Quick Summary: The 2025 Customer Revenue Leadership Study identifies four essential customer growth roles as the minimum viable structure for driving higher NRR. Teams with these roles outperform others by aligning cross-functional collaboration, operations, and expansion enablement.
After two years of revenue uncertainty and erosion, 2025 is now a baseline year for customer success. And just like before, it’s the CS teams that are supporting that stabilization.
In this year’s Customer Revenue Leadership Study, 74% of respondents report that most of their company revenue comes from existing customers. This pattern of stronger revenue performance ties back to teams that are staffing core customer success roles: enablement, CSMs, support, and account management. The right balance, our research indicates, will lift NRR, which is especially important in a steadier market.
“Customer-driven growth resets the operating agenda, with team design moving to the foreground. 2025 is a baseline year. After two years of erosion, NRR and GRR have stabilized. In a steadier market, your success reflects choices that you control. How you staff, instrument, and run your post-sale engine matters more than macro noise.” You Mon Tsang, CEO and co-founder, ChurnZero.
Here’s a sneak peek into one of the report’s primary findings: a minimum viable customer growth team.
Download a full copy of the 2025 Customer Revenue Leadership Study, presented by ChurnZero, 6sense, Customer Success Meetup, OnRamp, Pavilion, Outreach, and Success Venture Partners.
What are the four essential customer growth roles?
This year, we found that certain customer success roles correlate with increased NRR. No matter the leadership structure of your customer GTM team, the presence of CSMs, support, enablement, and account management appear to provide a platform for consistent, high-performing customer growth.
According to this year’s study, the following roles had a positive impact on NRR:
- Customer enablement: 99% NRR with the role/function present, compared to 94% without.
- Customer success managers (CSMs): 98% with role present, versus 90% without.
- Support: 98% with role present, versus 93% without.
- Account management: 98% with role present, versus 94% without.
This also aligns with participants’ responses in the new, open-ended question, “What do you wish you were doing better right now?” The top responses included aligning teams and processes for stronger cross-functional collaboration, expansion enablement, and balanced CSM ratios.
“Our community of thousands of GTM leaders—from sales to success, marketing to product—confirms what this study underscores: the companies winning today are those that treat post-sale execution as a growth engine, not a support function. The data shows that success isn’t about any single role, tool, or tactic, but about how leaders orchestrate teams, technology, and customer outcomes together.” Sam Jacobs, CEO, Pavilion
How does CS and sales leadership factor into team structure?
It’s no mystery that most customer growth teams are shared across senior roles and between Customer Success and Sales. This year’s data showed that the executive structure is almost evenly split, with the most common senior role titles being VPs/Directors of CS and CRO/sales leaders.
Since the number or placement of executives doesn’t have a meaningful impact on NRR and GRR, leadership should focus on that minimum viable CS team and various role coverage, as well as setting effective playbooks and benchmarking system adoption.
Where are the gaps for CS and cross-functional teams?
There are a few other functions to keep an eye on when building or refining a growth-focused CS team:
Dedicated or integrated renewals: Over the last few years, many SaaS businesses have formalized their renewals function due to high risk and complexity. However, this year’s study found that having a dedicated renewals function correlated with lower NRR (93%, vs. 97% without the formalized function). If the team is already established, treat it as a risk response and use it to support other programs that are true drivers of a lower NRR, like enablement and adoption.
Dwindling customer marketing and operations: Customer marketing and operations roles have seen a consistent decline over the past three years of data. Unfortunately, cutting back on these levers for retention and expansion can weaken NRR in the long term. Consider these roles’ coverage: managing lifecycle programs, advocacy, segmentation, data hygiene, and more.
Sales headcount: While CS teams are seeing an increase in headcounts and budget, there seems to be more strain on sales. While 51% of CS leaders maintained their headcount and 43% grew it, 29% of Sales leaders reported staff reductions. When working cross-functionally, shift efforts toward efficiency (e.g. win rate enablement, deal quality) and focus on CS programs with a short time to value.
Takeaway: focus efforts on payback, and staff your team to win
The minimum viable customer success team is more robust and cross-functional than even just a few years ago. To keep retention strong while building a baseline centered on growth, ensure you’re including enablement, CSMs, support and account management. Beyond simply filling these roles, offer clarity and support with the right operations, technology, and education/training.
For more findings on CS team structure, 2025 as a baseline year, and the correlation of technology for revenue retention, expansion and higher NRR, make sure to download the 2025 Customer Revenue Leadership Study.
