Customer Success Manager - Growth and Retention

Customer Success Manager - Growth and Retention

The Customer Success Manager - Growth and Retention is responsible for reducing churn, improving customer health, and protecting recurring revenue through early risk detection, cross‑functional mitigation, and scalable retention programs. The role partners closely with Renewals, Customer Success, Customer Engagement, Competitive Intelligence, and Pricing & Packaging to orchestrate coordinated customer‑save strategies.

This role also provides renewal objection handling expertise, enabling teams to navigate downsells, downgrades, competitive threats, pricing pushback, TCO/ROI concerns, and budget constraints. The ideal candidate excels at influencing cross‑functional teams, handling commercial risk, and translating customer insights into save actions.

Key Responsibilities

1. Churn Risk Identification & Health Intelligence

• Maintain a standardized customer risk scoring framework leveraging health signals, product usage, support patterns, sentiment, and competitive exposure.
• Identify early risk indicators (e.g., discount cliffs, adoption gaps, under-deployed licenses, sponsor turnover).
• Partner with Renewal Ops, Data team to automate risk workflows in Salesforce
• Collaborate with Competitive Intelligence to map competitive displacement trends and update counter strategies.

2. Cross‑Functional Risk Orchestration (Renewals, CS, CI, Pricing)

• Lead weekly renewal risk reviews/war rooms with Renewals, CSMs/CEMs, and Sales to align on mitigation actions.
• Build account-level mitigation plans that include adoption interventions, executive alignment, value reinforcement, and commercial flexibility.
• Partner with Pricing & Packaging and Deal Desk to design controlled commercial offers (e.g., term/ramp, New Product Introductions, New SKU Impact, Product Bundling etc).
• Escalate systemic product, billing, or support issues and track resolution.

3. Renewal Objection Handling 

Serve as the subject‑matter expert for Renewals by providing guidance, playbooks, and strategic support to overcome critical renewal objections.

• Diagnose downsell and downgrade risks, recommend right‑sizing strategies, and deliver value‑based narratives to reinforce ROI and prevent unnecessary revenue loss.
• Partner with Competitive Intelligence to address competitive pricing challenges, coach teams on TCO and switching‑cost comparisons, and collaborate with Pricing on controlled incentive structures.
• Provide Renewals reps with ROI models, justification materials, payment‑flexibility options, pricing guardrails, and negotiation strategies to resolve budget and pricing objections while protecting retention revenue.

4. Preemptive Retention Programs

• Launch and manage proactive churn-prevention programs, such as:
• Early renewal health checks
• Competitive threat campaigns
• Discount cliff mitigation
• Develop and maintain risk playbooks for teams to execute consistently.
• Partner with Enablement to deliver training on objection handling and retention strategies.

5. Insights, Reporting & Executive Readouts

• Deliver monthly churn insights including root causes, save rates, objection trends, and program impact.
• Own cohort analyses, risk heatmaps, and retention dashboards.
• Provide actionable recommendations to Product, Pricing, Support, and Leadership teams.
• Support Renewal forecast accuracy through risk scoring and save probability modeling.

6. Process, Tooling & Enablement

• Improve CRM/CS tool workflows to enhance visibility into churn risk and save motions.
• Standardize processes for risk identification, objection handling, escalations, and mitigation SLAs.
• Build and maintain a knowledge base of objection-handling scripts, competitive counters, and case studies.
• Deliver enablement sessions to strengthen Renewals capabilities in handling commercial objections.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years in Renewals, Customer Success, Account Management, or Customer Operations (SaaS preferred).
• Strong analytical and commercial acumen with experience handling pricing, TCO, ROI, and competitive objections.
• Ability to influence cross-functional teams and lead risk discussions with executive stakeholders.
• Experience with Salesforce, Gainsight/CS platforms, and BI tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Looker.
• Strong communication, negotiation, and conflict‑resolution skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in competitive intelligence, pricing strategy, or deal desk functions.
• Experience running war rooms or escalation workflows.
• Background in program management or enablement.
• Strong understanding of SaaS economics: GRR, NRR, churn, discount impact, unit economics.

Key Metrics (KPIs)

• Gross Renewal Rate(GRR)
• Net Renewal Rate (NRR)
• Revenue and logo churn rates
• Save rate on at‑risk renewals
• Early risk detection rate
• Renewal forecast accuracy
• Adoption/health score improvement
• Discount hygiene and cost-to-save efficiency
• Time-to-mitigation for escalated risks

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