The reason CS leaders struggle to get a seat at the executive table isn't because we're not valued—it's because we can't clearly articulate our strategic impact.
We've all been there. You walk into a leadership meeting armed with dashboards showing customer health scores, product adoption metrics, and satisfaction surveys. Your CFO glazes over. Your CRO checks their phone. Your CEO asks, "But what's the business impact?"
Many CS leaders excel at the operational aspects of their role but struggle to articulate their strategic value in boardroom conversations. We present customer health scores while CFOs think about cash flow. We discuss product adoption whilst CROs focus on pipeline generation. We talk about customer satisfaction, whilst CEOs consider capital efficiency.
The problem isn't your metrics—it's the lack of a coherent strategic framework that connects your daily activities to business outcomes in a language that resonates with other executives.
A.C.E.: A Strategic Framework for Customer Success Excellence
After working with numerous CS organisations, I've developed the A.C.E. Framework—a strategic approach that provides clarity, consistency, and measurable business impact.
A.C.E. stand for Activate Value, Cultivate, and Expand—three foundational pillars that align with the customer lifecycle whilst addressing the metrics that matter most to business leadership.
Pillar 1: ACTIVATE Value
The Core Principle: Systematically activate the value promises made during the sales process through outcome-focused customer onboarding. This is all about reducing Time to Value through targeted initiatives.
Rather than generic product training, this pillar focuses on rapidly demonstrating the specific business outcomes that drove the customer's purchase decision. If sales promised a 20% efficiency improvement, your activation process must deliver a clear path to achieving that result within the first 90 days.
Why is activation instead of delivering value necessary? This phase is the most crucial phase for Customer Success to get right. If we cannot activate value truly seen from a client perspective and deliver it from our side, then we miss the point and consequently struggle with retention and expansion in the follow-up.
Strategic Actions:
- Design onboarding experiences that directly map to customer's business objectives
- Implement collaborative handovers between Sales and CS teams
- Co-create detailed "Value Plans" with customers that serve as success roadmaps
- Your key metric: Time to Value
Pillar 2: CULTIVATE for Retention
The Core Principle: Build systematic, data-driven processes that nurture customer relationships and protect revenue through proactive engagement.
It's all about systematically cultivating deep customer relationships, driving sustained product adoption, and building unshakeable loyalty, thereby protecting your revenue base and aiming for a Gross Revenue Retention as close to 100% as possible.
This is the pillar to understand churn reduction once value is activated by combining a human-first approach with AI-supported processes to predict retention. Cultivating relationships and building trust with humans is key to understanding how value delivery can be continued. But it needs to happen in a way that is scalable and sustainable. GTM engineers can help you facilitate the digital CS implementation.
Strategic Actions:
- Implement predictive health scoring using behavioural and usage data
- Develop authentic relationships built on trust and mutual value creation
- Record every meeting and learn from early signals of churn. Then, create structured feedback loops that capture insights for your GTM peers.
- Your key metric: GRR
Pillar 3: EXPAND Revenue
The Core Principle: Transform Customer Success into a revenue-generating function that systematically identifies and captures growth opportunities within the existing customer base.
This pillar addresses the evolution of Customer Success from a support function to a commercial engine. It requires developing commercial acumen whilst maintaining the trusted advisor relationship that CS teams excel at building.
If your Sales, CS, or Account management teams are focusing on expansion, please ensure that you set up a system based on thorough learning from Pillars 1 and 2.
Strategic Actions:
- Develop commercial awareness within CS teams
- Create formal processes for identifying Customer Success Qualified Opportunities
- Set up a feedback system between CS, Sales, Marketing, and Product
- Your key metric: NRR
Adapting A.C.E. Across Business Models
The framework's strength lies in its adaptability—core principles remain consistent whilst tactical implementation aligns with your specific business context.
Product-Led Growth: The framework emphasises user activation patterns, usage-based health indicators, and expansion through feature adoption and seat growth.
Enterprise Sales: Focus shifts to stakeholder relationship management, complex implementation planning, and strategic account development through executive engagement.
Usage-Based Pricing: Emphasis on consumption optimisation, usage pattern analysis, and expansion through increased utilisation and new use case development.
From Operational Excellence to Strategic Impact
The A.C.E. Framework provides Customer Success leaders with a strategic language that clearly connects operational activities to business outcomes. It transforms how we think about our role, communicate our value, and measure our success.
When you can demonstrate that your strategic approach has driven 95% Gross Revenue Retention through CULTIVATE initiatives and 135% Net Revenue Retention through EXPAND programmes, you're presenting measurable business impact rather than operational metrics.
This framework doesn't just improve Customer Success operations—it establishes CS as a strategic business function that directly contributes to sustainable growth and profitability.
The opportunity is clear: continue operating as a well-executed support function, or embrace a framework that transforms Customer Success into the strategic growth engine your business needs.
I'm curious about your experience: what's been your biggest challenge in establishing Customer Success as a strategic function within your organisation? How might a structured approach like A.C.E. address those challenges?
Responses