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Hey {{first_name | CS Pro}},

Almost every CS team I work with has a success plan template, but very few have a success plan anyone actually uses.

It gets filled in at onboarding, saved to a folder, and nobody opens it again until renewal is 30 days out.

This week, Erika Villarreal, Strategic CSM at Eptura, came back on the podcast (my first ever returning guest) to show how she keeps hers alive every week.

(Her first podcast episode is STILL one of my most downloaded episodes with a guest, so of course I had to have her back on the show)

She manages Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 accounts, and one of her biggest has around 20 stakeholders. If she can make success planning work at that level, you can make it work in your book too.

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Start with 3 outcomes, not 20

Erika's success plan is a roadmap of everything she knows about the customer. She builds it before anything else, during onboarding or with the salesperson when she picks up an account.

Erika's success plan recipe

Do the homework. Research the customer, their industry, the executive stakeholder and the pressures they're facing. If the sales notes have gaps, build an assumption.
Pick 3 business outcomes. Only the 3 that matter most to that person. Go to 5 or 6 and you lose track of the priority.
Tie each one to ROI. Every measure of success lands in 1 of 4 buckets: increase revenue, reduce cost, mitigate risk or improve productivity.
Validate it with the customer. Take it into a discovery session and ask, am I on the right track? What do I need to change?

My 2 non-negotiables on top of that? Every goal needs a metric and a date. Without a date, it's just a dream.

If your team's success plans look more like a filled-in form than a roadmap, this is exactly what we work on in my Value & ROI workshop, live on your team's real accounts.

How she keeps the plan alive every week

Most success plans die in a Google Drive graveyard. Erika turns every outcome into milestones, and those live in a tracker. Honestly? It's a spreadsheet.

Erika's tracker setup

One spreadsheet per customer
A tab for every meeting date, so you keep a history of every conversation
A status on every task: in progress, done or stalled
Any risks, plus who to pull in or escalate to
Anything critical with a hard deadline goes into your CSP with a reminder (Erika uses Planhat)

So if the goal is to increase utilization from 60% to 80%, the milestones might be building an integration, getting IT approval, then comparing before and after data.

In every business review, the plan comes back out. Here's what we agreed 3 months ago, here's where we are, and if we're stalled, why?

And when customers won't share numbers? She brings benchmarks from internal Power BI dashboards, published research and ChatGPT Deep Research. As Erika put it, customers often don't know what good looks like until you show them.

From 60% to 80%... to $2 million

Erika is measured on GRR, NRR and customer outcomes. But she doesn't pitch. She listens and stays curious.

Last year, her biggest customer was moving from 3 to 4 days in the office, and their current solution couldn't be configured the way they needed. Another Eptura product solved the 5 pain points they'd raised, so she ran a demo built around exactly those 5. They signed. That account now has 3 products and sits at around $800K in ARR.

❝

"You're not selling, you're solving for a problem."

Erika Villarreal, Eptura

Then there's ROI. Erika works backwards from the financial outcome. Improving utilization from 60% to 80% doesn't make a CFO lean in. This does:

300% ROI

Help a customer consolidate 2 floors and avoid a lease renewal, and they save $2 million a year on $500K of software. That's a number an exec can repeat.

And it doesn't have to be exact to the cent. A solid rough estimate works.

CS leaders, if your CFO asked each CSM to show the value delivered in their top 3 accounts with a number, how many could do it? If that makes you wince, let's talk about a workshop for your team before your January and February kickoffs.

Your weekly challenge

Go back to the measures of success on your top accounts and check... is each one tied to revenue, cost, productivity or risk? If not, use AI to brainstorm how to translate it into a dollar value.

Then get your baseline. Sometimes your own product data already has it.

❝

"If you don't have the baseline, you're never gonna be able to say we did this, because what was it before?"

Erika Villarreal, Eptura

Pick 1 account this week and do it.

That's it for this week! Hear the full conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube, and let me know what you think.

Want to go deeper? Erika's Success Plan Playbook (her 7-step framework) is out now, so go say hi to her on LinkedIn.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST NOW

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