Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

The Key Metrics That Really Matter for Customer Success

18 Dec 2023 · 1 min

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0:43

This YouTube video (Jason M. Lemkin, uploaded Dec 18, 2023) argues that chief customer officers or VPs of Customer Success should be judged primarily by business-level outcomes—specifically net renewal rate and net retention rate—rather than on account health, product utilization, or engagement metrics. The speaker emphasizes that surface-level "healthy" accounts mean little if they don't translate into renewals and retention.

Chapters

I think the biggest learning for me is if you came to me two years ago and I was meeting with a new chief customer officer or senior VP of Customer success, and I was like, hey, how do you want me to judge you? They would tell me. If they told me, hey, you should judge me on health of accounts, utilization of the accounts, you know, overall usage and engagement with the product, I'd be like, no, I'm going to judge you on net renewal rate and net retention rate, because those are the metrics in the business that actually matter for what you do. And so I don't care if you tell me if every account is super healthy, but that correlates to very low retention or renewal rate. I don't care for that.