Customer Success · Account Management · B2B SaaS
Churn is a bill for poor quality. It arrives a year later, in someone else's name.
The CSM prevents churn. The Account Manager grows ARR. Gaps get settled at the kick-off, not in an escalation. Value is measured in the customer's own metrics.
At a pricing SaaS vendor for mass retail, NRR rose from about 90% to 120% in five years.
A first 30-minute conversation, no strings attached.
In purchasing, the saving made at order time is paid for later, in a rush, on another line of the budget. The bill never lands on the line where the saving was made. Joseph Juran formalised this calculation in 1951 as the cost of quality. Every quality-related expense falls into one of four lines. Two are chosen. Two are suffered.
The kick-off is for deciding. Every gap between the customer's process and the product is written down. For each one, someone decides who adapts.
Value is measured against a control group, in the customer's own metrics. The vendor and the customer read it on the same dashboard.
Escalations. Configurations built in a hurry. The analyst pulled off three other accounts to put out the fire.
The discount granted at renewal, the downsell, the cancellation. The reference the customer will never give.
Cost of qualityJuran model, 1951Rev. C
No amount is recorded. Model: J. M. Juran, Quality Control Handbook, 1951.
~90% → 120%
NRR. Pricing SaaS vendor, over five years, while ARR grew tenfold.
×10
Expansion revenue. Customer Success team of more than fifteen people, across three European markets, in under three years.
At a B2B SaaS vendor, the cheapest growth is in contracts already signed. Two jobs protect it and grow it: the CSM, who prevents churn, and the Account Manager, who grows ARR. I build these functions, or I rebuild them. Requests usually come from one of three situations.
The sector I know from the inside is retail and e-commerce: buying groups, back margins, pricing committees, budget cycles. Vendors that sell to retailers are my first ground. Retail & e-commerce →
Situation
No Customer Success or Account Management function.
Intervention
I built the function from scratch: portfolio split, account follow-up processes, expansion strategy, tooling. Then I ran it internationally, with five CSMs and AMs on individual renewal and expansion quotas.
Results
NRR from about 90% to 120% in five years. ARR multiplied by ten over the same period.
Situation
The customer changes its commercial policy. Margin drops out of its priorities, although it represented 90% of the contract.
Intervention
Defending the old scope was going nowhere. I started again from its new problems.
Results
Three cross-sells: alignment with competitor prices, analysis of promotion relevance, an RFP won to build its in-house pricing tool. One upsell on an e-commerce test outside the initial scope.
Situation
A Customer Success team spread across France, Spain and the United Kingdom, confined to reactive work.
Intervention
More than fifteen people to lead, and common processes to install without flattening what had to stay local. The team tripled, onboarding time was halved, and it moved to a model steered by retention and expansion.
Results
Expansion revenue ×10. NPS +20 points.
2 to 3 weeks
A quantified review, a prioritised roadmap. The shortest format, with no commitment to what follows.
3 to 6 months, part-time
The function is built or rebuilt, from portfolio segmentation to team rituals.
1 to 2 days per week
I hold the role while an owner is hired or builds up skills.
One-off sessions or ongoing support
One-off sessions or regular support, for a team or for the person who has just taken on the role.
The twelve calculators used on engagements are open to anyone, with no sign-up. On the Customer Success side they cover NRR, team sizing, health score and churn risk; on the pricing side, among others, target buying price, price image, markdown and promotion P&L. See the tools →
Part of what Velista publishes is not advice but tooling, built to understand a subject from the inside. Twelve free calculators. A glossary of AI and data, because a CSM should know what drift is before promising a result. And Argosfire, a wildfire monitoring service built from raw data through to deployment. Tools → AI glossary → Argosfire (in French) →
Glossary
42 terms from retail pricing, Customer Success and French retail. For each: the definition and related terms.
Open the glossary →Thirty minutes is enough to tell whether your topic calls for a diagnostic, a build-out or something else. No strings attached.