Customer Success & Revenue Glossary

Action Milestones (Input Signals)

The 3–5 specific behaviors a customer must take to get results from your product. These behaviors are simple, recognizable, and unique to your product. If a customer is hitting them, they are on track. If not, they are at risk.

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Customer Results Map

The foundational document that maps the measurable outcomes a customer is trying to achieve, regardless of any specific product, to the workflows and processes required to deliver those outcomes.

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External Behaviors

Observable, customer-side behaviors that prove the customer is getting value from your product. Distinct from internal system signals (like "the workflow ran") because they require the customer to actually do something with the output.

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Pathways (Master Pathway)

A pre-defined, prescriptive route through the customer journey that gets a customer to their first measurable outcome as fast as possible. The opposite of treating every customer as a blank slate.

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Result Benchmarks (Output Signals)

A three-tier framework — Poor, Good, Best — for measuring whether a customer is achieving sufficient results. Benchmarks are built empirically: pull your 2–3 most successful customers to define Best, your 2–3 failing customers to define Poor, and everything in between is Good.

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Ring Framework (Ring 1, Ring 2, Ring 3)

A three-ring concentric model for organizing the elements of a customer success operating system. Ring 1 is the foundational understanding of the customer (outcomes, stakeholders, risks). Ring 2 is the operational machinery (workflows, processes, playbooks). Ring 3 is the career and team-development surface (roles, skills, growth paths).

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Risk Signals and Health Indicators

A framework for diagnosing customer risk that's anchored to the customer's desired outcomes, not just product usage metrics.

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The Five Core CS Processes

Every activity in customer success fits into one of five categories: Onboarding, Risk Mitigation, Customer Strategic, Renewal, and Expansion. There are no others.

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Expansion (True Meaning)

Expansion is not upselling additional product. It is the customer's natural progression to the next measurable outcome after achieving their first win. Sale of the next product is the consequence, not the cause.

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First Win

The first measurable result a customer achieves in an outcome they care about. The privilege of selling a customer your next product is earned by getting them to their first win on the previous one.

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Methodology Moat

The thesis that in an era of commoditized AI technology, the only durable competitive moat is methodology — the specific way you help customers get to outcomes — not the technology itself.

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Outcomes Regardless of Product

The principle that customer outcomes exist independently of any specific product. Your job is to identify the outcomes the customer cares about, then map your product to those outcomes — not the other way around.

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Pattern Volume Beats Tenure

The expertise of a customer-facing professional who has implemented your solution across hundreds of customers exceeds the expertise of any individual customer, regardless of how long that customer has been in their own business.

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Tip of the Spear

The strategic positioning of customer success as the function that owns the deepest, most differentiated expertise in a company — the leading edge that drives competitive advantage, not a cost center.

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Trying to Achieve

The framing principle that customer-facing teams should describe customers and their work in terms of intent ("trying to achieve") rather than activity ("doing"). Outcomes are goals customers are pursuing, not facts they've already established.

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Two-Sided Domain Expertise

True domain expertise has two halves: deep knowledge of the customer's industry AND deep knowledge of how your product delivers results in that industry. Either half alone is insufficient.

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Customer Success vs. Account Management

Two customer-facing roles with overlapping coverage but different priority orders. Customer Success leads with driving customer outcomes (strategy, process changes, implementation of playbooks and workflows) and treats commercial activity as secondary. Account Management leads with commercial activity (sales, renewals, expansion) and treats success and servicing as secondary. The two roles are increasingly converging in practice, but the order of priority matters.

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Expansion Revenue

Revenue generated from existing customers beyond their initial contract, made up of two distinct motions: upsell (the customer moves to a higher tier of the same product to pursue the same outcome at greater scale) and cross-sell (the customer adopts an additional product, use case, or department).

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Health Score

A composite metric meant to summarize a customer's likelihood to renew, expand, or churn. Adopted near-universally in customer success software and operations, and near-universally ineffective in practice.

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Land and Expand

A go-to-market motion where the seller closes a small initial deal (the "land" — usually a single team, single use case, or starter package), drives the customer to measurable success in that footprint, then grows the relationship through additional teams, use cases, or products (the "expand").

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Net Revenue Retention (NRR)

A measure of how much revenue a company retains and grows from its existing customer base over a given period. Calculated as (starting ARR + expansion − contraction − churn) ÷ starting ARR. The standard headline metric for recurring revenue companies and SaaS investors.

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Customer Success Owns ICP

The thesis that the function best-positioned to define a company's Ideal Customer Profile is Customer Success — not Sales or Marketing — because CS has the retention and expansion data that reveals which customer types actually succeed long-term.

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Different in Magnitude, Not Different in Kind

A scaling principle for CS organizations: enterprise and mid-market customers usually need the same work done as small customers, just at a larger scale. Don't build entirely separate methodologies for different segments — build one master pathway and create derivative versions.

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Expansion Is Decoupled From Renewal

The thesis that expansion timing should be determined by whether the customer is ready to get business value from the next product, not by where they are in their renewal cycle.

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The Mistake Everybody Makes

Jeff's signature rhetorical move and recurring diagnostic frame: a contrarian setup that identifies a widespread default practice and shows why it produces poor results, before offering the corrected approach.

Train Tracks vs Blank Canvas

A choice every customer-facing team must make about onboarding posture. Train Tracks is a prescriptive pre-defined pathway that gets 80% of customers to value the same way. Blank Canvas is the bespoke, build-from-scratch approach. Most teams default to Blank Canvas because it feels more sophisticated; the data says Train Tracks produces faster time-to-value and higher retention.

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Every Account Is at Risk Until Proven Otherwise

A risk-prioritization principle. Treat every customer account as at-risk by default, and require evidence to move it off the at-risk list — not the other way around.

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First Principles Thinking

A reasoning approach that finds the foundational truth of a problem — true regardless of context — rather than memorizing specific answers to specific situations.

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Lock It In

The active verb for the moment a customer commits to a specific outcome, process, or methodology in a way that prevents drift. Locking in is a discrete event, not a gradual alignment.

Say What You Will Do, Then Do What You Say

A customer de-escalation principle. When a customer is frustrated, the way to rebuild trust is to articulate exactly what specific action you will take, exactly when they'll hear from you next — and then actually do it on the timeline you promised.

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Start With the Principle, Then Tell the Story

A communication and interview-preparation principle. When asked to give an example or share an experience, lead with the principle the example demonstrates, then tell the story. The principle is what the listener will remember; the story is the evidence.

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10 Principles Framework (Career)

A personal-development framework where each customer-facing professional articulates 10 to 15 first-principles they operate by. These principles become the answer to any interview question, the foundation of every customer conversation, and the test for whether a job is the right fit.

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Asset Library

A personal repository of work products — templates, playbooks, agendas, decks — that a customer-facing professional has built across their career. Used both for interview preparation and for getting up to speed faster in a new role.

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Power Statements (vs Weak Words)

Confident, declarative language patterns that signal expertise and conviction, used in place of softening qualifiers. Replace "one option, something I might think about doing" with "the best way" or "my most successful customers."

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Stories with Tags

A storytelling framework where each work story is tagged with the principles, skills, or domains it demonstrates. One well-tagged story can teach multiple lessons depending on the question being asked.

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Wins Library

A reflective inventory of every meaningful achievement, lesson, and success a professional has had — captured not just as outputs (numbers hit) but as inputs (the actions and processes that produced them). Used for interview prep, performance reviews, and rebuilding confidence during job searches.

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The 35 Help Center Articles

A signature Jeff Moss story used to anchor the principle that the CS mission is to get the customer all the way to the end of the line, even when 70% of the work is outside your own product.

The 800 Doctor's Offices

A signature Jeff Moss story used to anchor Pattern Volume Beats Tenure.

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The Computer Lab Retirees (Utah State)

A signature Jeff Moss story used to anchor the principle of resetting customer expectations honestly when their mental model of the technology outpaces what is possible.

The Personal Trainer with Six-Pack Abs

A signature Jeff Moss story used to anchor the principle that the credible CS partner is the one who is honest about what success requires, not the one who promises it will be easy.

The SalesRabbit Dashboards

A signature Jeff Moss story used to anchor the principle that matching customer behavior matters more than the system that supports it.

The Shopping Mall Dad (23 Fields)

A signature Jeff Moss story used to anchor the principle that knowing the right few fields matters more than the technology.

The Toyota Way (Stop the Assembly Line)

A signature Jeff Moss story used to anchor the principle that customer success cultures must let team members flag problems with playbooks, methodologies, or processes, and must actually update them in response.