Opinion
Customer success - The missing link in revenue predictability
"Revenue planning is no longer just about closing deals; it’s about understanding customers deeply enough to anticipate their next move," writes Guy Galon, Chief Customer Success Officer at Obrela.
In an era marked by economic volatility, Geopolitical uncertainty, and continuous technological changes, one challenge still keeps executives busier than ever:
Can we still predict revenue with confidence?
For Chief Revenue Officers (CROs) and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs), accuracy in revenue forecasting has become both an art and a science. Yet while sales teams often dominate these discussions, a powerful ally is frequently left out of the room—Customer Success (CS).
When empowered and integrated, Customer Success teams can bridge the gap between sales' natural optimism and financial realism. They hold a depth of customer insight that no CRM dashboard can replicate, offering the observations that turn revenue forecasts from hopeful projections into a confident action plan.
Beyond Sales Pipelines
According to Forbes, companies have a 60–70% chance of selling to existing customers compared to only 5–20% when targeting new prospects. Despite this, many organizations still rely primarily on deal-stage forecasts, which are traditionally designed and implemented for new-logo sales.
This imbalance hides a massive opportunity. As companies mature and shift toward recurring revenue models, renewals and expansions become the actual heartbeat of growth. And those metrics do live in the sales funnel, but in the everyday work of Customer Success.
Customer Success teams track adoption, engagement, satisfaction, and outcomes—data points that reveal the progress customers make, the depth of relationships, and signal future buying behavior. By integrating this knowledge into financial planning, organizations can improve their revenue forecasts and reduce the risk of missing their targets.
The Predictability Advantage
So how can Customer Success reshape the way companies forecast revenue?
1. Monitoring Adoption and Outcomes
CS teams measure how customers use products to achieve their business objectives. This feedback reveals not just satisfaction and engagement levels, but the potential for upsell and cross-sell, opportunities that can be forecast with concrete evidence, not assumptions.
2. Identifying Early Risk Signals
Customer health scores, usage trends, and relationship sentiment offer early warnings of churn. When integrated into revenue planning, these signals help CROs and CFOs adjust projections to reflect real-time customer circumstances.
3. Building the Trusted Advisor Relationship
CSMs often enjoy access that sales teams can’t replicate. By becoming trusted advisors, they influence strategic discussions that lead to multi-year renewals and expanded partnerships. By blending industry expertise with strong relationships, CSMs can reveal new opportunities for engagement and revenue growth. This dual capability makes them invaluable contributors to the sales process as their qualitative perspective complements quantitative forecasting models.
A New Alliance: CRO, CFO, and CS
In most companies, sales forecasts rely heavily on deal stages and probabilities — logical, but incomplete for existing clients. The benefits of ongoing engagements are apparent when the underlying data is combined with human assessment. Both provide a closer look into the dynamics forming beneath the surface.
For CFOs, whose mission is to build an achievable revenue plan with reduced uncertainty, the CS perspective is indispensable. Renewal confidence scores, engagement patterns, and usage metrics serve as leading indicators that enhance financial predictability.
For CROs, CS insights mean better planning and execution based on factual customer intelligence. Customer Success account plans provide a clearer view of upcoming renewals and customers' needs and challenges that could trigger scope or service expansion. In addition, by aligning with customers’ real-world needs, staying up to date on adoption trends, and monitoring stakeholder sentiment, sellers can approach existing clients with precision, strengthening both trust and deal velocity.
Best Practices for Data-Driven Forecasting
Forward-thinking organizations are already integrating Customer Success input into their revenue forecasting processes. Here are key practices driving their success:
- Adopting Multi-Variant Renewal Predictions: companies go beyond initial usage or onboarding data to include customer outcomes and sentiment as part of retention forecasting.
- Establish a Renewal Confidence Score: Develop a composite metric that mixes engagement, outcome measurements, and relationship strength into a single source of truth for renewal prediction.
- Leverage Predictive Modeling and AI: Use machine learning to analyze behavior and usage trends at scale, identifying renewal likelihood or upsell readiness with higher precision.
- Tailor Renewal Strategies: View renewals not as a one-off event but as a strategic process, with options for early or multi-year commitments that align with customer budgets.
- Build Growth Frameworks: Integrate CS account planning with sales strategies to align expansion moves with key customer business and operational milestones.
Each of these steps transforms Customer Success from a reactive function into a proactive forecasting partner, adding reasoning and context to the revenue conversation.
From Insights to Impact
Revenue planning is no longer just about closing deals; it’s about understanding customers deeply enough to anticipate their next move. In that sense, Customer Success is emerging as the new revenue intelligence engine — blending human connection, operational data, and strategic foresight.
By weaving the reality check delivered by CS teams into financial and sales forecasting, organizations can move beyond pipeline dependency toward a model built on predictability and cross-team knowledge sharing.
Because in today’s uncertain economy, the most significant advantage isn’t just achieving growth, but knowing more confidently where it will come from.
Guy Galon is the Chief Customer Success Officer at Obrela.
