Gainsight

Why we picked it Nine chapters covering the QBR structure, the common mistakes (generic content, dwelling on the negative) and how to keep quality when you have too many customers for one per account.

The Essential Guide to Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs)

From Gainsight 9 chapters

• McKinsey found B2B customers with strong executive engagement are 2.5 times more likely to renew.
• 87 percent of business buyers want their rep to act as a trusted advisor, not a vendor.
• Keep a QBR under an hour, and lead with outcomes rather than a data dump (72 percent of senior decision-makers say information overload delays decisions).

Why we picked it The Gainsight CEO on why CS should own an NDR number rather than just a churn number, including the idea of giving every CSM their own book of MRR to grow from 100 to 115.

8 Things I Learned from Dave Kellogg About Net Dollar Retention

From Gainsight by Nick Mehta 8 min read

• Gross retention is ambiguous (which ARR is the denominator, is a product swap churn), while NDR folds churn and expansion into one number.
• One cloud company cut NDR by acquisition channel (self-service, enterprise, channel) and found some sales motions were losing money.
• Some accounts churn whatever a CSM does, so that time is better spent expanding healthy customers.
• Break upsell into its parts: more of the same product, new products to the same buyer, new products to new buyers.

Why we picked it This is the gap between a status update and a review an executive clears time for: an agenda built around their business outcomes, not your feature usage. Gainsight walks through the structure slide by slide.

How to Deliver a Flawless Executive Business Review

On Gainsight 44 min

Why we picked it The most complete breakdown of what goes into a health score: which four to six categories to weight, how to segment scores by journey stage, and the failure modes (too many metrics, too much subjective input).

Customer Health Score Explained: Metrics, Models and Tools

From Gainsight 12 min read

• Sample health score weighting: usage 40 percent, support trends 25 percent, sentiment 20 percent, executive engagement 15 percent.
• Score bands used to triage accounts: 71 to 100 healthy, 31 to 70 at risk, 0 to 30 critical.
• 78 percent of customers say personalisation makes them more likely to buy again (McKinsey, 2021).

Why we picked it Lays out the three real ways to organise a CS team (by segment, by lifecycle stage, by engagement model) and what each one costs you, which is the actual decision a first-time CS leader faces.

Customer Success Team Structure: The Ultimate Guide

From Gainsight 16 min read

• Names three scalable structures: embedded digital experience team, centralised content with distributed strategy, and community hub with program satellites.
• Forrester's read is that most CS organisations struggle for lack of a clear charter and a segmentation framework.
• Tie each program to NRR, gross retention, time to value, renewal forecast accuracy, and health score accuracy.

Why we picked it How to cover a long tail without a named CSM per account, with two working models (strategic plus pooled, and centres of excellence) and named companies running each.

Pooled Customer Success Management: The Water's Fine

From Gainsight by Abigail Spear 8 min read

• RD Station keeps a dedicated CSM only for its most complex 30 percent of customers and pools the other 70 percent.
• Pooling is not just for the low end: Imprivata halved strategic account ratios and reserved part of every CSM's time for the pool.
• Pooled coverage is a break from the one-to-one CSM-to-customer model customer success was built on.