As a customer success (CS) leader, you don’t need to tell your Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) that CS supports customers; they already know that.
What you need to do is prove the business impact of CS. However, speaking purely in terms of retention, adoption, and relationships won’t cut it. You need to show that the CS team’s actions protect—and grow—annual recurring revenue (ARR). If you can’t, you lose credibility in the boardroom.
The fix? Translate CS work into business outcomes. Let’s break it down.
Existing Customers: Your Most Valuable Revenue Source You Already Have
Net Retention Revenue (NRR), Gross Revenue Retention (GRR), and Lifetime Value (LTV)—the metrics every CRO cares about—all rely heavily on existing customers. The people that CS teams engage with all day hold the keys to a more successful company.
But it still isn’t enough to simply report those metrics. CS leaders must connect their team’s activities—like risk outreach, feature adoption, or executive QBRs—to measurable outcomes like reduced churn, higher LTV, or greater expansion of Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). For example, rather than just saying, “Our GRR improved,” tie it back to what your team did: “Our QBR program helped prevent $X in churn and uncovered $Y in expansion ARR, which drove our Y% GRR this quarter.”
A helpful theme to keep coming back to in every conversation with your CRO: Your existing customers are your most profitable growth channel. Retention increases margin. Expansion lowers Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Advocacy accelerates pipeline.
By reducing churn and increasing upsells, CS teams improve margins and add resources for the rest of the team. Without a steady customer base, other teams have to work even harder to make up the difference. Sales teams need to close more deals, Marketing needs to spend more to get attention from new audiences, and Product must react to retention issues. A strong CS foundation reduces that pressure—and it’s on you to make that connection clear.
How? By highlighting how upsell opportunities lead to higher customer lifetime value (LTV), or the ways that CSMs can automatically reach out to customers who may be disengaged and at risk of churn. At the same time, explain how CSMs are involved in the Sales process, both pre- and post-sale. It may seem like an overwhelming amount to report on, but it’s crucial to explaining the value of your CSMs’ work.
Position CS as a Fast, Flexible Growth Lever
Customer Success has a unique ability to respond quickly to customer needs and drive meaningful results—often with less lead time and fewer resources than other teams require.
That’s not to say CS is more important than Marketing or Product. Each function plays a different role in growth. Marketing builds pipeline. Product creates long-term value. But CS operates closer to the customer on a daily basis, which gives it a different kind of leverage: responsiveness.
Because CS is in direct and constant communication with accounts across your customer base, it can act on insights in real time. When an engagement strategy works, it shows up fast—in usage, sentiment, or renewed momentum. And when something doesn’t resonate, CS can pivot quickly and prioritize the most valuable work. That flexibility allows teams to continuously focus on the initiatives that deliver the greatest value.
In terms of ROI, that efficiency is invaluable. It helps ease the workload of everyone on the team, as well as reduces excess spend on initiatives that don’t add to the bottom line. What’s more, it gives your company a competitive edge by proving to your customers that you listen and what to ensure their success.
Tie Pipeline to Current CS Processes
To prove ROI, it helps to talk not just about what the CS team has done in the past, but also how it impacts the future of the business. In particular, CS plays an important role in influencing pipeline, often in ways that aren’t formally tracked, but still add real value.
CSMs are often asked to provide references for prospects to talk to about your product. They also contribute to in-app engagement strategies, lead onboarding and training that increase feature adoption, and surface product feedback that helps unblock deals.These are the efforts that aren’t tracked in metrics like NRR or NPS, but they are the processes that ensure long-term, sustainable success for your customers and your company.
The challenge is that most companies don’t track them. So, start simple:
- Work with RevOps to tag “CS-influenced” deals
- Document reference activity and track what closes
- Record expansions tied to feature adoption or usage insights
These are the types of strategic shifts that’ll help CROs see CS not just as a renewal engine, but as a quiet driver of growth.
Your team already creates value. You drive adoption, reduce churn, enable expansion, and support growth. The challenge is making that value visible to executives who think in revenue terms.
So, when it’s time to meet with your CRO, don’t just talk about what your team does. Show how it protects and grows the business.
Speak their language. Prove your impact. And earn your seat at the revenue table.
Show the ROI of Customer Success with Gainsight
To ensure that you have all the right data to explain the ROI of customer success, you must invest in a holistic platform that can track and organize all your efforts. Gainsight is the only CSP that provides the power CS teams need to be impactful, but also the data necessary to continue to prove your value. Ready to make your impact impossible to ignore? Let’s talk.
