There’s a lot of noise about building CS playbooks.
Account plans. Health scores. Risk matrices. Success plans. Expansion frameworks. It can get overwhelming fast.
But if you strip it all down, there are three core plays that every Customer Success team must master first no matter your company size, segment, or growth stage.
✅ If you get these three right, you create the foundation for sustainable retention and expansion. ✅ If you skip them, no amount of dashboards, tools, or touchpoints will fix the gaps.
1. The Save Play
Your ability to spot risk early, intervene decisively, and drive structured recovery plans.
Retention doesn’t happen at renewal time. It happens every time you recognize risk signals and act.
Most CS teams react to churn once it’s obvious. Great CS teams predict and prevent churn long before it shows up in a health score.
Mastering the Save Play means you have a repeatable system to:
- Track leading indicators of risk (adoption drops, engagement decline, champion turnover)
- Run structured internal risk reviews monthly or quarterly—not ad hoc
- Create customer-facing Save Plans that address root causes (not just add more training or more calls)
- Set clear internal roles: who owns escalation, who drives executive intervention, who supports technical recovery
Example: If a customer’s usage drops 20% for two consecutive months, your system automatically triggers an internal account review and Save Plan creation. The Save Plan is documented, owned by a named CSM/AM, and monitored weekly, not just left to hope.
Retention isn’t a metric you watch. It’s a system you run.
2. The Growth Play
Your ability to expand customer value naturally, without feeling transactional.
Many CS teams treat expansion as something that happens at renewal. That’s too late.
Growth conversations should be happening throughout the partnership and tied directly to business value, not product checklists.
Mastering the Growth Play means you have a system to:
- Identify expansion triggers during regular success planning (new teams onboarded, new projects launched, new pain points emerging)
- Equip CSMs to position growth around solving business problems—not pushing product usage
- Create light-weight Growth Playbooks that outline when to introduce additional products, services, or tiers and how to tie them to outcomes
- Partner tightly with Sales/AMs while keeping the customer experience seamless
Example: If a customer hits 80% feature adoption in Core Product A, your team introduces Advanced Module B not as an upsell but as the next step in unlocking deeper operational efficiency (tied to the customer’s original business goals).
Expansion is framed as a strategic enabler, not a sales pitch.
3. The Executive Alignment Play
Your ability to maintain strong strategic relationships at multiple levels of the customer org.
Without executive relationships, you are vulnerable.
Your champion might love you. But if the CFO, CIO, or CEO doesn’t understand the value you deliver, or worse, forgets about it, you’re at risk when priorities or budgets shift.
Mastering the Executive Alignment Play means you:
- Build executive awareness early in the customer journey not just at renewal
- Tie every strategic conversation to the customer’s top-line business goals (revenue growth, cost reduction, risk mitigation)
- Schedule Business Reviews that focus on impact, insights, and what’s next—not feature tours or technical status updates
- Proactively multithread relationships with decision-makers, influencers, and key operational leads
- Develop templates and best practices for engaging executives quarterly, even if the champion relationship is strong
Example: Instead of waiting until QBR season, your CSM builds a quarterly Executive Update slide (1 page, 3 key wins, 2 risks mitigated, 1 strategic recommendation) and sends it proactively to the exec sponsor to maintain visibility and trust.
Executive alignment is built through consistent, value-driven communication, not quarterly during your business reviews.
Why These Three Plays Matter
If your team can consistently:
- Save at-risk customers early
- Grow existing customers based on value
- Maintain executive alignment over time
You don’t just drive retention. You drive expansion, influence budget conversations, and cement your company as a critical partner.
Everything else—your success plans, health scoring, segmentation—feeds into these three fundamental motions.
Master these plays first. Then scale.
📅 Want help operationalizing these plays inside your team?
👉 Book a consultation call with me here. We’ll talk through what you’re navigating and explore whether coaching or consulting is the right next step to support your goals.