In this guide, we’ll explore how Customer Success has evolved from a support function primarily oriented to enterprise companies to a well recognized growth framework for high-growth startups. We’ll dive into operationalization of these principles and how they can be applied to build a scalable, revenue-driving CSM motion.

Why Customer Success is a Growth Engine

From an emotional standpoint, winning new deals is the best feeling in the world, but from a revenue standpoint, recurring deals go much farther. A study from Harvard Business Review says customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95% through the economics of loyalty and retention. 

Anecdotally, I’ve heard that companies like Ontic invest more into their retention than new sales. Keeping a customer is more important to them than getting a new one, if they had to pick one. Knowing if this is right for you comes down to a simple thought exercise. Ask yourself, “is it more work to prospect, sell, legal, and onboard a customer or provide value to an existing customer and have a renewal discussion (little legal, no prospecting, no onboarding). 

What I made my unique advantage, and you can too, is investing more than your competitors into retention, especially because the ROI on that is much higher. 

Nonetheless, hopefully by this point you know retention and customer success (CS) is important.

When Startups Should Invest in CSM Playbooks

If you are a business to business company, the best time will likely be much, much sooner than you think. Playbooks do not mean hiring more CSMs, it means encoding a repeatable plan to a certain trigger. 

Well, why is it important if you have no CSMs? Firstly, it’s to offload the cognitive load on your brain to have to remember the steps. What probably happens today is you jump right into a problem and ‘do what feels right’. This is the equivalent in code of rewriting code (you should not do that) when you really should just be creating a repeatable function you can call that does the steps you want it to. The CS equivalent of that is playbooks. 

As soon as you start to notice repeated patterns in risk response or onboarding, you should be making a playbook. These are the moments that define if a customer will stick around or not, and having your best set of plays written down will be a huge time, effort, and revenue saver down the line. 

If I was reading this as a founder, the first thought to myself would probably be, “In a risk response or onboarding moment, I’m probably not going to go to a document”. To that, I have a solution. 

The Best CSM Playbook for High Growth Startups

The first thing you must know is that I’m referring to a playbook as the ‘bible’ of any tumultuous customer facing moments that have a retention impact. 

So, what typically are these? 

Onboarding is the most universal. Good and bad onboarding can, and very often is, the difference between renewing or cancelling a contract or poc. 

The other is risk response. Every company will have different risks they may see. Examples include, but are not limited to:

• Reorganization Risk - Point of contact or economic buyer leaves

• Budget Cut Risk - Self explanatory!

• Usage Dip Risk

• Absence Risk - Not showing up to meetings, etc.

• Renewal Window Risk - Entering 3 month renewal window

Hundreds more. Every company has their own they’ll start to notice repeatedly surface up.

Step 1: Writing Plays

So, where should these documents live? The very best place is somewhere you know you’ll find yourself going when the moment happens. For the step by step, I’ll explain how you can do it with something more static, like a google document, and something more proactive, like Cuelock. 

At this point, you already noticed a repeated risk that your company faces post-sale. For example, let’s say you work in a field where reorganization is a common risk type you face. 

For documents:

1. Clear and Specific Risk Identified (“Reorganization Risk”)

2. Summarize (“For Acme, Inc. the most common reorganization risk we see is a champion leaving the firm”)

3. Tasks

   1. Order

   2. Summary of the task (“Slack the account manager to let them know that a budget cut risk was identified from {Customer Company}.)

   3. Assignee (“CSM, CS Manager, Account Manager, Legal, etc.”)c

   4. Recipient (“Point of contact, decision maker, internal)

   5. Delay before taking the next action

   6. Medium (slack, call, gmail)

For Cuelock: 

1. Create a risk

2. Input risk name

3. Input risk summary

4. Add tasks

   1. Order

   2. Summary

   3. Assignee

   4. Recipient

   5. Delay

   6. Medium

Now that your playbook templates have been scribed somewhere, we’ll take a look at using them in practice. 

Step 2: Using Plays

So the playbook has been written, and now we’re in the action. You’re going about your day, and then BOOM, one of your customers just informed you, or a CSM, that they are no longer going to be the contact because they are leaving the firm. What happens? 

For document playbooks: 

1. Preparation

   1. Open the document

   2. Scroll to the “Reorganization Risk” section

   3. Copy and paste the template into your own document

   4. Change any tasks as you see fit to the situation

   5. Apply the tasks, assignees, recipients, to your specific scenario 

2. Execution

   1. Manually execute each step in order

   2. Once the delay period is done, go to the next step

   3. If resolved, highlight the step at which it was resolved in green

For Cuelock playbooks:

1. Preparation

   1. Open cuelock

   2. Click Report Risk

   3. Select the company from the CRM sync

   4. Select the risk

   5. Cuelock pulls context from emails, calls, notes

   6. Cuelock interprets the template

   7. Cuelock creates the case-specific playbook with populated messages, assignees, and recipients

2. Execution

   1. (In Slack or Cuelock) Select yes, no, edit to execute a task

   2. If resolved, click resolve when Cuelock reminds you of the next step

Here, both ways are effective, but the primary difference is in the manual document way, the cognitive load of remembering, interpreting, and executing is entirely on you or the CSM. Cuelock will allow you to only have to put in information once, at the beginning, and will become the engine for resolution. 

Step 3: System of Record

It’s crucial that you actually know what works and what doesn’t. It’s easy to depend on anecdotal evidence on what works, but that can cost an arm and a leg down the line if systems are built upon wrong, or even slightly wrong, beliefs about what is going on. 

As a founder that is trying to build a sustainable, scalable company, it’s crucial you get this right. You need to know what worked, at what point, and at what step of any playbook. 

Playbooks are meant to be iterated, especially at the start. 

For document playbooks, you have to create a copy of a case-specific playbook you ran, and you need to log when it was run, what tasks were taken, which company it involved, and more. You can do this by creating a google sheet and having the following columns: 

• Risk

• Playbook name

• Customer

• Playbook link

• Situation context

• Total steps 

• Churned? Y/N

• Step of resolution

• Notes

For Cuelock:

• Cuelock asks you at each step if it was resolved or not

• If resolved

  • Cuelock stores the case-specific information

    • Risk

    • Playbook name

    • Customer

    • Playbook link

    • Situation context

    • Total steps 

    • Churned? Y/N

    • Step of resolution

    • Notes

In both scenarios, what you get is a very valuable log at the end of a term showing exactly which risks occurred the most, how you responded to them, what worked, what didn’t, and more. 

You can see the intricacies of which type of customers had which risks, how they are best handled, and share that with any CSM that joins in the future. In other words, you’ve made a scalable system. 

The key is, that has to continue as you bring on CSMs. Cuelock ensures it will, but a document / sheet may have a rough time. 

The Metrics That Matter

At the startup level it’s difficult to gauge this effectively, but the most important two metrics is:

• NRR - Net Revenue Retained

• GRR - Gross Revenue Retained

Everything else is vanity. In business, people will vote with their dollars. It’s tough to gauge a before playbook and after playbook at the startup level, but as a founder, you will quickly see the value of a repeatable, adaptable set of playbooks, and can make a safe assumption on if these playbooks had a causal relationship to better GRR and NRR. 

Final Note

Running a business is extremely difficult. Starting a company is ultimately just a series of picking which battles you want to fight. To me, playing the customer success + product game paid off, and hopefully for you, it can too! 

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions and if creating and operating playbooks is something you want to get serious about, check out Cuelock!