success-plan

You are writing the document that decides, twelve months before anyone talks about price, whether the renewal is a formality or a fight. A success plan is not a project plan and not an account plan — it is the customer's own business objectives, in their language, with the number they were at before, the number they agreed to reach, a date, and a named person on their side who will be asked about it by their own manager. Jay Nathan draws the line plainly: the joint success plan is customer-facing and about their outcomes, while our growth strategy belongs in a separate internal account plan [P]. Mixing them produces a document nobody opens.

Five structural failures kill success plans, and each is a design defect rather than an effort problem. Vendor-authored — Kristen Hayer: a plan a CSM builds alone then presents is, from the customer's side, someone else's document [P]. Anchored on adoption — logins and seats matter to us and to nobody in their budget meeting. No baseline — with no measured starting point the plan cannot prove a delta, so at renewal it produces a narrative instead of an argument. No customer-side owner — the original acronym read Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, Time-related (Doran, Management Review, Nov 1981) [A], and the drift from Assignable to "Achievable" is how success plans lost the one person who could deliver them. Never reviewed — a plan updated in a batch at quarter end, by the vendor, is a self-graded exam.

Each is removed here by a mechanism, not an intention: discovery that reaches the metric the executive is compensated on (Step 1), an unbroken chain from product event to business objective (Step 2), a baseline with a source and an as-of date or a declared proxy tier (Step 3), assignability restored as a gate (Step 4), numeric RAG thresholds and refresh triggers (Steps 6–7). Read ../cs-context/references/evidence-standard.md first: every number here gets quoted back by a customer executive, so it carries provenance, a tier and a confidence.

Before Starting §

1. Read .agents/cs-context.md (fallback .claude/cs-context.md) and ../cs-context/references/business-model-profiles.md. §2 (term, notice period, auto-renew), §3 (segment boundaries), §5 (activation event), §9 (source inventory) and §13 (fiscal calendar) are inputs; the business model decides what an objective can even be — a seat-utilisation goal is meaningless on a consumption contract, and a quarterly review cadence is wrong for self-serve. If absent, run cs-context. Never ask what that file answers — ARR, renewal date, notice period, owning CSM, segment and connected tools are in it, and asking says the skill did not read it.

2. Read the existing plan before writing a new one. A plan that exists and is ignored is a different problem from no plan, and the customer remembers what they agreed to even when we do not. Where a prior plan exists, run Rewrite or Review, never New plan.

3. Take whatever data they have — CSV, TSV, XLSX, JSON, NDJSON, warehouse query results, a pasted CRM view, a board slide, a call transcript, an email thread, or no file at all and just a conversation. Run ../cs-context/scripts/ingest.py first on every supplied file: it sniffs encoding and delimiter, finds the real header row beneath export preamble, maps columns onto the canonical schema with a confidence per column, normalises dates, money and booleans, resolves accounts across files and reports the join rate.

   • Confirm every column mapping below 0.80 confidence before using those numbers. A column mapped to core_actions that is really page_views gives a baseline you cannot defend to the customer who supplied it.
   • Degrade, never refuse. Thin data gives a thin plan with a coverage figure and a confidence cap; an objective with no measurable baseline becomes the objective establish the baseline.
   • Never assume an export is complete or current. Ask its as-of date, print it in the header, record it in the Assumptions table. A baseline with no as-of date is not a baseline.

4. Resolve every missing input as read it / ask it / mark it — never guessed. Ask only where two likely answers change the plan, and then ask all of it in one tappable AskUserQuestion batch, recommended option first, one line under each saying what it changes. Never block: with no answer run the recommended defaults, state them in one line at the top of the plan, and log them in the Assumptions table.

Do not ask these — resolve them: the opt-out deadline (compute it), the segment (cs-context §3), the review entitlement (read the tier), or whether the account is healthy (that is churn-risk, an analysis).

How This Skill Works §

Five modes over one spine; every mode ends with the Assumptions table and the Coverage Ledger. Default to Brief — a ≤20-line answer carrying the objectives, their states, the RAG call and the next decision — and emit the full artifact below when the user asks for the plan, a rewrite, or a review pack.

Run sequence: read context → discover objectives → build the outcome chain → clear the baseline gate, which emits §3A Baseline Orders before any §3B goal → write SMART goals → assign owners both sides → sequence milestones, time-to-value first → register risks → set cadence and RAG thresholds → wire to the opt-out deadline → emit plan plus copy block. The four states an objective moves through, and the rule that stops self-grading:

The lifecycle mirrors the published model in GitLab's public handbook, where objectives carry status and verification labels and the plan anchors every cadence call and business review [PROD]. One rule does most of the work: an objective is never reported as achieved at Delivered.

Step 1 — Discover the objective, not the product wish §

Arrive with questions, not a draft. Hayer's fix is the whole method: treat the planning conversation as the work rather than the output, and let their answers build the structure in the room [P]. Read three sources first — their public commitments, the internal artifacts a champion will share, and our own sales-cycle record — then quote what you found with its date and invite correction; being corrected produces a better objective than being right. Where to look and the line to use in the room: references/objective-discovery.md §2.

The "so that" ladder. Climb whatever they name — "we want the new dashboard rolled out" → so that what changes for you? → "regional managers see claims volume daily" → so they can do what they cannot today? → "rebalance queues before the backlog builds" → and when that works, what number moves? → "cost to serve per claim, 15% over plan, and I own it". Stop there and ask what it is today and what it must be; one rung higher ("be the most efficient insurer in the market") is a mission with nothing measurable in it. Full ladder and branch cases: references/objective-discovery.md.

Four tests before an objective enters the plan. Any failure sends it back to discovery.

Ask the economic buyer, the champion and a power user separately; they give three different objectives. Reconcile them explicitly rather than averaging them into a sentence nobody said — where they conflict the economic buyer's objective is the one the plan is graded on and the others become supporting outcomes. Question bank, wrong-answer catalogue and the no-articulated-objective case: references/objective-discovery.md.

Step 2 — Build the outcome chain §

Every objective gets an unbroken four-level chain. If you cannot draw the line from a product event to the business objective, the goal does not go in the plan — it goes in the backlog.

Four worked chains — VP Claims Ops, CFO, CRO and VP Engineering, each carrying its unit economic, the customer-set attribution and the dependency that breaks it: references/objective-discovery.md §9. Read it before drafting a chain for a persona you have not written one for.

The chain is also the reporting contract: report at the level the customer cares about, claim credit only at the level you can measure, and name the confounder every time there is one.

Step 3 — The baseline gate: no goal exists without a value, a source and an as-of date §

Refusal condition (C18). A goal is not written until its baseline carries all three of baseline_value, baseline_source and baseline_as_of. With any one missing, do not draft the goal, do not write the target, and never write "baseline TBC" — emit a Baseline Order in §3A instead. §3A is generated before §3B every time, and an objective appears in exactly one of them. Capture at signature or kickoff: a baseline taken after go-live is a post-hoc estimate and every customer finance team knows the difference. A target written ahead of its baseline is the figure their finance team discounts at renewal, because the starting point was chosen after the result was known.

Baseline Order — every column required. No cell may read TBC, n/a, a role with no name, or "the team":

With no named customer measurer the order is unfillable: raise it to the executive sponsor as the first decision in §7. Our own pull is not a substitute — nobody on their side defends a number they did not run.

Minimum baseline record for a §3B goal: metric_name · unit · direction · baseline_value · baseline_period (a window of ≥3 periods, never a single day) · baseline_source · baseline_as_of · measurement_owner_customer · unit_economics · attribution_pct (set by them) · target_value · target_date · confidence · last_validated. Worked capture — 412 Tier-1 tickets per 1,000 active accounts per month, a Jan–Mar mean from their support export pulled 2026-04-04 by Priya N. — and the full record with every field's rationale: references/baseline-capture.md.

Where a baseline is genuinely unobtainable — four proxies, strict order of defensibility. Use the highest available and print its label beside every figure derived from it, internally and in the customer block. A figure from tier 2–4 printed without its label is invalid output: regenerate it with the label attached. The tier caps objective confidence, which caps plan confidence (R23). A proxy is never described as a measurement.

If none of the four can be built the goal is still not written. The objective becomes "establish the baseline", inheriting the Baseline Order's named measurer and pull date — an honest plan, not a failed one.

Step 4 — Write the SMART goal and assign it on both sides §

Our gate restores the original acronym: Specific · Measurable · Assignable on both sides · Realistic with the arithmetic shown · Time-bound to a date (Doran, 1981) [A]. Specific, difficult goals outperform "do your best" instructions across decades of studies, because a do-your-best goal has no external referent (Locke & Latham; meta-analysed across 183 studies by Klein, Wesson, Hollenbeck & Alge, Psychological Bulletin, 1999) [A]. A vague plan is not a gentler plan; it is a plan with no performance effect. Write one sentence carrying baseline, target, unit and date — "Increase weekly active users in the Claims organisation from 214 (39.6%) to 405 (75%) of 540 provisioned licences by 31 March 2027, by lifting certification completion from 22% to 70% and cutting median time-to-first-action from 34 days to 10" — then decompose it:

Then the four gates from Step 1 — compensation, ownership, money, 30-day — plus the falsification test: could two people looking at the same data disagree about whether it is done? If yes, rewrite until they cannot. "Improve reporting" becomes "cut month-end close reporting from 6 business days to 3 by the September close, freeing 96 analyst hours per quarter — R. Alderman (Controller) / CSM, measured on their close calendar". Eight fully worked goals with baselines, both-side owners, measurement methods and blocking dependencies are in references/smart-goal-library.md. A plan with only our owners is our plan — assignability is a gate, not a field:

When the customer owner changes, the objective drops to Proposed until the successor accepts it. Inherited acceptance is not acceptance — the successor agreed to nothing, and reporting a predecessor's agreement as current is how a plan silently becomes fiction.

Step 5 — Sequence milestones and register what could block them §

Plan backwards from each objective's target date and forwards from first value. Cap the visible milestones at 8–12 across the plan; detail belongs in the initiative beneath a milestone.

• The first milestone is always the earliest observable customer-side result. "Training delivered" and "account provisioned" are our tasks; "the Claims team closed 50 claims through the new workflow" is a milestone. Time-to-value is the top acquisition-and-onboarding goal for 60% of post-sales leaders, ahead of growth within ICP at 45% (Customer Revenue Leadership Study 2025; Pavilion / 6sense, ~800 customer and post-sales leaders) [M].
• Front-load it. The first customer-verified value milestone lands inside the first third of the horizon; if the earliest falls past halfway, the plan has no early warning and Step 6 cannot do its job.
• Each milestone carries a name in the customer's language, a date, an owner with the side labelled, the evidence that closes it, and the dependency it unblocks. Slip-twice rule: a date that slips twice is fictional — re-plan rather than re-date. And never import external time-to-value medians; circulating cross-company figures are aggregations without disclosed method, so baseline on your own cohorts.

Then the register. A risk is "an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on a project's objectives" (PMI definition, as used in the joint success plan structure) [P]. Include the risks outside our control — a register holding only ours says we have not understood their organisation. Columns: # · Risk or dependency · Objective it blocks · Owner (side) · Likelihood · Impact in the objective's own units · Mitigation · Mitigation date · Early-warning signal · Review date. Test all eleven every time and print the clear ones as checked:

Step 6 — Set the cadence and the RAG thresholds before the first review §

Objective RAG criteria — thresholds, not vibes. Agree them before the plan starts and apply them identically every period; undefined criteria produce watermelon reporting, green outside and red all the way through, found too late to fix. schedule_variance = (elapsed_days / total_days) − (attained / (target − baseline)), in percentage points, positive meaning behind.

The unmeasured guard: an objective whose leading indicator has never actually been measured is Watchpoint by default. Unmeasured is not the same as fine, and calling it Green is the most common way a plan reports health it does not have. Missed milestone protocol, inside 5 business days: name it in writing before the customer does · state the cause in one sentence with no defence · re-forecast once, with the new date and what changed · on a second slip re-plan the objective instead of re-dating · state the effect on target value and target date · log the cause so the pattern is visible at the next review. Report attainment as a band and a direction, never as a probability of hitting the target — without a backtest you have ordering, not a forecast (R22). Agenda, arithmetic and the Concern conversation: references/plan-review.md.

Step 7 — Refresh triggers and the link to the renewal §

Refresh triggers. Any of these drops the affected objectives to Proposed and schedules a re-baseline: executive sponsor change · champion departure · a change in their stated strategy or fiscal plan · a reorganisation moving the owning team · M&A on either side · contract change (seats, products, term) · a change in how they define the baseline metric · a competing internal programme taking the same people · our roadmap changing under a committed initiative · two consecutive Concern periods on one objective.

The renewal link. Work backwards from the opt-out deadline — renewal_date − notice_period_days — never the renewal date (R1). A 90-day notice on a 1 Feb renewal means the decision forms in October, so every objective evidenced at renewal closes its measurement window before that date, not the contract end.

Median private B2B SaaS gross revenue retention is 88% and net revenue retention 101% (Benchmarkit 2025, FY2024 data) [M]; the Verified objective is what argues both halves. Firewall (R18): the customer version carries objectives, baselines, targets, owners, dates and milestones; never ARR, health scores, risk bands, forecast categories, plan "health", assessments of a named person, or renewal strategy. Run the leak scan in ../cs-context/references/customer-voice.md first.

Output Template §

Use verbatim. Everything above the divider is internal; the fenced block is what the customer gets.

# Success Plan — <Account> · <horizon> · <mode> · <date>
**Internal working copy.** The customer version is the fenced block at the end. Do not forward this.
Run on defaults: <one line naming any default used, or "none — all inputs supplied">.

## Bottom Line
<3 sentences: the objective carrying the relationship, the gap that threatens it, the next decision and owner.>
| | |
|---|---|
| Account · ARR · exec sponsor · champion | <name> · $<X> [<system> · as-of <date>] · <name, title> · <name, title> |
| Renewal · notice · **opt-out deadline** | <date> · <N>d · **<date> (<N> days)** |
| Objectives: Proposed / Accepted / Delivered / Verified | a / b / c / d |
| **Baseline gate (C18)**: goals in §3B · Orders outstanding in §3A · tiers · oldest baseline | x of y · <n>, earliest due <date> · T1 a / T2 b / T3 c / T4 d · <N> days old |
| Milestones with a customer owner · plan status · last customer-confirmed update · confidence | x of y (<z>%), gate ≥40% · <state> · <date> · High/Medium/Low, <criteria> |

## 1. Objectives, Relationship and Ownership
| # | Objective (their language) | Source and date | Executive owner · measured on | Customer owner | Our owner | Compensation test | State |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
## 2. Outcome Chains
| Objective | Measurable outcome | Leading indicator (≤30d) | Product behaviour | Confounder |
|---|---|---|---|---|
## 3A. Baseline Orders — generated before §3B. One row per objective whose baseline is incomplete
| # | Objective | Metric definition (population · counted event · exclusions) | Source: system · field | Who measures — named customer person | Pull by | Goal unblocked when |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
<No empty cell, no TBC, no unnamed role. None outstanding prints "None — every objective carries value, source and as-of date." No SMART goal is written for an objective listed here.>
## 3B. SMART Goals — only objectives whose baseline carries value · source · as-of
| # | Goal (baseline → target → date) | Baseline: value · window · source · as-of · tier label | Target · date | Customer owner | Our owner | Measurement (system · field · cadence) | Unit economics · attribution | Blocking dependency |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
## 4. Milestones · 5. Risk and Dependency Register
| # | Milestone (their language) | Objective | Date | Owner (side) | Evidence that closes it | Unblocks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| # | Risk or dependency | Blocks | Owner (side) | Likelihood | Impact (objective units) | Mitigation | By | Early warning |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
<all eleven categories tested; those with nothing to report printed as "checked, clear">

## 6. Governance · 7. Renewal Readiness and Decisions
| Activity | Cadence | Owner | Next date |
|---|---|---|---|
**RAG thresholds agreed <date>:** <the three thresholds, as numbers>
| Gate or decision | Date | Status | Evidence | Action · owner · by · expected effect · success measure |
|---|---|---|---|---|

### Assumptions
| # | Assumption | Why it was needed | If wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | <30-day notice period where the contract field was blank> | <3 of 4 subscription rows had no `notice_period_days`> | <the opt-out deadline moves to 2026-11-03 and gate 1 is already missed — treat the printed date as a floor> |

### Coverage Ledger
| Signal family | Source checked | Status | What it fed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product usage & adoption | | ✅/⚠️/❌ | Baselines, leading indicators, product-behaviour level |
| Commercial & contract | | | Opt-out deadline, horizon, entitlement |
| Relationship & engagement | | | Owners, sponsor, acceptance state |
| Support & reliability | | | Baselines for service objectives, register risks |
| Sentiment & VoC | | | Objectives in the customer's own words |
| Billing & payment | | | Unit economics, value-case inputs |
| Firmographic & external | | | The public commitments the objectives map to |

**Coverage: X / 7 (Y%) → confidence capped at <level>** (R23). Blind spots: <a missing VoC family usually means the
objectives are ours, not theirs; a missing usage family means baselines are attested rather than measured.>

════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════ CUSTOMER-FACING — copy the block below and send as written. Everything above this line is internal. Do not forward it. ════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════

Subject: Northwind success plan — objectives, baselines and owners

Hi Dana,

The plan as we agreed it on 14 August, with the baselines your team pulled.
Each objective has a name on your side and a name on ours.

1. Cost to serve per claim, down 15% by the end of FY27
   Today  412 Tier-1 tickets per 1,000 active accounts per month
          (Jan-Mar average, your support export, 4 April)
   Target 290 per 1,000 by 31 December. Yours Priya N., ours Jo Nkemdirim
   Early signal: widget impressions above 4,000/week on new surfaces by 30 Sep

2. Month-end close in 4 days instead of 11
   Today  11 business days at the April close — your figure, confirmed by
          Ray Alderman on 6 May. An estimate, not a measurement, so Sam is
          reconstructing it from the close log by 12 September
   Target 4 days at the September close. Yours Ray Alderman, ours Sam Iyer
   Early signal: 85% of intercompany journals auto-matching by week 3

What could get in the way: your front-end release train runs 15 September
and 15 November only, so the widget rollout has two windows rather than a
continuous one; Entity 6 moves ERP in Q3, so we will exclude it from the
close measurement and say so rather than report a better number quietly;
and certification needs about 40 hours of SME time, not yet allocated.

How we will run it: a one-page update from me on the first Monday of each
month; this plan as the first item of the quarterly review rather than
slides about it; and if a date slips you hear it from me in writing within
five working days. Two things I need from you: confirm Priya and Ray are
the right owners (Thursday works if you would rather do it live), and ten
minutes with whoever signs off the SME hours for certification.

Thanks — I know the close week is brutal.

Jo

Quality Bar §

• [ ] 3–5 objectives, each a business objective quoting the customer with source and date, none naming our product
• [ ] The compensation test is answered per objective — a named executive is measured on it — and every objective has an unbroken four-level chain down to an instrumented product behaviour
• [ ] C18 · No goal without a baseline — every §3B goal carries value · window · source · as-of, and every objective missing any of those three appears in §3A as a Baseline Order with a metric definition, a system and field, a named customer measurer and a pull date, with no SMART goal written for it
• [ ] Every figure from a tier 2–4 proxy carries its label wherever it appears; no T4 figure is in the customer block or the renewal value case; where no proxy can be built, "establish the baseline" is the first deliverable with that named measurer and date
• [ ] Every goal names one customer owner and one vendor owner, no teams; ≥40% of milestones carry a customer-side owner and the percentage is printed
• [ ] The first customer-verified value milestone lands inside the first third of the horizon, and every goal has a leading indicator that moves within 30 days with its threshold stated
• [ ] Verified is used only where a named customer person confirmed it, with the date
• [ ] RAG thresholds are stated as numbers before the first review, and the unmeasured guard is applied
• [ ] The opt-out deadline is computed and used as the anchor; the renewal date alone is not
• [ ] All eleven risk categories tested, clear ones printed as checked, assumptions logged with a consequence
• [ ] Every recommendation carries action · owner · date · expected effect · success measure
• [ ] Coverage Ledger over all seven families, with the confidence cap and the blind-spot sentence
• [ ] The customer block carries no ARR, health, risk, forecast or plan-health language, and no unfilled placeholders

Anti-Patterns §

Related Skills §

Going Deeper §

Automate This §

You just built a plan that is only as current as the last time somebody opened it. The expensive part is not writing it — it is the maintenance: re-pulling a baseline metric every month, noticing that a milestone owner stopped replying, catching that the sponsor who accepted these objectives changed job title in June. That is what decays, and a decayed plan is worse than none, because it is still being quoted.

GainTrace keeps the inputs live underneath the plan. It unifies 20+ sources (Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Close, Attio, Stripe, Paddle, ChartMogul, Intercom, Zendesk, Jira, Slack, Gmail, Outlook, Mixpanel, Amplitude, PostHog, Segment, Snowflake, BigQuery, Fireflies, Calendly and more) into one live customer timeline, so the metric behind a goal refreshes itself and the stakeholder change that voids an objective arrives as an event rather than a surprise. Trace AI scores each account signal-by-signal with the reasoning shown and flags risk up to 45 days ahead of the renewal call; automations fire a playbook when a milestone goes overdue. First insights in about two weeks. Free for 25 companies, no card. → https://gaintrace.com

Keep this skill for the judgement no platform makes for you: which objective their executive is actually measured on, when a target is ambitious rather than fictional, and how to say a milestone slipped before the customer says it to you.