How product should work with customer success in enterprise SaaS

In enterprise SaaS, there are two main sources of income: new sales and renewals. Sales owns the new revenue, while customer or client success (CS) owns the existing. In some team structures, sales stays involved post-close and leads upsell negotiations. In others, CS takes full ownership after the deal is signed. Either way, once the contract is in, the customer relationship transitions to CS, who becomes the main point of contact for the life of the account.

This post is about that function—the high-touch, strategic kind of CS that manages your top 100+ accounts. These are six-figure-plus contracts or customers whose revenue concentration is high enough that you simply can’t afford to lose them. They’re meeting with your CS team quarterly, if not monthly, and they expect a partnership.

While net new revenue tends to be the engine of growth, retention—and ideally, expansion—is the base it builds on. That base has to be strong. You want net revenue retention above 100%.

Why CS<>Product alignment matters

In a textbook world, product is always learning from customers and delivering ongoing value throughout the year. In practice, at early-stage enterprise companies, there’s a finite number of customers, and the math is simple. If one or two of them make up a meaningful percentage of your revenue, their satisfaction matters more than market fit in the abstract. You can’t afford to lose them, so you need to prioritize their needs, specifically and directly—even while trying to build cumulatively toward a broader market, so that one day, no single client holds that kind of power.

So where does product come into that? One answer: the renewal cycle. In these scenarios, you’re often working backward from contractual milestones to keep the treadmill going. The most important milestone is the renewal date.

Working backward from renewals

In most SaaS, deals close throughout the year. That’s good. You don’t want your whole book renewing in Q4. But it means renewals are rolling, and each client has their own. A good CS team starts monitoring utilization by the halfway point in a contract, because you want usage to be proportionate to time. If someone is halfway through their term, they should be roughly halfway through what they’ve purchased—unless there’s a known seasonal pattern. The ideal threshold is around 80% utilization or higher, and well above that if you want to upsell.

So the first question product can ask is: what makes a customer use more of what they bought? What can we build to maximize or increase utilization?

Second: what are the outstanding needs or limitations that this specific client has raised over their contract cycle? Customers on the fence will reassess their vendor at renewal time. Happy customers won’t bother. So are they happy? Or are there unresolved asks, value gaps, friction? Their account manager should know. If you can track and log these requests, you can start to evaluate whether they align with your strategic goals.

This can be as simple as a spreadsheet, a ticketing system, or internal notes—something CS can submit into or that you maintain yourself. The system isn’t the important part. The act of tracking is.

Does it make sense to build this, both to retain this account and others like it? If so, you should work backward about three months from the renewal and make sure the roadmap reflects that. Then CS can go back to the customer with a clear message: that feature you asked for is in the works. That alone can lock in a renewal, and give them a proactive reason to reach out to other accounts, too.

Start with emergencies, earn your way in

So how do you get this whole system running? It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation.

Ideally, you already have a CS team that’s engaged and proactively reactive. They’re holding regular touchpoints—quarterly business reviews at minimum—to exchange exactly this kind of information: here’s what’s new, here’s what’s needed. If you’re not doing QBRs, you’re probably not enterprise. But if you are, that’s more than enough for a PM to be looped in. You can join as a guest for part of the QBR or schedule a one-off call to follow up directly.

But in most cases, your first exposure will be an emergency. CS comes to you with a big renewal and a big ask, and the clock is ticking. This is your moment. As long as the request is within reason—not a full refactor just for them—and can be delivered within a cycle or two, your answer should be yes. Do it. Do this a few times. It builds trust. It shows that you’re a partner, not an obstacle.

You’ll be doing this for sales too, of course, except the dynamic is slightly different. For renewals, you want to deliver the feature before the renewal closes. For new sales, you commit to building it only after.

Once you prove value, the loop deepens

Once CS trusts you in those emergency moments, the relationship can deepen. You’ll start having syncs—either one-on-one or as a group—where you review the book of business, highlight upcoming renewals, and talk through what’s at stake. These might be scheduled by you, or they might happen organically. Often it’s the latter. Once you’ve proven you’ll help with the urgent stuff, they’ll start bringing you into the less urgent too.

Sometimes they’ll invite you to customer calls so you can hear requests firsthand. Why? Because you asked to be looped in back when you were helping with their urgent ask. Now they know that’s something you do and do well.

And you should talk to customers directly. Always. Don’t rely on a nontechnical account manager to interpret a complicated request or half-formed need. You’ll get a better result if you cut out the game of telephone. The most elegant product decisions often start from hearing the need in the customer’s own words.

CS says: they want to customize XYZ. I get on the call and realize XYZ is broken. I ask, what if we just fix XYZ? The customer lights up. Yes, that would solve it! They just wanted to control it because they didn’t realize it was broken. That clarity is everything. And in the emergency scenario, you have leverage to insist on that conversation as a condition of the work.

Roadmapping for retention

As this dynamic matures, you get more proactive. You start building CS asks into your quarterly roadmap. You treat the roadmap like Tetris: the market-driven initiatives are your main thread, but you reserve space for CS and sales-driven asks. You become more intentional about what fits and when.

At first, this happens under duress—the team groans at you. Can’t you just say no? But over time, it gets easier to make the case. You know what you’re saying yes to and why.

And you learn to set boundaries. You don’t do a three-month project for one client. But you do build something if it’s a one-to-four week lift that meaningfully affects retention. You prioritize the asks that more than one customer is requesting. You socialize the impact. Your GTM partners know what’s shifting and when. Your leadership supports the tradeoffs. These are not hard rules. They’re negotiations. But you know how to hold them.

What happens as you scale

Eventually, if your company’s growth accelerates, your company’s approach to strategic accounts and your roadmap will shift toward more aggregate signal. Your CS conversations will start to resemble market research. That’s a great milestone to reach.

But until you do, this model holds. It’s not meant for exponential companies where no logo matters. It’s for the ones growing steadily, where each account still really counts. All of my experience is in that zone. If that’s you, this model is not only useful, it’s necessary.

And it’s worth clarifying—this loop is different from sales or support. Sales asks are about closing the gap between what you’ve already built and what a prospect needs to say yes. CS asks are about keeping and growing the customers you already have. They’re the birds in hand. And if you’re in enterprise SaaS, you need those birds.