Success plan
A documented, ideally customer-visible plan of the outcomes an account wants to achieve, broken into objectives with owners, target dates, and measurable progress.
A success plan turns "make the customer successful" into something inspectable: the outcomes this specific customer bought the product to achieve, decomposed into concrete objectives, each with an owner, a target date, and a way to measure progress. It is written at the start of the relationship — usually during onboarding — and then actually maintained, because a plan that was written once and never revisited is a sales artifact, not an operating document.
The property that gives a success plan most of its power is that the customer can see it. A shared plan aligns both sides on what success means before anyone measures it, makes progress visible without a status meeting, and quietly builds the renewal case all year — by renewal time, the value story is the plan's own history rather than a hurried retrospective. Internally, plan health is itself a signal: objectives sliding past their dates and plans gone quiet are among the earliest honest indicators that an account needs attention.