The customer looked really healthy on paper. $480K USD value, 72% adoption rate, three departments onboarded, and quarterly ROI reports showing 14% cost savings. The pretty picture, unfortunately, was covering up some unpleasant factors bubbling beneath that posed a definite threat to the ongoing relationship. There were three sponsor executives in 12 months, with priority resets every quarter. We discovered that $480K customer was definitely at-risk. The Executive Continuity Audit we did for the account revealed that we had been too dependent on those key executives. The lessons we learned from this relationship, that over-reliance on executive sponsors is risky, drove us to create Executive Continuity Plans for all our accounts to focus on the business rather than the current individual in the role.

The Process

Our customer had three sponsor executives in 12 months. In Q1, the sponsor declared that “integrations are the top priority.” The next sponsor executive had a different idea for Q2: “Reporting needs to be fixed; nothing else matters.” In Q3, the picture grew even more grim: “We’re consolidating vendors. You need to justify why we’re not redundant.”

Each new leader came in with a new mandate. Each reset wiped out months of progress. My CSM was firefighting every quarter, scrambling to rebuild success plans, new dashboards, and new playbooks. She thought the customer was indecisive. But the truth was simpler and scarier. It wasn’t indecision. It was sponsor executive turnover that was threatening the ongoing relationship.

We sat down and did an Executive Continuity Audit for the account:

Do we have the company’s 12-month objectives documented? (No)
Do we know how each sponsor’s mandate ties to those objectives? (No)
Are our success metrics anchored to individual leaders, or to company strategy? (Leaders)
If this sponsor left tomorrow, would our value story survive? (No)

Score: 0/4 = Total dependency on executives.

That’s when it hit us: we weren’t aligning with the business. We were aligning with whoever sat in the exec chair that quarter. When the third sponsor came in asking about vendor consolidation, we didn’t scramble, we re-focused.

We presented: Cost savings of 14% year-over-year. Adoption growth across three departments. A roadmap showing reduced reliance on overlapping tools. In short, we told the company’s story, not an individual’s wish list. The account renewed. The CSM kept her sanity.

Lessons Learned

We created what we now call an Exec Continuity Plan:

Anchor to company goals, not personal KPIs. Instead of asking “what do you care about?” we started asking: “What’s on your company’s board deck this year?”
Document, don’t reset. Every time a new exec came in, we showed them: Here’s what your predecessor prioritized. Here’s how that ties to adoption, cost savings, and reporting. Here’s where you inherit a success story.
Build resilience into success metrics. Instead of “integration complete,” we shifted to “time-to-value reduced 18% across teams.” The kind of metric no exec could walk away from.

Customer priorities don’t always change because the customer is confused. Sometimes, it’s because the executives keep rotating. If you don’t map your value to the company itself, you’ll always be rebuilding from scratch. That’s why today, every one of our large accounts has an Exec Continuity Plan in place. Because leaders will come and go. But the company’s goals and your values should never reset every quarter.

Summary

The Company: A $480K account that was at-risk despite its initial healthy appearance

The Customer Success Executive: Kelly McGuire

The Outcome: Relationship refocused, and the lessons learned were applied across all other customer relationships

Kelly McGuire

Kelly McGuire is a passionate CX leader with demonstrated success in building and scaling high-performance go-to-market teams as well as navigating enterprise-level customer relationships. Over the last 15+ years, Kelly has led global Customer teams at fast-growing SaaS organizations, driving top line revenue impact, operational efficiency and organizational excellence. She is driven by coaching & guiding teams, helping businesses solve challenges, align objectives to company goals and obtain measurable results. In her spare time, she’s an avid traveler and music lover.