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Building Your Enterprise CS Framework: From Strategy to Scale Part 7
Measuring Success – Proving Your Worth And Ditching Vanity Metrics
Tomas
May 21st, 2025
Featured Article
Welcome to the final chapter on our enterprise CS series. From building the right teams to building client relationships to delivering more efficiently with AI – it all comes back to driving tangible customer outcomes with consistent, profit-generating strategies.
In just about every newsletter, one thing came up – communicating your value. So let’s end this series by zooming in on how you translate and prove your success.
Why is this such a big deal anyway?
Because if you’re saying the wrong stuff to the right people, no one will recognize your value. And that leaves you vulnerable.
So let’s get close and comfy with the value metrics that actually matter. Here’s how to build your strategy around them in three phases.
Phase 1: Cancel Vanity Metrics
Most teams track activity. Winners track dollars moved.
NPS, login rates, and “engagement scores” are corporate pacifiers. And if your decision-makers are checked in, they’re going to see through it.
Instead, focus all your attention on these ROI-based metrics:
Net Revenue Retention (NRR): The only metric that matters for enterprise CS. If you can’t prove how your work is moving this dial – you’re wasting your time.
EBITDA Impact: Directly tie your tools to client $$ savings.
Time-to-Value (TTV): How fast did you deliver results, not features?
This isn’t to say all of your other reporting metrics are useless. Just start actively tying them to outcomes. For example: Replace “QBRs completed” with “QBRs that led to expansions.”
Phase 2. Set Your Team Up To Drive NRR
Once you’re clear on what your target metrics are – get your systems and your people on the same page to drive those results. The three ways to do this…
Tie compensation to spotting issues quick:
Think: A CSM gets a bonus for predicting a $500K risk before it explodes.
Promote the Paranoid. Reward CSMs who obsess over risks, not just relationships.
Do better post-mortems:
Make sure the right people are in the room for the big talks. I’ve seen escalation figures cut down by 60% a business started requiring execs to be there for port-mortem meetings.
Tear apart one failed implementation. Look closely when a project’s profit tanks. Calculate the exact revenue loss. Present it to the board.
Leverage the team:
Deploy a SWAT team to fix issues quickly. Put together one rep from CS, Engineering, and Product to be your go-to for 72-hour solutions.
Hire a “Chaos Engineer.” Their job? Break your processes. I read one story where a team hired an ex-consultant for this role—their NRR jumped 12%.
Phase 3: Build a Customer Feedback Loop in the Right Language
Any kind of feedback is helpful when it comes to improving your tools. But great CS teams can translate a problem to a sale. The key is mapping feedback to financials.
Like this…
“Feature request for payroll automation” → “This will save $200K/year in manual work.”
“UI is confusing” → “Current confusion costs $85K/month in support tickets.”
Go one step further and start leveraging AI models to scan support tickets for doll-impact phrases like “wasting 10 hours/week.” then auto-prioritize those fixes.
The focus here is to bake in ROI awareness into every single task, fix, and conversation. By the time you’re done – you’ll have made undeniable progress on the numbers that actually matter to boards.
Your 7-Day Profit Overhaul
Wanna get this started? Here’s what to focus on this week:
Kill one vanity metric: Replace it with a dollar-value KPI.
Run a “Dollar Audit”: Pick a churned client. Calculate exactly how much revenue died.
Launch a Profit SWAT Team: Task them with fixing one revenue leak in 5 days.
Bottom Line: If you can’t connect your work to a P&L, you’re just another line item waiting to be cut.
If you’ve gotten this far, you’ll know by now that nailing enterprise CS is really about architecting systems and teams that drive two big things:
→ Clarity
→ Momentum
Keep driving forward processes that deliver direct, clear impact – and you’ll start to see dollar signs pile up for your company.
Flick back to any of our enterprise CS topics you might have missed:
Built specialized teams
Mastered onboarding chaos
United warring stakeholders
Conquered technical hellscapes
Weaponized AI
Engineered adoption addiction
Proved your worth
Tomas
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