Your First 90 Days Owning an NRR Number: The VP of Customer Success Operating Plan

Speaker A: The day you sign an offer letter with an NRR target on it is the day your entire career changes. You are no longer paid to make customers happy. At that point, you are paid to make a number move. And the part that no one actually tells you about or prepares you for is when you get promoted or hired into that VP of Customer Success seat. The renewal landing in your first quarter, they were won or lost months before you ever walked in the door. And you are being judged every single day on that number that you did not create. Yet again, you are still responsible for it. So today I am giving you the exact operating plan I wish someone had handed me the first time I owned a retention number. And what to do in your first 30 days, or even your first 60 days, and then into your first 90 days of what you have to do as a customer success leader that owns an NRR number. And it's gonna be all about the number that you inherited and the number that you are gonna be creating as a customer success leader. So welcome back to the Customer Success Pro Podcast. I'm your host, Anika Zubair and this show exists for one reason. It's really to help you build the confidence and the skills to become a revenue generating customer success Pro professional. Because customer success is a revenue function and a renewal is a sale. And if you cannot tie your work to revenue, it really doesn't matter what your title actually is. And I have served as a VP of Customer Success three times in my career. And whether you just landed your first VP seat or you're interviewing for one, or you're a csm, um, who maybe wants to understand how your leader thinks, or maybe you're a CS professional that's thinking about becoming a VP of Customer Success one day in your career. Well, if you fall into any of these buckets, then this episode is going to be your exact playbook. So let's actually get into it. Hello everyone, I'm your host, Anika Zubair and welcome to the Customer Success Pro Podcast. Your go to space for real talk, expert advice and actionable insights in the world of customer success. I'm a CS executive leader, award winning strategist, CS coach and customer success fanatic. I help CSMs, um, and CS leaders build the skills and the confidence to become revenue driving pros and scale world class CS teams. So whether you're brand new to CS or a seasoned leader, this podcast is here to support your growth. Because customer success isn't a destination, it's a journey. And I'm here to be your guide and navigate every step of your journey. So join me every Wednesday where you'll get fresh CS tips, tricks and strategies you can actually use. Some weeks I'll share my own insights and best practices from working in CS over the last 13 years. And once a month I'll bring on expert guests to dive into the most relevant and pressing topics in customer success today. So if you're ready to level up, hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you tune in and let's make your CS journey a little bit easier together. Okay, I wanna start with two numbers that I think should make every single CS leader, whether you're new or an existing leader for a while, really make you sit up and listen to what I have to say. The first number that I wanna share is that the Chief Customer Officer is the youngest seat in in the C suite and it has an average tenure of just 29 months. Okay, 29 months, that is barely two and a half years. Some data that's floating around LinkedIn puts VPs of customer success 10 years even lower than that by the way at around 18 months. And even looking back at my career, I had a tenure of two years and then 18 months for my last two VP roles. So on the money by the way, customer success leadership roles are becoming shorter and shorter. And the other benchmark that I want to say or the other data point that I want to share with you is that there's been a lot of benchmark data that has shared that more than 2,000 SaaS companies that have put in this data point puts median or the middle net revenue retention for Most of these 2,000 SaaS, companies that were that were polled at 106%. Okay, that's on average and then best in class companies run at about 130, 135%. And anything under 100% net revenue retention means your company is actually shrinking before sales actually books a new logo. Now in my experience my highest NRR target has been 123 and my lowest as ah, in the lowest my teams have ever executed on was at 104%. So I would say that revenue has always been part of my teams and the way I run customer success and I know for a lot of people it really isn't, it's something new. And even calculating net revenue retention is a scary thing to do. But just listen back to the numbers that I shared earlier on. Most companies are hitting about 106% net revenue retention and the top performing the unicorn companies out there are between 130 to 135. Now, if you put those two numbers together, you have roughly two years in seat, or so let's say you have two to three years in seat as a customer success leader. And the market has a very clear scoreboard for whether you are winning or losing that seat again. And you know what this kind of reminds me of is football. And since I live in London, I actually mean football. So to my American listeners, soccer. But to the rest of the world, football. And while recording this, it is World cup season. And I just want to kind of relate all this back to football because everyone is going football or soccer crazy at the moment. And I want you to think about what happens when a, uh, Premier League club hires a new manager midseason, okay? That manager or coach ends up inheriting the team. They inherit the injuries, they inherit all the different players, and they actually inherit where the team lands in the league right now. Like what their last position was. They did not recruit the players on their team, they did not design a training program. But from their very first day as head manager or coach, for those Americans listening, the result is on their record. Okay? And if the result does not come within a season, like as, uh, in. If they don't win something that season, usually those head managers are gone, like they're being replaced. Right? And that is exactly what stepping into a VP of Customer Success role looks like in 2026. Okay? You inherit a book of business. You inherit the team, you inherit all the tooling and all the pricing decisions and all the problems, honestly, and, and all of the promises that sales made 18 months ago to customers. And then from day one, you are inheriting what is your current NRR scoreboard. And it has your name written all over it. All right? And the VPs of CS or the managers who survive are not the ones who complain about the team they've inherited. They are the ones who actually show up with an operating plan to actually make a change and hit their net revenue retention so that they can get some wins under their belt. And that is exactly what we're going to talk about today. And I want you to build out your operating system for success if you are stepping into a revenue role. And the first real problem that I see with the first 90 days in owning like a revenue target within customer success is that NRR is truly a lagging indicator. And for those that don't know what I mean by nrr, I mean net revenue retention or for a lot of US companies, it' ndr Net dollar retention. And whether it's nrr, NDR or any other like net revenue number that you are tracking, it is basically the final, final score of a game that started long, long, long before you arrived. Right? The renewals, the churns, like all of that that happened months before your tenure, that all comes back to kind of bite you again because the customers that all checked out during onboarding or during a bad sales cycle over a year ago, that expansion deal that didn't land last month or in the last three months, or maybe it was like a CSM M that basically botched something two quarters ago on your team, right? Like all of that unfortunately all adds up to be your NRR or NDR number. So you're at this stage or this like strange era or window of time where the number reflects the past, but everyone is looking at you for the future and how to fix this. And what do most new VPs do with that window? Well, they drift left and right. They spend 90 days in meet and greet meetings, tool demos, listening to sessions with no structure, joining all the C suite meetings. They collect vibes instead of building an exact same system M to improve revenue. And then when your first board meeting arrives, which it will by the way, depending on again, what time of year you start in. I personally have always started and within usually a month to maximum two months of when I've started into my VP roles, I have attended a board meeting. And every board meeting I've attended, the very first one to the very last ones I've attended, someone will always ask, what is your plan to get us from 101% to 115%. And they have very strong feelings and very strong opinions and they want to know what your answer is to the numbers that they're seeing on the board right now and what they're expecting to roll out in the next month, two months, next quarter as well. Because most board meetings and any executive meeting really is usually talking about business numbers. And net revenue retention is a business number that truly reflects if a business is growing or shrinking and you are directly responsible for that. And when you walk into those board meetings and when you do not have a plan of action or at least an operating model that you know is going to work or you're at least going to try to make work, you start losing credibility really, really quickly. Okay, not at a time of renewal, not in a quarter when QBRs are due, but, but in that first board level conversation where you either sound like an operator or you sound like a very Senior csm. And there's nothing wrong with either. But when you are stepping into a revenue leadership role, you've got to step into that operator role and how to actually execute on a revenue number. And before we go any further into this, let me be super clear about what I mean. Owning the number actually means. It means that when your CFO asks you for a forecast, you have it. It means we can explain where our number comes from. Is it churn? Is it downsells? Is it expansions? Is it a certain segment of customers that are growing? It means basically having a documented point of view on which levers move that number. Okay, Ownership is not about caring the most. Ownership is about being able to really explain, explain and predict the number better than anyone else in the room because it is your number at the end of the day. All right, just a quick pause from the podcast because I want to talk to the leaders that are listening today. So if you're a customer success leader, this is for you. If you own a retention or NRR number right now, here, here is a question. When your board asks for the forecast, is your team giving you dollars and probabilities or are they giving that gut feel? Because if your CSMs are still running friendly check in calls while your name is on that revenue number that you're caring for the entire company, every renewal is going to end up being a surprise and every expansion is just a happy accident. And you are doing forecast math at 10pm at night before a board meeting. And I don't want that for you. I want you to imagine a better world where your CSMs walk into a forecast call talking like commercial owners. They know their book, they flag risks early and they share dollar amounts attached to everything. They surface expansion before sales even sees it. And your Forecast call takes 45 minutes and you end up trusting every line that comes out of the CSM's mout mouth. And that is what it feels like when the whole team operates commercially and not just the leader operating commercially. And that is exactly what my team workshops are built to do. I come in to work with customer success teams all around the world at ah, startups to Fortune 500 companies, whether it's virtually or in person. And I end up training your team on commercial skills that most CSMs were never taught. Things like renewal conversations, objection, handling value and roi, storytelling, forecasting with confidence. These are the same workshops that I have delivered for SaaS. Teams around the world and leaders constantly tell me that forecasting conversations changes within a quarter. Once they have these workshops with their teams. And if you're interested in bringing this to your team, head over to the Customer Success pro.com team-event to book a call with me. And let's design one of these workshops for your team to become the commercial leaders I know they can be. That's TheCustomer SuccessPro.com team event. And the link is in the show notes, of course. All right, let's get back into the episode. So why do smart exchanges, experienced CS leaders end up always just kind of messing up this window of opportunity? It's honestly comes down to four things that I see happening again and again. And personally, I've made one of these mistakes really severely in my very first CS leadership role. But I like calling out mistakes mainly on this podcast, because I like being real with you guys. Like, no one has it figured out, by the way, not even me. I have to say, I have some experiences. I share my experiences, but I also share a lot of mistakes. On purposes like these solo episodes. I love sharing mistakes first because I love making it real. Like if, uh, you guys go and listen to other business podcasts or motivational talks, like, they almost make it sound like, oh, everything's great and perfect. But honestly, most customer success organizations are not perfect. They're far from. They're a mess. They're totally messy. Nothing is perfect. Whether you're at a small 5 person startup or at a major 5000 person company. I have helped and worked with both types of companies. I have personally been a VP of customer success at both types of companies, but I've also worked at consulting and training within both types of companies. And these mistakes that I like to talk about on these solo podcasts is just to remind us all we are living through real change in customer success. And it's hard and it's not easy, and mistakes are the only way that we end up growing in our career. So I like to call out mistakes on every single one of these solo episodes because that is the reality. If you are a customer success leader, you make more mistakes than you do make correct things. I don't know how to say that, but basically, mistakes are common. Mistakes are more oftenly common than successes. That's all I have to say about being a VP of customer success, because as much as I share my successes, there's a lot of mistakes that sit behind it. But anyways, as I was saying, a lot of mistakes are made when you're within your first 90 days as a customer success leader. And these four that I want to talk about are the Ones that I keep seeing happen time and time again. And one is that I've. I've basically fumbled so many times. But the first mistake is basically accepting a number without actually doing the math yourself. And I just want to say you'd be really shocked at how many companies calculate NRR totally differently. Okay? It's a trailing twelve month number, or maybe it's an annualized monthly number. Um, sometimes it includes contraction at renewal, or maybe it's at all periods of downgrade. Right? And sometimes they have professional services a part of that number, and sometimes it's not a part of that number. So if you do not actually do the math yourself, or at least interrogate, how did they come up with this calculation? How did they come up with this number? You might actually spend a year optimizing an NRR number that is completely different in a CFO spreadsheet than what's in your dashboard or what's in your calculation of nrr. And I have seen leaders present retention wins to the board and get corrected by finance in the room. Okay? That is the level of career damage you never recover from, and you just don't want to go there. So again, do your math, or at least double check where the math is coming from. All right? Mistake number two is boiling the ocean. And this is one for all of my type A control freak customer success leaders, which I admittedly was as well. But this is a mistake I've made too many times. And I'm pretty sure if you're listening to this podcast and you're an overachiever in customer success, this is probably also one that relates back to your experience as well. But new leaders always want to prove themselves. And I get it, they want to launch everything at once. New health scores bring in a new customer success platform. Re segment your customer base. Um, create new plans, like comp plans for your CS team, new playbooks, like new initiatives, new onboarding in 90 days or less. All of this sounds wonderful, okay? But all of this is activity. And NRR doesn't actually respond to activity. It responds to two, maybe three levers that are pulled hard and consistently and built on, again, revenue outcomes and not activity. And again, I have personally experienced boiling the ocean. It's something I did in my very first head of role. And then as I moved into the VP role, I thought I had to do it all to prove something. But doing all this activity proves absolutely nothing. It's the revenue retention number that actually matters. Okay? Mistake number three is operating like a super CSM instead of a Operator. And I'm going to keep saying operator by the way, because I think it's a term that maybe if you're younger in your career, you probably don't know the meaning. But when you work at a venture backed or private equity backed company, which means these are just companies that take on investment that don't actually bootstrap their growth, they have external investors coming into the organization. When you have external investors, everyone who works within the business is considered an operator. Especially when you talk about leadership roles. So when I was a VP of Customer Success, I was an operator, okay. I was someone who was executing against the wishes of investors and the wishes of the um, founders of the business to actually operate the business. That's, that's where the term comes from, operator. But what I see happen time and time again is when a CS person gets nominated into a CS leadership role is they start working like a super CSM instead of truly operating the business or again functioning like an operator. Right? And this is a promotion trap. And it happens more often than you'd like to believe because a lot of times they, people who move into a leadership role from a senior CSM think they got the seat or think they got promoted because they're really good with customers, they're really good under pressure, they know how to react and how to jump into every escalation and how to join every renewal call. And they keep doing this when they sit in the leadership role. But you're doing your team's job instead of your own job. And nobody else in the building is going to be building retention operating systems. Only you can do that. And the mistake that everyone keeps sitting on is like, oh, let me do the job of a super CSM or everyone else on my team. And then you end up forgetting doing your job, which is building that operating system or building that revenue operating system. And the final mistake that I see happen too often, and it's happened with some of the CSMs that I've coached into CS leaders, is they end up letting other people within the organization write your narrative. So if you wait until day, let's say 90 or 120 or however many months you've been at the organization to actually like share your number, what ends up happening is people in the organization end up filling the silent number for you. So what ends up happening is sales then decides that CS is actually a cost center. Or I've heard even worse where sales end up calling CS basically their admin or like their assistant to deals, which is really bad. And then Finance decides to forecast their own number and create their own metric for you, and then your CEO is sit there, like, sat there, like, actually wondering, like, who did I hire and what are they doing? Okay, so don't let other people within the organization. Set your own narrative, okay? Like, set your narrative early. Whether that's with data, whether that's with having chats with the cfo, whether that's understanding sales process. Just make sure you make your decision, like, intention clear. What is the narrative that you're building for? Because if you do not make it clear, what's going to end up happening is everyone else is going to set it for you, and then that's how customer success ends up being a dumping ground. And I know we've said that many times, but it's true. And more times than not, we end up being like the everything department, because we don't really voice what we're here to actually do. I'm here to protect and grow revenue, and I'm going to execute that by doing X, Y and Z. Right? Like, or my team is here to protect and grow revenue through expansion conversations and closing renewals early. Whatever it is, just be very intentional. And if you can also put a metric against it, I'm sure your CEO is going to appreciate it. So saying something like, I'm here to protect and grow revenue to 120% NRR through renewals and upsell motions, Simple. But again, that's your narrative. Stick to it. Make sure you make it clear. Right? And as I went through any of those mistakes, if any of them, like, made you really feel uncomfortable, I'm actually happy that they made you feel uncomfortable. Because that means this next section that we're about to go into is meant for you. Because if you're making these mistakes, first of all, you're human, you're normal, and you work in customer success. Congratulations. You fit all three. But what I can also just say is that what's great about making all these mistakes is we can learn from them, we can expand, we can get better, and we can continue to advance our careers because I made these mistakes. Like I said, I loved boiling the ocean. When I was in my first leadership role, I was like, I have to prove to everyone that I'm worth this title and this rule, and I have to do everything at once. I learned. And the beautiful part about this podcast is that you're going to learn, too, and it's going to make you a better leader by learning from your mistakes. So how do we actually fix all of this? Right. I'm never going to give you just theory. I always like to explain what to do as well. Like to actually lead to success as a revenue leader. And the only reason I always like to explain what happened is because I want it to feel relatable. I want you to understand that this podcast is lived in experience. Everything I teach and coach with and work with teams with is lived in experience, okay? And the very first time, I owned a retention number, including the part where I embarrassed myself. And I share all of this because I made almost every mistake. I really did. And by the way, I dug myself out because of an operating plan. And I have used this and I have taught this with teams and I have worked with many leaders. And it all started in my second week. In seat. I got invited to basically a, uh, finance review. And this was wild. Okay? This was my second week on the job. I was trying to understand the product. I was starting to speak to customers. I was trying to understand my team. But in the second week, the CFO looked at me and asked one simple question. And he asked me, what is your renewal forecast for this quarter? And I gave a very classic customer success answer. I said, well, from what I understand, the relationships are really strong and the sentiment we have of product usage is really high and positive, and I'm still getting up to speed on everything, but I feel really good about our forecast. That's all I said. I'm giggling even saying that out loud, but I said, I feel good about our renewal forecast. And you know what happens when a CS leader says, I feel good and a sales leader ends up saying 92% to commit with two deals at risk worth about 500,000 in opportunities. You know what happens when a CS leader says feelings and a sales leader starts saying numbers and metrics? What ends up happening is the sales leaders get budget and the CS leader gets told to go back to their desks and gets a little bit of sympathy for the work they do. And that's about it. I watched credibility drain out of the room in real time, okay? And nobody was unkind in that moment, but it was almost worse, okay? They moved on to people with numbers. Truly, they moved on with every other leader that could back up their story and narrative with numbers. And I went home that night and I was so upset at myself that I said, I. It felt good. Like, truly, I really was kicking myself for this. And I decided that evening I made a decision that I was never going to be the feelings person ever again any single time I was in an executive room or amongst board members, or again, even in business meetings or team meetings. I am never going to say feelings again. I am going to lead with numbers. And that's exactly what I did. And this is how I built basically an operating system system, okay? And the first thing I did was I rebuilt the number by myself, by hand, okay? That same week, I booked time with the finance manager, and I asked them to walk me through NRR calculation line by line. And I'm so glad I did that, because the number in my dashboard that I had and the number in my CFO's model were not calculated the same way. Different treatment of how downgrades were looked at, different time period. And if I had presented my version to the board or even to the finance team again, they would have corrected me in the room, and then I would have been looking stupid again in front of the team. And that is how I decided, okay, I need to build what I call my NRR number. That's built on the finance modeling system as well. So I started to build out, like starting ARR minus churn minus downsell plus expansion equals ending ARR. And that seems super simple, but I broke it out by segment, by cohort, by csm, by account in a spreadsheet, okay? Just sitting on my laptop at home. And it took me the better part of a week. And it was the singlest, highest value thing I did that week for my entire first quarter as a VP of customer status, because for the first time, I could see where the number was leaking and not just what the number was. Okay? And then the second thing I ended up doing was I did a little bit of a listening tour with actual structure. So I ended up getting on calls with the top 10 accounts, right? Highest ARR. And I didn't want to actually take over the relationship. I let the CSM kind of guide the conversation, but I wanted to hear directly from my customers why they bought what value they were getting and what would make them lead. And on one of those calls, there was a renewal risk that ended up coming up, and it was nowhere visible in our health score. And I sat down then with every CSM on my team, and I asked one question. Which accounts are you worried about? And my team already knew where basically all the risk was. But the risk data I needed for my very first forecast was sitting in their heads, and it wasn't actually sitting in our tooling. And so I went to my peers. I went to the CRO, the cfo, and the VP of product, and I asked each one of Them, what does customer success need to do for you to hit your number? Okay. And those three conversations taught me more about the real expectations of my role than the entire interview process ever did. And the final thing that I ended up doing was really, I was negotiating reality with my executive team. Okay? So once I had that ARR bridge and I could see, like, where the problem was when it came to renewals and when it came to hitting our NRR number, I basically already realized that churn was baked into the book long before I even arrived. And customers who had made a decision to leave months earlier, they were now in that record. And I went to my CEO and said, here's the churn that already has contracted and it's already happened. Like, as in, they have already told us it's going to happen, and here is the target that we're going to assume, and here's the gap. Okay? That conversation was really, really uncomfortable. It was also the reason that six months later when that churn landed, it was known event. And it was not a surprise on my record. I was really, really clear about my narrative. Like, these are the customers that already gave notice, like, three, four months ago. And it also got clarity on things nobody had defined before, which was grr and the NRR target and who actually owned exposure, expansion revenue. So was it my team? Was it the sales team? And getting those answers in writing in month two saved me endless political pain or, like, office drama later. Okay? And then the fourth thing I did was I put three meetings in the calendar and I never, ever canceled them. Okay? It was a weekly renewal forecast call run exactly, by the way, like a sales pipeline review. If you ever sat in a sales pipeline review, I ran a weekly call like that. But for our renewals, okay? Every renewal in the next two quarters committed, best case at risk, with dollar amounts attached to them. And a weekly risk review where every flagged account had an owner, Okay, A playbook and a date, and a weekly expansion review, looking at white space, qualified expansion opportunities. And I will be honest, my team hated the forecast call at first. Like, truly, they. They're like, oh, my gosh, we now have a sales culture. It's invading customer success, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But within about, I want to say, six, maybe eight weeks, something started to really change. My CSM started walking in with dollar amount and probability instead of, like, feelings and gut vibes and things like that. They started flagging risk early because the meeting rewarded early flags and the rhythm that turned retention from something we cared about into a system that Ran every single week whether I was in the room or not, suddenly started changing the way my entire team was working. And then the last thing I'll say is the last thing that I like changed was I picked two levers and said no to everything else. Remember, I was the overachiever that loved to do everything. So my NRR calculation showed me that there was two clear leaks. Customers who onboarded slowly would end up renewing really badly. Like the slower the onboarding, the more likely that they would churn. And then the enterprise accounts with single champions churn the moment the champions would leave. So I put real resources against onboarding time to value and multi threading. Okay? Just those two things. Okay. I had a list of six other initiatives I wanted to run. A new health scoring, a new platform segmentation, and I parked all of them. Why? Because by day 90, I wanted to walk in and change an NRR number. I want to change revenue number, okay? And I walked back into that same finance review with a one page explanation forecast and dollar amounts. And I also came with two plays that we built and executed on that actually had an ARR value attached to each one of them. So the same exact woman that said, I feel good about the renewal forecast, okay? About 10ish weeks later, I completely flipped. I did a 180 because now I could expect explain the number and I could predict the number better than anyone else in the building. And that was the whole fix. I had to rebuild the math myself. Okay? I had to really restructure, I had to renegotiate reality early and I had to install a weekly rhythm to really make sure that we were executing against my NRR number. And basically I had to pull two levers instead of six in order to make this all happen. Now, if you can only remember one thing from this episode, okay, make it this one thing. Becoming a VP of customer success is like taking over as a pilot of a plane that's already in air. Okay? The route was filed by someone else, the fuel was loaded by someone else. Half the journey has already flown. You cannot control any of that. Okay? All of that is in the rear view. But everyone on board is now trusting you with completing this journey and the safe landing of this airplane. Okay? A panic pilot grabs the controls and starts flipping every switch and freaking out, right? But a professional pilot does something much better and calmer. They read the instruments, they configure what's ahead, they talk to their crew or their co pilot and also air traffic control, and then they fly the plane. They just Keep going. And that is what my first 90 days taught me. Okay? I had to read the instruments before I could fly the plane. And this NRR target and how you calculate it, that's your instrument panel. And the listening tour that I was talking about, that's like your crew. That's your whole team. And that weekly rhythm that you're going to get into with the forecasting call and the risk call, doing those things first and doing them often and regularly is gonna mean that your landing is gonna take care of itself. And you know how this show works and you know that I love leaving every single one of these solo episodes with a challenge, because every solo episode I love leaving you with homework, because otherwise I'm just entertainment and I'm pretty entertaining, I think. But at the same time, I hope that as you listen to every single one of these podcasts, you learn something and you apply it into your day to day role. So every solo episode comes with homework because information without application is just entertainment. And I don't want to be entertaining. I want to be your customer success coach to you, being the best VP of customer success you can ever be. All right? And your challenge this week is to build your NR bridge plan, whatever you want to call it. Okay? One page, starting from ARR churn downsell expansion, ending ARR. Break it down by segment. And if you're a vp, build it for the whole book and take it to your finance team to actually pressure test it and check your math. Okay? And if you're just a CSM or a team lead, do not wait for the title. Build your own NRR target. Okay? Walk into your next meeting and say, hey, here is where my book is growing, here's where it's leaking, and here's my plan. I promise you that conversation is going to get you promot super fast. Okay? Because you are starting to think like a VP of customer success without the title. And to make this easier, I have broken down this exact weekly challenge in the newsletter that I send out every week as well. So if you want to have this weekly challenge in your inbox, rather than me talking it out with you, I list it in my newsletter. I also give you examples in my newsletter of how to actually build your NRR bridge. So go ahead and go over to newsletter.thecustomersuccesspro.com and make sure you are subscribed to our weekly newsletter so that you can get this straight to your inbox so that you too can be a revenue leader rather than just someone who goes on gut feeling. Okay, I want you to go and do this homework this week. And if you do do it, feel free to either message me on LinkedIn or leave me a comment down below on this video and let me know what was the most challenging part of building your NRR bridge. Okay, I want to bring this all back together and bring it home for you now, because I want to remind you that the VP of Customer Success seat comes with a scoreboard and the data says you have around about two years to prove that you can make an improvement to that scoreboard. Okay? NRR is a lagging indicator. So your first 90 days are not about moving the number. They are about building the system that moves the number. Make sure you avoid all of the mistakes that we talked about. I listed them out. I shared exactly what I did wrong so that you don't have to do it wrong as well. Okay? Please do not boil the ocean. Do not operate like a super csm and don't let anyone else write your narrative or your number. Okay? And then do what I did. Rebuild the math yourself and build your NRR bridge. And make sure you come out on top with a actual NRR number that you can defend in your next board meeting or your next weekly rhythm or your forecasting call with your cfo. Once you actually start adding a metric or a dollar value to your forecast and to just all the work you're doing, you will be seen differently at the executive level. Okay? You do not inherit an NRR number. Okay. You earn it week by week, forecast by forecast, with a system that works. All right, if this episode helped you, just three quick things I would love if you follow or subscribe to the Customer says Pro Podcast, wherever you are listening, Whether it's Spotify, YouTube, Apple podcast players, anywhere, just hit that subscribe button. I'd really appreciate so you don't end up missing a future episode episode. And if you've made it to this point of the podcast, you are such a true listener. I would love for you to go and leave a comment on this video of, uh, the biggest mistake you ever made as a CS leader or the first time CS leader. I'd love to hear it because I shared my honest mistakes. So I'd love to hear your mistakes down in the comments of this video. And if you did find this show helpful, my last ask is please, please go share it with a customer success leader who has just stepped into the seat and help them make sure that they are at their first board meeting fully prepared. And if you want more help with this. This is exactly what I do. By the way, if you want to sharpen your commercial skills, then RevUp Academy is a great way to do that. If you're a CSM or if you're a customer success leader leading a team, then another great way to sharpen commercial skills within your team is bringing me in for a workshop and training your team on objection handling, on identifying white space analysis for renewals and upsells, and for just making sure that you're articulating value correctly. And if you want either to sign up for RevUp Academy or any of our workshops, all the links are down in the show notes of this episode. All right, my name is Anika Subair and this is the Customer says Pro Podcast and I hope you enjoyed the chat and I hope to see you next week where we are going to dive even deeper into becoming a revenue leader and how customer success is a revenue generating team. All right, I want you to sign off. I want you to go claim your NRR number and grow it and make sure that you become the best revenue leader in your first leadership role. Thanks for tuning in to the Customer Success Pro Podcast. I hope you picked up something valuable to take back to your team. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world to me if you took just 10 seconds to leave a review on Apple or Spotify. It helps more CS pros like yourself discover the show and creating new episodes takes a lot of work, so leaving a nice review keeps me motivated to keep creating. And don't forget to hit subscribe on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcast episodes. I drop a new episode every Wednesday packed with practical tips and if you've got a topic you'd love for me to cover or want to be a guest on my show, send me a message. All the details are in the show notes. I'd love to love to hear from you. And hey, if this episode helped you share it with a fellow CSM or CS leader, remember, sharing is caring. Cheers to your CS journey and I'll catch you next week for our next episode.