. Startups could raise massive rounds at sky-high valuations, often before a product was even built.

When I first started working in the investment world, it was normal to write a $1M check at a $9M valuation. By the height of 2021, writing a check for $1.5M on a $40M valuation wasn’t unusual – even when companies hadn’t finished building their product.

But that cheap money masked inefficiency.

Founders didn’t need to worry about profitability or building operational discipline. They could delay it indefinitely. Many companies went public, openly stating they never expected to be profitable. And instead of solving root problems, they threw headcount at them. Infinite access to cheap cash meant “just hire more people” became the default answer.

That era is gone. It’s finished. The tap has been turned off. We’re entering a decade – at least – of slower growth and higher interest rates. Software is still a high-margin business, but it’s no longer considered recession-proof. Even industry leaders like Salesforce have started to cut back.

This shift has huge ramifications for customer success.

Understanding what corporate boards care about

On the corporate boards I sit on, conversations are laser-focused on three things:

Runway: How much cash is left to keep operations going?
Fundraising: How hard will it be to raise more, and how expensive will that money be?
Burn rate: How are we actually spending on running the business, and how can we reduce spend across headcount, software, and operations?

This means every function in a startup is under scrutiny. And if we are to really strip this back to the bare bones, boards typically categorize startups in three simple buckets:

People who build the product – not just engineering, but product management and product marketing.
People who sell the product – sales, demand gen, and marketing.
People who support the product – customer success, support, professional services.

If you're looking to reduce burn or extend runway, then cuts are needed. And unfortunately, support functions are the first target.

Now, you can debate whether that’s sensible, but in practice, it’s where boards look first. It's far better to be associated with selling a product than it is to support a product. All of these functions will have cuts and be under scrutiny, but it's going to be much harder for someone to pull the plug on selling the product in a tough macroeconomic environment.

That’s why it’s critical for customer success to shift from “support” to “growth.”

Why customer success has to change

Right now, customer success is great at growing adoption, usage, and champions. That’s important, but it’s not enough anymore.

This doesn’t mean becoming pushy salespeople burdened with an unachievable quota. It means reframing the work so it’s clear how it drives growth. There are four practical steps every CS leader can take:

1. Define what you do in board language

If you describe CS as “trusted advisors” or “delivering customer value,” a board member won’t get it. It’s too vague. What boards actually care about is:

Revenue: Does it create or protect it?
Speed: How quickly does it create value?
Efficiency: Does it deliver more with less?
Business value: How does it impact the company, not just the customer?

So define what you do in those terms. Here’s one way to put it:

“We create the conditions for more revenue and faster business value through change-management skills.”

That’s tangible. That’s business-focused. Anyone can understand it.

The details of how you do it – onboarding, adoption programs, QBRs – can follow. But lead with outcomes, not activities.

2. Own a revenue number

If you want a seat at the table, you need to own a revenue metric. Specifically, two:

Net revenue retention (NRR)
Gross revenue retention (GRR)

These are the numbers boards actually care about. They want to know how much revenue is being retained and how much it’s growing.

To support those metrics, you also need leading indicators. Think of these as quarterly targets that demonstrate progress:

Time to value: How fast customers see value after purchase.
Deployment speed: Finishing implementations in a set number of days.
Feature adoption: Ensuring every customer uses the core sticky features.
Consumption milestones: Data flowing through the platform, integrations live, usage hitting a certain level.

Activities alone don’t cut it. Too many board presentations lean on “we did 65 QBRs” or “25 EBRs.” That earns a shrug. What matters is: did those activities shorten time-to-value, increase adoption, or drive retention?

Practical tips:

Track both leading and lagging indicators quarterly
Forecast them – how many deployments you expect, how much adoption growth.
Show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year trends.
Share results widely inside the company.

If your numbers aren’t in the board pack, they don’t exist. And if you’re not presenting them directly, push your CEO to include you. Ask for five minutes and two slides. There’s no harm in asking – and if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

3. Learn the language of revenue

Boards and executives think in terms of revenue. If you want to influence them, you have to speak their language.

That means:

Know the forecast. Open up Salesforce or HubSpot, look at the pipeline, and understand what deals are coming.
Get close to sales. Sit in on forecast meetings. Attach yourself to key deals. Massage an AE’s ego if you have to – they’ll let you in the room.
Celebrate wins. Salespeople ring the bell for closed-won deals. You should do the same for renewals, expansions, or successful uplifts. Put them in Slack. Share them at town halls.
Learn how sales works. Go through the same training. Watch how they run kickoff calls, handle objections, and negotiate. CS professionals influence, persuade, and negotiate every day – so why not learn from the people who are trained to do it?

The love language of the company is revenue. If you don’t speak it, you’ll always be seen as “support.”

How to Build a Customer Lifecycle That Grows Revenue Playbook

4. Change the culture

This is the hardest step. There’s a mantra in CS: “If I carry a revenue target, customers won’t trust me.”

It’s wrong.

The best sellers build trust. They focus on mutual benefit. They understand that if the customer achieves value, revenue follows. That’s exactly how CS is wired.

So don’t be afraid of being seen as sellers. Be afraid of not being seen as revenue drivers.

Here’s how to shift the culture:

Think commercially, but don’t act commercially. Don’t negotiate contracts or pricing. But do think about how your work contributes to revenue.
Multithread your relationships. Don’t rely on one stakeholder. Use sales training techniques to find others. Ask what their teams are working on. Build a broader network inside each account
Log proof points. Track new stakeholders, opportunities influenced, case study attributions. Don’t just do the work – document it.
Report proof points regularly. Show how many stakeholders were added, how many opportunities were passed to sales, and which case studies you influenced.

The worst thing you can do is leave your impact invisible. When renewals “just happen” with no proof points, founders and boards start to believe in magical thinking: “This product is so good, it would never churn even without a CS team.”

Your job isn’t to make the next sale. It’s to enable it – and to prove you enabled it.

Balancing two customers

One of the biggest mindset shifts for CS leaders is realizing you serve two customers:

The people who bought your product.
Everyone else inside your company.

Too often, CS focuses so much on external customers that internal ones get ignored. But sales leaders, CFOs, and boards are customers too. They need empathy. They need to see the numbers. They need to understand the proof points.

Balancing both is the only way CS earns long-term influence.

The org structure debate

A question that often comes up is: if CS is about growth, why have separate sales and CS teams? Shouldn’t one team do both?

Here’s the reality: new business and expansion both matter. The skills are complementary but different. Sales tends to focus on landing new logos. CS is better placed to drive adoption, expansion, and retention.

The org chart is less important than the mindset. Whether you sit in sales, growth, or success, the company only cares about two things: what you’re measured on and what you produce. Customers don’t care about your title either. They just want to know you can help.

Handling revenue ownership conflicts

In many companies, the moment CS puts its hand up to own NRR, the VP of Sales will push back. They’ll want that number. That’s not a bad sign – it’s actually proof that it’s the right number to own.

A rule of thumb: if salespeople complain about it, you’re probably on the right track.

That said, expansion deals are rarely “CS-only.” If a sale required an SE and an AE, why expect a CSM to handle expansion solo? It should be the same two-skill process. CS enables, influences, and sets up the conditions for revenue – but that doesn’t mean carrying every step of the transaction.

Cultural bias toward hunters

One challenge is cultural. In business, hunters are celebrated. Farmers aren’t.

We glorify the person who goes into the jungle with a spear and brings back an animal, not the person who grows wheat and keeps us fed for 10 years. That same bias plays out inside companies. New business is celebrated. Renewals and expansions aren’t.

But the numbers tell a different story. In 2022, Salesforce announced that 78% of its revenue comes from existing customers. Imagine being the leader who owns that number. Suddenly, the “farmer” looks like the most important role in the company.

Recap

The cheap-money era is over. Growth at all costs is gone. Efficiency, retention, and sustainable revenue matter more than ever.

This is the perfect moment for customer success to reposition itself as a growth engine.

Define what you do in board language. Speak in outcomes that matter: revenue, speed, efficiency, business value.
Own a revenue number. Track leading and lagging indicators. Forecast them. Share them. Get them into the board pack.
Learn the language of revenue. Stay close to the forecast. Attach yourself to deals. Celebrate wins. Borrow from sales training.
Change the culture. Think commercially, log proof points, and prove how you enable revenue.

And remember: you don’t just serve customers outside the company. You serve customers inside, too – boards, executives, and colleagues who need to see your impact.

If you do this, CS won’t sit in the “support” column anymore. It’ll stand alongside sales as a true growth engine.

This article is based on a session Rav presented at Customer Success Summit London 2022.