# Use case: Success Plan

**The situation**

Most CS teams have some version of a Success Plan. A template in a spreadsheet. A slide deck updated before the quarterly Business Review. A shared folder with a roadmap and some milestones. The intent is right — define the goal, track the progress, show the value.

The problem is that these plans almost always live in your tool, not the customer's. The customer sees it once at the start of the engagement, maybe again at the Business Review, and rarely in between. In practice, the Success Plan becomes an internal document your team maintains to prove they're doing their job — rather than a living commitment that guides the relationship on both sides.

When the plan isn't truly shared, accountability slips. Your team is managing toward milestones the customer has forgotten. The customer feels like things are happening to them, not with them. And when renewal comes around, you're trying to reconstruct the value story rather than simply pointing to a shared record of what was achieved.

***

**The approach**

A real Success Plan has three qualities that most plans lack.

The first is a genuine business outcome at the top. Not a list of features to activate or training sessions to complete — the actual result your customer is trying to achieve for their own business. If you sell HR software, the outcome might be reducing cost-per-hire by 25%. If you sell a project management tool, it might be getting three departments fully adopted within six months. The plan exists to get the customer to that outcome. Everything else — the tasks, the milestones, the adoption goals — serves that north star.

The second is shared visibility. The customer sees the plan, tracks progress against it, and owns their part of it. This changes the dynamic from vendor-managed to partnership. When a customer can see that their onboarding tasks are overdue, they often complete them without being chased. When they can see that their usage goal is behind, they ask what they can do to accelerate. Visibility creates accountability on both sides.

The third is continuous connection to reality. A plan that was set at kickoff and never updated against actual data is just a wish list. A real Success Plan reflects what's actually happening — adoption data, survey results, task progress, support health — and updates as the relationship evolves. The AI reads all of this and keeps your team honest about whether the plan is on track.

***

**How to do it in Startdeliver**

**Start with the business outcome**

Before creating a project or a task, create a Customer Goal that reflects what this customer is trying to achieve. Name it in their terms — their outcome, not your product feature. "Grow sales pipeline by 50% in 12 months" not "CRM adoption." This goal becomes the anchor for everything that follows.

<figure><img src="https://1065233822-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2Fttka6LKL3bc1LsaDzuI5%2Fuploads%2FkIO45GzwiLrfMrpaBVAH%2FScreenshot%202026-04-22%20at%2012.42.12.png?alt=media&#x26;token=141c0e50-5da6-4b38-ad4f-09c9b860f6fa" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

→ [Customer Goals & Success Plans](https://docs.startdeliver.io/managing-customers/customer-goals-and-success-plans)

**Build the Success Plan as a shared project**

Create a project from your Success Plan template. Include the key milestones, tasks for both your team and the customer, and any documents or resources relevant to the engagement. Set the project to Shared so it appears in the customer's Shared Space from the moment it launches.

<figure><img src="https://1065233822-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2Fttka6LKL3bc1LsaDzuI5%2Fuploads%2F8EYmjFuTGDUK0IBgtGXD%2FScreenshot%202026-04-21%20at%2014.04.15.png?alt=media&#x26;token=a5ef4cc9-65ef-4c84-9efb-de5865a93443" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

Link the project to the Customer Goal so progress on tasks and milestones contributes directly to goal tracking.

→ [Projects](https://docs.startdeliver.io/managing-customers/projects) · [Templates & projects](https://docs.startdeliver.io/platform-settings/templates-and-projects)

**Launch Shared Space**

Invite the key stakeholders from the customer side — the decision maker, the champion, the operational lead — to Shared Space. They log in, see the plan, see their tasks, see the goal and the current progress toward it. They can comment, ask questions, and complete their assigned steps without emailing their CSM.

When the customer is actively engaged in Shared Space, it's a signal the partnership is healthy. When they've gone quiet, it's a signal worth investigating.

→ [Setting up Shared Space](https://docs.startdeliver.io/managing-customers/shared-space)

**Let the AI read the plan**

Once the goal is set and the project is running, the AI reads them as part of the customer assessment. If tasks are slipping and adoption is behind goal, the AI surfaces this as an at-risk signal before the customer brings it up. If usage is strong and the customer is ahead of schedule, the AI identifies this as an expansion or advocacy signal.

<figure><img src="https://1065233822-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2Fttka6LKL3bc1LsaDzuI5%2Fuploads%2FcTxckBNVoXpSzvErWy2O%2FScreenshot%202026-04-20%20at%2020.40.47.png?alt=media&#x26;token=5c4bb86c-955d-4302-877b-eefe666e5041" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

The Success Plan isn't just a communication tool — it's a data source the AI uses to understand trajectory.

→ [How health assessment works](https://docs.startdeliver.io/health-and-metrics/how-to-set-up-health-metrics-and-assessment) · [AI Assessments](https://docs.startdeliver.io/jecta-agent-and-ai/ai-assessments)

**Use the Business Review as a checkpoint, not a presentation**

When the Business Review arrives, you're not building a story from scratch. You open Shared Space with the customer and walk through what was committed, what was delivered, and what's next. The plan, the progress, and the data are all there — visible to both sides, updated in real time.

The Business Review becomes a conversation about the future rather than a defense of the past.

**Automate the rhythm**

Configure automations to keep the Success Plan moving without manual effort — a check-in task for the CSM at 30-day intervals, a message to the customer when a milestone is reached, a flag when a task has been overdue for more than a week. The rhythm of the plan runs automatically. The CSM focuses on the conversations that matter.

→ [Automations](https://docs.startdeliver.io/managing-customers/automations)

***

**What good looks like**

* Every customer has a named business outcome that your team and the customer agreed on at the start of the engagement — and that the AI reads as part of every health assessment
* Customers log into Shared Space regularly — not because they're chased, but because their plan is there and it's useful to them
* Your CSMs walk into Business Reviews with a shared record of what was committed and what was achieved — not a slide deck they built the night before
* The AI tells your team when a Success Plan is at risk before the customer does — giving you time to intervene rather than react
* Renewal conversations start with "here's what we achieved together" rather than "let me remind you of the value we provide"


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