Customer Success & Revenue Glossary

Career Domain Expertise

The second branch off Customer Domain Expertise. The expertise to operate yourself across roles, companies, and industries by applying the customer-modeling discipline and the operating-model discipline personally. The framework does not change when you change roles or companies; only your role's responsibilities and metrics do. Productized as career history, wins, principles, stories with tags, power statements, visual portfolio, networking, Role Strategy Planner, tailored applications, interview coaching, and mock exercises.

8 related terms

Company Domain Expertise

The first branch off Customer Domain Expertise. The expertise to design how a company has to operate to deliver its customers' outcomes, across the six customer-facing departments (Marketing, Sales, Onboarding, Customer Success, Support, Product) and the responsibilities, processes, metrics, and roles that flow through them. Captured in the Operating Model Matrix: six departments by six operating rows (customer outcomes, company metrics, responsibilities, processes, role archetypes, context methodology). Built on the 10 Foundational Libraries consumed across columns.

6 related terms

Customer Domain Expertise

The foundational root of the Three Domains of Expertise. The expertise to model any customer in any industry: what outcomes they care about (regardless of your product), how they measure those outcomes (poor, good, great), what actions drive them, which personas matter, how they operate, where they are going, what derails them. Captured in eleven semantic dimensions composed into the Customer Results Map, the universal, per-ICP, company-branded worldview. That Map applied to one specific customer becomes the Customer Strategy Planner, the phased, customer-branded artifact. Map and Planner are two distinct objects; they are not interchangeable.

8 related terms

The Three Domains of Expertise

The structure of what Expansion Playbooks teaches: one customer-facing discipline applied at three scopes. Customer Domain Expertise is the foundational root: model the customer in front of you. Company Domain Expertise is the first branch: design how a company has to operate to deliver that customer's outcomes. Career Domain Expertise is the second branch: operate yourself across roles, companies, and industries by applying the same discipline personally. The three are not co-equal concentric scopes; they are a root and two branches. The integration of all three, not any single domain, is the moat.

7 related terms

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.

3 related terms

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.

1 related term

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

Customer Results Map

The universal, per-ICP, company-branded worldview that captures what a customer is trying to achieve regardless of any product. Eleven semantic dimensions composed into a single decision filter: outcomes, measurement benchmarks (poor/good/great), ranked actions, products, use cases, personas, workflows, pathways, risk, mission, rollout. The Customer Results Map is the universal artifact; the Customer Strategy Planner is that Map applied to one specific customer (phased, customer-branded). Map and Planner are two distinct objects, not interchangeable.

7 related terms

Health Score

A composite metric meant to summarize a customer's likelihood to renew, expand, or churn. Adopted near-universally in customer success operations and customer success platforms. Near-universally ineffective in practice. The fix is not to perfect the composite; it is to abandon the composite and track risk specifically, not generically.

5 related terms

The Substance Tool for the AI Era

The strategic positioning of Expansion Playbooks. Two compounding shifts are happening in the market simultaneously: an economic shift from market share to wallet share, and a technological shift in which AI commoditizes execution. Pre-AI expertise was substance (knowing what to do) plus execution (knowing how to do it). AI compresses execution to near-zero cost. The substance half is now the entire bottleneck. EP is positioned as the substance tool: every other AI-for-X tool focuses on the generation step; EP focuses on what makes generation worth anything.

4 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

1 related term

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

Expansion Revenue

Revenue generated from existing customers beyond their initial contract, made up of two distinct motions: vertical expansion (the customer goes deeper in the same outcome, typically moving to a higher tier of the same product family with more capability or scale) and horizontal expansion (the customer takes on a different outcome, often a different department or use case, often a different product). EP uses vertical and horizontal expansion rather than upsell and cross-sell because the framing is value-driven, not product-pushed, and because expansion does not always require revenue (deeper adoption of already-purchased capability counts as expansion too).

6 related terms

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 minus contraction minus churn) divided by starting ARR. The standard headline metric for recurring revenue companies and SaaS investors. Top SaaS companies sit well above 110 percent; many AI companies exceed that benchmark.

4 related terms

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 roles are increasingly converging in practice, but the order of priority matters.

5 related terms

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, and then grows the relationship through additional teams, use cases, or products (the expand). Almost universally presented as the ideal motion in modern B2B SaaS. Almost universally misused as a cop-out for not selling a real customer strategy.

6 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms

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.

3 related terms

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."

1 related term

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.

2 related terms

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.

2 related terms