Customer Success

Chapter 14

Law 10: It's a Top-Down, Company-Wide Commitment

Author: Nick Mehta, Chief Executive Officer, Gainsight

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Executive Summary

Customer success is not just a department or an organization. It's a philosophy that must pervade your entire company. For most of business history, only two things have really mattered: (1) building the product and (2) selling the product. We believe that the time has come for a third core process to emerge—customer success.

Customer success is not just the buzz phrase du jour. It's here and it's here to stay. Done well, customer success drives real value to the bottom line of your business. If you are not on board yet, you will be soon because you can't survive without it. Luckily, getting started is not that difficult. But customer success starts at the top, and it must be a company-wide commitment.

Customer success. It sounds like a truism that says nothing new or interesting. After years of hearing CEOs say customers are king and watching them do the opposite, it's easy to be cynical about the new customer success movement.

In this law, I hope to convince you about the following four points:

1. What customer success is (for real)
2. Why customer success is inevitable
3. How customer success drives value
4. Where to start

What Customer Success Is (for Real)

As many B2B companies create teams with labels such as customer success management ...