My champion at a big account just left. What do I do?

The single most common cause of a surprise churn, handled step by step, including the 48 hour window for reaching the new contact and the 'you, we, me' meeting structure.

Did your customer champion leave? Use this five-step playbook to reduce churn risk

From ChurnZero by Emily Nesterick 9 min read

• When a customer champion leaves, there is a 51 percent chance the account churns within 12 months.
• 65 percent of accounts that see an executive change do not renew their SaaS contract.
• Acting inside the first 48 hours makes that customer 33 percent more likely to renew.
• Only about half of customer success teams have a play for a key contact leaving.

A seven-step method for building relationships beyond one contact. It is written for new deals but the mechanics are identical for protecting and expanding a renewal.

Multithreading in Sales: The B2B Selling Framework

From Highspot by Jessica Hitchcock 11 min read

• In the older enterprise sale, a single contact could carry you 80 to 90 percent of the way to close; now there are a dozen people involved.
• Map five stakeholder roles on every deal: economic buyer, technical evaluator, end user, procurement, and executive.
• Multithreading is not one extra call, it is multiple conversations with multiple contacts across weeks or months.

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).

Shows what a productised CS play looks like when written down for a whole team: a named motion, tied to a product stage, with the assets attached. Rare to see this published.

Customer Success Playbooks

From The GitLab Handbook reference

• Sorts every play by trigger type: risk, lifecycle event, opportunity or expansion, objective, activity, digital journey.
• Risk plays are named off observable signals, for example low license utilisation, non-engaged customer, product risk.
• Each playbook has the same four parts: procedure, positioning, discovery questions, and an adoption map.
• Every play is marked automated or manual, so only some fire without a human deciding.

Two working CS leaders talking through the first 48 hours, including what to say in the note to the incoming contact and what not to ask for yet. It is the tone of the outreach that decides this, and tone is easier to hear than to read.

What to do when your champion LEAVES! | The Customer Success Hotline #1

On Lifetime Value: The Customer Success Channel by Kristi Faltorusso and Stino Verhelst 28 min