---
title: "Metrics I Used to Manage $50M in Customer Revenue"
episode: 19
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Bernardo Alves"
guest_title: "Engagement Manager, LeanScale"
date_published: 2023-08-14
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:08:21
word_count: 1459
topics: ["revenue-operations", "consumption-revenue", "gtm-strategy"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/bernardo-alves-customer-revenue-metrics/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# Metrics I Used to Manage $50M in Customer Revenue — Full Transcript

> Episode 19 of The LeanScale Podcast, with Bernardo Alves.
> Published August 14, 2023 · 00:08:21 · 1,459 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/bernardo-alves-customer-revenue-metrics/

## 00:00 — Cold open: masking a leaky bucket

**[0:00]** And if you're masking a leaky bucket with aggressive expansion, there's two things. One, you might not identify the problem, but two, you're spending a lot of resources to try to save a lot of accounts and aggressively expand.

## 00:25 — Welcome to the LeanScale Podcast

**[0:25]** Welcome to The LeanScale Podcast where we talk about everything RevOps. Thank you for listening.

## 00:36 — Metric 1: gross vs. net revenue retention

**[0:36]** We're covering the three metrics that every single customer success team needs to be measuring. Bernardo, kick us off with the first one. Yeah, the first one is actually going to be two metrics. So you can't separate the two and a lot of businesses do report on them independently. And I would consider that to be a mistake. We're talking about gross revenue retention and net revenue retention. Now, tell me why it's so important. And I agree with you, you have to look at one with the other. But explain to people listening, why is it so important to look at both? So the big thing with these two is that one of them can mask the deficiency of the other.

**[1:15]** So if you only are looking at net revenue retention, for example, you might be looking at a rate of 105 and at face level, you're feeling good because you're growing your book of business 5% every year. That's fantastic. What you might be missing as the other side of that coin is that you're losing 15% of your existing customer base every time that they're up for renewal. So even though you're growing your remainder on overall 5%, that's not going to be sustainable. And you're surely going to have issues down the line. It's so important to look at both. And I think so if you're looking at every attention rate,

**[1:55]** normally what you'd include, you'd include churn, contraction of existing accounts. Maybe they didn't churn, but they're using less of your product or down sold and then expansion. And then you add up all those together to get your net. And when you're doing gross, you take out the expansion portion. And let's just laser in on how much of the book that you had at the starting of the period. Usually you'll look at this quarterly or annually. Do you still have? And if you're masking a leaky bucket with aggressive expansion, there's two things. One, you might not identify the problem, but two,

**[2:31]** you're spending a lot of resources to try to save a lot of accounts and aggressively expand. And if you have vast differences in your gross retention and net, you may be doing this in a really inefficient manner. Yeah. And there's a limit to how much a single customer can grow. Eventually you'll be able to extract all the value that you possibly can out of them in a usage model. You might be seeing all of their transactions or in an ACV model. They might not have any additional budget to ever dedicate to your project ever again. Eventually you will run that well dry and you don't want to be the one person that didn't catch that ahead of time.

## 03:10 — Metric 2: customer health scoring by engagement model

**[3:10]** What's the next metric customer success teams need to be looking at? I think it's a simple one, but incredibly important. Customer health, and it's going to look very different depending on what kind of business that you run and what kind of engagement model that you lean into. Typically, if you're going to be dealing with enterprise deals that have a very high touch model and your account managers and CSMs are going to be managing a very low number of accounts. The biggest thing that we think is going to be helpful here is using a sentiment based approach. There is not going to be any metric in terms of systematic warning triggers

**[3:47]** that will get you a better sense of what is happening in that account than the people who live and breathe that account. However, if you're looking at a low touch high volume model, there is no possible way a single person can keep track of 200 accounts in their name. You're going to want to lean very heavily on systematic warnings because those are going to be able to explore and predict things that you didn't know were an issue before they become something that cannot be reversed. The first one is usually pretty easy for people to understand. Okay, I have a CSM, I have professional relationship managers working with these accounts,

**[4:26]** typically a small book, and they're able to give a judgment call of how well the account is doing. A lot of that just using some human intelligence of thinking about how to use the product, thinking about the sentiment of the people at the company, and then giving you a green, yellow, red. For the high volume group, what are some typical signals you want to be tracking to make sure you're getting an accurate health score? Yeah, so it's going to depend very heavily on your product, but things that you should be keeping top of mind are going to be product utilization and penetration within the account.

**[5:00]** Do you have one person who's using a lot versus a whole team that's using a lot? That's going to be very telling in the overall sentiment for that organization. The more people that you have, the stickier you're going to be. And then similarly, are you noticing any drops in utilization? Are people stopping logging into your product? All those are things that you can keep a very tight finger on the pulse there to understand before it becomes a big issue. What's going on? What's the third metric CS teams need to be looking at? Yeah, I think it's really important to keep that customer portion in customer success

## 05:36 — Metric 3: voice of customer (NPS & CSAT)

**[5:36]** and understanding voice of customer, typically through NPS and CSAT is going to be a big part of that. So if you haven't started a campaign, NPS is typically going to look at how likely somebody is to refer your product to somebody else, which is a great proxy for how likely they are to renew with you in your next renewal cycle, so very directional there. And then the other one in terms of CSAT is just overall satisfaction. And you can look at that through many different lenses, through specific engagements, through specific milestones in their journey, or just overall how the customer feels about the experience of working with you as a company.

## 06:17 — How to survey customers well

**[6:17]** One recommendation I have for people who are surveying their customers, one, find the frequency in which you should be surveying. For some, maybe there's some real time opportunities within the product or something like that. For others, if it's more enterprise focused, you may want to break it off into quarterly or semi-annual cadences. And as you're doing your surveying, just make sure you're consistently getting a good cross-section of your business. So you're not over-indexing on surveying one segment over another, but you're continually getting feedback from a sample size that gives you a good overall representation of your company.

**[6:54]** Yeah, absolutely. And I think common sense goes a long way here. People don't want to be pestered to do something. So if you're getting signals that you're starting to become a nuisance in pushing for these things, respect some boundaries. And there's still a lot to be learned across the entire board, but people will not give you good reviews if you just keep pushing them for it. So if you're running a customer success team, you absolutely need to be looking at net retention rate and gross retention rate. Look at it both from a revenue and logo perspective and make sure that you're really going

## 07:26 — Recap: the three customer success metrics

**[7:26]** into what those churn contraction and expansion differences are for your book. It's going to give you a lot of insight. The next, you're going to want to be looking at customer health. If you have enterprise relationship managers, a good green, yellow, red system is a good start. If you have a high volume of accounts and a low touch model, you're going to need to have a system. You're going to need to have some type of process to assess health of that book of business. And then have a voice, a customer program, survey your customers, ask for feedback, do it in the right way and try to get a good cross section as much as you can.

## 08:02 — Close

**[8:02]** Renato, thank you so much for sharing these today. Thank you, Anthony. Thank you for listening to this episode. If you liked the discussion, please like, share, and subscribe to wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss a new episode.

**[8:17]** (upbeat music)