Success Plans

The core distinction

Milestones are the floor. Success plans are what you add when the customer's definition of value goes beyond the floor.

Every account, regardless of segment, is driven toward the same four adoption milestones. That's the standardized success path — the minimum definition of a working Prism deployment. Mid-Market and Enterprise accounts get a success plan on top of that, capturing outcomes the milestones don't describe.

An Enterprise account therefore has both, scored separately: milestone progress feeds Product Adoption, plan progress feeds Success Plan Progress. They never blur, and neither double-counts the other.

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The standardized success path (all segments)

Four milestones, in order. Each is observable from Prism's own telemetry — no customer-supplied data.

Why milestone 3 requires an actual login. Access granted but never used is not value delivered. The distinction matters: an account that provisioned portal access and stopped there looks complete on paper and is functionally stalled. This is the canonical adoption-failure pattern for this product (see 1.5 Customer Journey Map, "the exposure moment").

Why milestone 4 requires two cycles. One successful send proves the mechanism works; it proves nothing about whether the customer trusts it. Firms commonly manually review the first automated send — which is fine — but if they're still hand-checking every send at cycle six, the time savings that justified the purchase never materialized. Two consecutive cycles is the smallest evidence that unattended delivery has actually been accepted.

Completing all four = Value Realization, the lifecycle milestone that moves an account into the Healthy state (see 1.4 Customer Lifecycle).

Why SMB gets only this

SMB accounts follow the standardized path and receive no individually authored plan. This is a deliberate consequence of the coverage model, not an omission: tech-touch coverage scales through standardization, and a bespoke plan the CSM has no capacity to review with the customer would go stale immediately — scoring badly on plan currency and telling us nothing useful.

For a firm buying white-label reporting, the definition of success genuinely is this generic: get your clients seeing branded reports on a recurring cadence. Individually authored plans begin at Mid-Market, where deal complexity, stakeholder count, and per-account value justify custom outcomes.

Interview framing: the honest version is "SMB success planning is standardized, not absent." Saying "we don't do success planning for SMB" invites the obvious counter — so you don't know what success looks like for most of your book?

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Success plans (Mid-Market and Enterprise)

What goes in one

Deliberately lean. A plan nobody maintains scores badly on plan currency, and that's by design — the structure should be light enough that reviewing it quarterly is realistic.

Deliberately excluded:

• Adoption milestones. They're the floor and are tracked separately. Restating them in the plan would double-count them across two health categories.
• Our internal task list. That's what playbooks are for. A success plan is a shared document about customer outcomes, not a CSM to-do list.

Who writes it

Objectives originate with the customer and are captured in their words during a discovery conversation. The CSM drafts the structure around them.

Not: the CSM invents plausible goals and asks the customer to approve them.

This matters for two reasons:

1. Scoring integrity. Success Plan Progress is the one health category where the CSM controls the input — they both set the goals and mark them complete. Objectives that originate with the customer mean the CSM is scoring against a commitment someone else made, which is meaningfully harder to fudge.
2. Behavior. A plan built from the customer's words gets reviewed with them. A plan the CSM authored alone gets reviewed alone, goes stale, and tanks plan currency — which is exactly what that metric is designed to catch.

Owner note: every objective needs an owner on the customer's side. Most success plans fail because everything is implicitly the CSM's responsibility, which makes the plan a wish list rather than a commitment.

Review cadence

A review means a conversation with the customer that updates the document — not the CSM re-reading it. Last-reviewed date only advances on a real review.

When objectives change

Plans are living documents. Objectives get met, abandoned, or replaced as the customer's business changes. Closing an objective as "no longer relevant" is a legitimate outcome and should be recorded as such — quietly leaving dead objectives open distorts goal completion rate and makes the plan feel like an artifact.

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How this feeds health scoring

See 1.6 Health Scoring Methodology for weighting.

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Not yet modeled — v2 scope

Neither milestones nor success plans exist as structured records in the CSP today. Both are logged in BUILD_BACKLOG.md:

• Adoption milestones as tracked per-account records with completion dates
• Success plans as structured records (objectives, owners, target dates, last-reviewed)

Until then, this page defines the target model. See the working rules in HANDBOOK_SKELETON.md.

Related pages

• 1.2 CS Operating Model — the coverage model that gates plans at Mid-Market
• 1.4 Customer Lifecycle — Value Realization as the milestone-completion outcome
• 1.5 Customer Journey Map — friction points the plan's blockers section captures
• 1.6 Health Scoring Methodology — how milestone and plan progress are scored
• 3.6 New Customer Onboarding — the playbook driving milestones 1–4
• 4.2 Success Plan Template — the fillable artifact
• 4.3 EBR Kit — where Enterprise plans get reviewed