Just Start with Customer Success
Customer success is the discipline that emerged when software moved from one-time purchases to subscriptions. Once your revenue depends on customers renewing month after month, keeping them healthy stops being a nice idea and becomes the entire business model. The field covers everything from onboarding new accounts and tracking health scores to reducing churn and expanding revenue within your existing base. It has become central to how SaaS companies, and increasingly all recurring-revenue businesses, think about growth. These books give you the foundational framework and the practical playbook for building a customer success practice from scratch.
Start here
Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue
Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman & Lincoln Murphy · 256 pages · 2016 · Easy
Themes: customer retention, churn reduction, recurring revenue, SaaS business model, customer health scores
The book that defined customer success as a discipline, written by three of its most influential practitioners. Nick Mehta (CEO of Gainsight), Dan Steinman (Gainsight’s chief customer officer), and Lincoln Murphy (founder of Sixteen Ventures) lay out why customer success matters and how to build it into your organization.
Why Start Here
This is the foundational text for the entire customer success movement. The authors bring three distinct perspectives: Mehta as the CEO building a company around the concept, Steinman as the operator running customer success at scale, and Murphy as the consultant who has helped hundreds of companies implement it. Together they cover the full landscape, from why the shift to subscription business models made customer success inevitable, to the specific practices that reduce churn and grow recurring revenue.
The book is structured around ten “laws” of customer success, each contributed by a leader at a company like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Oracle. These laws cover topics like segmentation, customer health monitoring, churn prediction, onboarding, and the organizational changes needed to make customer success work. It is both philosophical and practical: you understand not just what to do but why the old approaches to customer management no longer apply.
What to Expect
A clear, well-organized 256-page read that works for founders, customer success managers, product leaders, and anyone in a SaaS or subscription business. No technical background is required. You will finish the book with a working understanding of what customer success is, why it exists, and how to start building a customer success function from the ground up.
Alternatives
Guy Nirpaz & Fernando Pizarro · 142 pages · 2016 · Easy
A concise, practical guide that reframes the entire relationship between companies and customers. Guy Nirpaz, CEO of Totango and a pioneer in the customer success software space, argues that businesses need to stop thinking like hunters chasing new deals and start thinking like farmers cultivating long-term relationships.
Why This One
The title captures the core insight perfectly. In the old world of enterprise software, sales teams hunted for deals, closed them, and moved on. In a subscription economy, the real value comes after the sale. Nirpaz breaks down the intellectual framework behind customer success and provides a practical roadmap for shifting your organization from acquisition-focused to retention-focused thinking.
At just 142 pages, this is the fastest way to absorb the customer success mindset. Nirpaz covers the customer lifecycle, health scoring, segmentation, and the operational changes needed to make customer success work. The book draws on his experience building Totango, one of the first customer success platforms, and his role organizing the Customer Success Summit, one of the industry’s key events.
What to Expect
A short, focused read that you can finish in one or two sittings. The writing is direct and practical, aimed at SaaS founders, customer success leaders, and anyone trying to understand why retention has become the most important metric in recurring-revenue businesses. It complements the Mehta, Steinman, and Murphy book by offering a more compact treatment of the same core ideas.