Hi @Anna Alley--The most difficult thing for CEO's, CFOs, and board members to visualize is time-delayed economic impacts. Intuitively, they can appreciate that cutting Development will eventually slow the rate of new feature introduction and bug fixes, but for some reason, the same intuition doesn't apply for Customer Success. The benefits that come from value realization, trust-building, and revenue expansion don't' appear for many months (and sometimes years) after Onboarding which puts us at a disadvantage. This is why I recommend you put together an economic model with your CFO that demonstrates both the cost and impact of Customer Success on unit economics as a function of time. At a minimum, you will need to show ARR, CLTV and CTS (Cost to Serve). It's also extremely helpful to reference churn & retention reasons data (assuming you have it), which can help quantify the economic impact of Customer Success. David Skok gives a helpful conceptual overview of the SaaS model and offers an downloadable spreadsheet template for monthly and annual contracts (https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/). Be careful to note that his churn calculations are misleading--he computes an average churn based on the total number of contracts, not just on those up for renewal. While the model shows the general idea of how revenue accretion works, I strongly recommend against using his churn calculations for Customer Success KPIs. I do a lot of economic modeling, so if I can be oaf any assistance, shoot me an email: ed@se-partners.com.
Ed