Quick summary: NRR and GRR run on the renewal cycle, so you won’t see your first 90 days in them. Marley Wagner offers four leading indicators you can move sooner: time to first value, product adoption, execution velocity and movement in renewal risk.
New customer success leaders often put a lot of pressure on themselves in the first few months. Within a short time, you expect to learn the product, lead a new team, and show impact to prove yourself as a worthy addition to the company. During a recent ChurnZero webinar, Marley Wagner, Head of Customer Success Programs and Strategy at EverHealth, walked through a 30-60-90 day framework for new customer success leaders. One of her recommendations is to be deliberate in what you measure.
Check net revenue retention (NRR) and gross revenue retention (GRR) for early signs of progress and you won’t find much. Those numbers likely won’t move because they are tied to a full renewal cycle. You rarely see day-one changes in those metrics within 90 days.
Leading indicators work differently. They show whether your changes are working before the revenue number catches up. Marley suggests four helpful metrics to watch in the first 90 days.
Metric #1: Time to first value.
Tweak the onboarding process and this one can move quickly, Marley says. She likes it because it shows whether customers are getting to use the product the way they want. Finishing the steps in an onboarding flow doesn’t say much by itself. What matters is whether that happens faster than it did before. Because time-to-first-value can move inside a single quarter, it’s one of the earliest signs that what you’re doing is working.
Metric #2: Feature and product adoption.
Product adoption can also be an early indicator of progress. For example, a feature could have launched or updated before you arrived but customers have yet to use it effectively or at all. Adding a slide about that feature to QBR and check-in decks, or adding some training, can be enough to move adoption.
Usage alone doesn’t prove a customer is getting value from the product. But it’s still one of the better leading indicators because it shows what customers are using. You’ll have to find out later if that usage pays off for the customer.
Metric #3: Execution velocity.
Execution velocity measures the team’s output, whether CSMs are able to effectively use their time to execute on their objectives. That could mean more strategic meetings and fewer status updates because a manual task finally got removed from their plate.
You might move certain tasks from CSMs to the support team. Other ways are automating data collection that used to live in a spreadsheet or building a deck template so team members don’t have to rebuild the same presentation from scratch every quarter. Any of these free up hours CSMs can spend protecting the account instead of doing admin work, and it’s one of the easiest wins to show early.
Metric #4: Movement in renewal risk.
Movement in renewal risk tracks how early a CS team can flag accounts that are unlikely to renew, rather than finding out at the last minute. It’s the hardest of the four to see this early, but it’s possible, according to Marley. A common pattern shows up across CS teams that can jeopardize renewals. CSMs will wait for the customer to bring up the renewal instead of raising it themselves, out of habit or nerves.
Coach the team to start that conversation six months out. Leaders get a more accurate read on which accounts are at risk, and CSMs get runway to act long before the renewal date. Addressing the renewal early gives the best accuracy in predicting retention or churn before NRR or GRR would be able to show it.
Build your own list.
These four metrics aren’t the only options. Every business needs its own metrics that are tied to a product or a specific problem a new leader was hired to solve. Use this list as a starting point, then build one that fits your business.
Watching a metric that’s already moving is a better use of the first 90 days than staring at one that hasn’t caught up yet. NRR and GRR will get there but they’re just not the first thing to check.