Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue

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.