Pioneering The Customer Success Model and Its Role in Driving Sustainable Growth

The emergence of the subscription model in the early 2000s transformed the software industry, offering advantages to both vendors and end customers. For software companies, it provided a more predictable and recurring revenue stream. For customers, it lowered upfront costs and implementation timelines, unlocked cloud-based access from any device and centralized data across the organization.

In the early days of the subscription revolution, Salesforce -one of the pioneers of the model- recognized that retaining and growing existing customers was just as vital as acquiring new ones. This realization marked the birth of the Customer Success Model, a framework that focuses on maximizing the long-term value of each customer relationship.

Early Signals That a Customer Success Strategy Is Needed

While each organization’s context is unique, there are three critical red flags that suggest a dedicated Customer Success strategy is not only beneficial -but necessary.

1. High customer Attrition

In SaaS, churn rate below 5% is a healthy indicator.

If churn is increasing, it’s a sign that customers may not be seeing -or understanding- the full value of your product. A CSM is responsible for monitoring account health, identifying signs of disengagement, and intervening before it's too late. That might involve re-engagement strategies such as training, workshops to redesign workflows with other players in the same industry, or simply ensuring the right stakeholders are aligned.

Structured customer Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) are a good tool to showcase value delivered, surface expansion opportunities, and co-create long-term roadmaps with champions and decision-makers.

2. Low Customer Engagement

High platform usage is one of the strongest predictors of renewal. A lack of engagement -measured through metrics such as login frequency, feature adoption, active users and number of records created- often signals a future churn risk.

CSMs help customers succeed by guiding them to a deeper and more effective use of the product. Whether it’s onboarding new users, unlocking underutilized features, or offering best practices, their role is to ensure customers are consistently realizing value.

3. Untapped cross-Selling and Up-Selling potential

A strong Customer Success function doesn’t just protect existing revenue -it grows it. Leading SaaS companies often generate around 20 to 30% of total recurring revenue growth from cross-sell and up-sell expansion.

By deeply understanding a customer’s evolving needs and goals, a CSM can identify moments to introduce new modules, additional licenses, or complementary solutions or services. These aren’t transactional sales -they’re extensions of value.

Are CSM salespeople, support, or consultants?

The Customer Success Manager role serves a distinct purpose that complements -but doesn’t duplicate- those functions.

CSMs sits at the intersection between product knowledge, support, and sales -proactively guiding customers, identifying and mitigating risks early- and surfacing insights that improve your overall go-to-market strategy. By bridging the gap between these functions, CSMs align teams around one goal: making customers successful.

Practical steps to build a CS model

A simple place to start is with a few core metricscaptured in a lightweight dashboard to monitor customer health (like Net Revenue Retention (NRR), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Churn Rate and Time to Value). From there, segmenting your customer base to ensure CSMs focus their time on high-potential accounts, building standardized best-practice engagement playbooks, implementing customer Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) and/or hosting exclusive customer product workshops and training sessions are all examples of strategies CSMs can leverage to drive value.

If you're thinking about how to:

1. Reduce churn while continuing to scale,
2. Increase the recurring revenue from your existing customer base,
3. Or turn your customers into true advocates of your solution,

Then a Customer Success strategy is not a nice-to-have -it’s a growth imperative for the business.

At Volpi Capital, we work hands-on with founders & management teams to implement high-impact Customer Success strategies. From defining the first hire to identifying cross-selling opportunities, building playbooks, and defining success metrics, we partner with teams to unlock long-term, compounding growth.

If you’d like to discuss elevating your Customer Success strategy, we’re always happy to chat. Please get in touch with Rosa De La Calle Garcia (rosa@volpicapital.com) and/or Thomas Mears-Alcaide (tom@volpicapital.com).