Angeline Gavino is the Founder & CEO at CS RevSpeak, the Vice President of Customer Success at Katalon, and a featured member of Vitally's Success Network. In this article, she shares how CS leaders can become more revenue-minded to make better decisions and move their businesses forward.

///////

As a CS leader, being revenue-focused isn't a nice-to-have anymore. It's the entire game.

Every Customer Success professional I’ve met would agree that the strategic business recommendations they make are far more likely to become reality if they’re backed by tangible revenue numbers, predictions, and historical data. When people can justify the rationale behind their activities and decisions with revenue metrics, they punch well above their weight class. 

So how do we, as VPs or CCOs, shift the tide so everyone’s laser-focused on measurable impact? In other words, how do we coach our teams to understand and speak the language of revenue?

After working in CS at SaaS companies for more than a decade, I’ve seen how Customer Success models have evolved. CS is no longer just about ensuring customer satisfaction and value realization. In order to secure a seat at the executive table and influence strategic decisions, you must be able to demonstrate how your efforts contribute to the company’s bottom line.

So, here are four things I do to help my CSMs better speak the language of revenue, upscale their efforts in front of CROs and CFOs, and have an operational rhythm that consistently drives revenue growth.

Related: The Revenue Mystery: Why Customer Success Leaders Struggle to Prove the Value of CS

1. Create a Revenue Operating Rhythm 

If you lead CS at your organization, treat the revenue you’re responsible for with the same level of care that your pre-sales counterparts give theirs. Since my team is responsible for renewals and expansions, there are several recurring meetings that I host with them:

Forecast calls

During these calls, each CSM presents forecasted renewals, expansions, and churn within their territories. We assess how much of the current up-for-renewal ARR is expected to be renewed, how much is at risk, and the expected revenue from upsells and cross-sells. This puts more ownership and accountability on the CSMs to understand their book of business and have a clear path to meeting their retention or expansion goals.

Pipeline reviews

Weekly pipeline reviews focus on how much expansion pipeline the CSMs have identified. Are they leveraging data to identify expansion opportunities? Are they proactively identifying whitespace in their accounts and reaching out to new business units? Do they have a territory plan that maps a path for how they will grow their book of business?

Opportunity reviews

These reviews help us understand the progression of individual CSMs within each opportunity. We monitor how close we are to the team’s quota for the quarter and identify any support needed to push deals forward.

Internal QBRs

Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) are crucial for aligning the team’s efforts with the company’s strategic goals. I’m not referring to the QBRs we do with customers. Internal QBRs aim to evaluate the performance of each CSM, discuss their achievements, and identify areas for improvement. These sessions help ensure that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same revenue objectives.

You’ll notice this sounds a lot like a pre-sales process; that’s completely intentional. We have incorporated a lot of the sales processes and frameworks in order for us to operationalize revenue growth. And, with the right CS software features, I’m able to monitor:

• How individual CSMs are progressing within each opportunity
• How close we are to quota as a team for the quarter
• If any support is needed to push deals forward

By establishing a revenue operating rhythm, you put structure and rigor in place for CSMs to drive consistent and predictable revenue growth. This disciplined approach ensures that your team stays focused on their targets and delivers reliable results quarter after quarter.

2. Report on Both NRR and GRR

Tracking just Net Revenue Retention (NRR) or just Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) isn’t good enough based on my experience. Which of these metrics you focus on will likely depend on your CS organization’s maturity (more on that in the video below), but ideally, you should monitor both.

If your CSM team is incentivized on expansion, a challenge I often see is that they push for expansion no matter what because it's what impacts their paycheck. This breeds a bad habit: CSMs start to neglect churn. “Well, if a couple customers churn, that's fine. I can just cover it up with more expansion from these two other accounts.” That attitude, though understandable, doesn’t lead to sustainable business growth. Growing at the expense of churn is not a good idea, so as a leader, you should track and talk about retention and expansion regularly.

NRR, in a perfect world,  would capture everything well, but in reality, it covers up churn bleeds. You could have 140% NRR, but only have a GRR of 70%. I recommend compensating your team based on both GRR and NRR attainment to incentivize them to strike a good balance between churn prevention and expansion and renewal revenue.

3. Link Customer Success Metrics With Revenue Outcomes 

As a CS leader, you need to be able to link your team’s activities to the actual business metrics your CRO and CFO talk about. They speak the language of revenue, so you need to as well. This involves demonstrating how key CS metrics directly influence revenue. One effective way to do this is through Health Scores. They won’t know what a Health Score of 6.8 means, but they will understand better if you can tie the significance of Health Scores to actual revenue coming in the door.

Let me explain: Imagine you’re measuring customer health, and you’re looking at green, yellow, and red accounts. Your CRO isn’t going to care very much that 80% of customers are “green” right now. But what they will care about is if you can say, “We have $X in predicted renewal revenue from our healthiest accounts compared to only $X revenue on the line from red accounts. There's more closing potential and higher retention rates for green accounts, so we’re going to place our focus there for the next month.” You can justify your decisions with statements like this.

Here’s another example: Let’s say 95% of customers who are “green” health-wise bring in an average of $X in ARR each. Knowing that information lets you say things like, "This is why I'm asking my team to drive more green health; we’ve seen an average increase of $X in ARR on the other side." 

Always connect the outcomes of your CSM’s activities with revenue, and you’ll earn trust and respect really fast.

4. Let Revenue Potential Be a Guiding Light for Product Requests

To optimize your cross-functional collaboration — which is far easier said than done — I can’t advocate enough for speaking in terms of revenue. Every business unit’s motivator and litmus test for “Am I doing a good job?” should be based on how good they are at providing value to your customers and consequently, how good they are in driving revenue growth for the business.

I’ll share an example that happens often in the SaaS world. Let’s say a dozen customers request the same non-existent feature over the course of two weeks. It’s clear that this is something that would be super valuable for customers. You know that as a CS leader, but the Product team may say, "Sorry, that’s not part of our roadmap this year. It's just not going to happen." 

But if you can say, "Hey, there are 12 customers worth the equivalent of $3M in ARR that are asking for this feature," your request will instantly get more attention from the Product team and from executives, too. Plus, it inspires some urgency internally for the people who’ll build the feature.

Related: What Should the Relationship Between Customer Success and Product Look Like?

A Revenue Focus Wins Hearts (and Gets Results)

No matter what CS looks like at your company, two of your biggest jobs as a leader will always be:

1. Showing value to your customers
2. Proving the value of your team’s work internally

The moment you attach revenue numbers to an activity, an initiative, a request — really anything — it gets people's attention. I’ve coached non-quota-carrying CS leaders before, and the problem they have is that they can’t showcase the immediate impact of CS; their KPIs are entirely focused on customer outcomes and mostly based on product adoption. 

If you’re in that boat, I feel for you — and I challenge you to make a change. Put solutions in place to make it easier to measure your team’s impact. You’ll be amazed at how infectious that will become and how much your decision-making and organizational alignment will improve.

—

Vitally is a fan-favorite Customer Success Platform that makes it simple for CS leaders to track their team’s revenue impact. Take a tour of the platform or schedule time with our team today.