Prism

Account Prioritization Framework

Prism Customer Success Handbook — Section 2.4

What this decides

Segmentation (1.2 CS Operating Model) decides what motion an account gets. This page decides what gets worked first when there's more to do than time — which, for a solo CSM covering a large book, is every week.

Without an explicit ranking, attention flows to whoever emailed most recently. That reliably serves the loudest accounts and neglects the quietly dying ones, which is the exact inversion of what the health model exists to prevent.

This framework consumes the output of the weekly internal risk review (2.2 Meeting Standards & Working Norms, 2.3 Operating Rhythm).

Priority tiers

Tier Trigger Why here
P1 Active escalation Something is broken or a customer is in crisis. Nothing outranks it. Comms cadence obligations (2.7 Escalation Management) are commitments already made.
P2 At-Risk state + renewal in the near window Risk with a deadline. The compounding case — limited time to recover and a contract decision arriving regardless.
P3 At-Risk state, no near renewal Recoverable, but the clock is running. Most saves happen here; most missed saves are accounts that sat here too long.
P4 Accounts in Onboarding or Adoption stage Highest failure probability, lowest complaint volume.
P5 Renewal checkpoints on healthy accounts Routine motion work on a known schedule (3.7 Renewal Motion).
P6 Expansion opportunities Real revenue, but deferrable without loss.
P7 Proactive outreach and everything else Relationship-building, value record maintenance, education follow-ups.

Why onboarding outranks routine renewal work

A stalled onboarding is a churn twelve months out that nobody is tracking yet. It produces no complaints, no support tickets, and no health history to trigger on — the account simply goes quiet and looks unremarkable. A healthy account's renewal checkpoint, by contrast, can slip a week with no material consequence.

This is also why 2.3 Operating Rhythm gives onboarding accounts weekly attention regardless of what the dashboard says: they're the most likely to fail and the least likely to raise their hand first.

Why expansion sits below renewal work

Expansion is additive; retention is protective. Losing an existing account costs more than deferring a growth conversation by two weeks, and expansion opportunities generally remain available — an account healthy enough to expand this month is usually still healthy enough next month. An account at risk this month may not be here next quarter.

Tiebreakers within a tier

When two accounts sit at the same priority, rank by ARR, adjusted for contact recency.

  • ARR first — an Enterprise account at P3 generally outranks an SMB account at P3.
  • But adjusted by silence. An SMB account that hasn't been contacted in five months outranks an Enterprise account spoken to yesterday, even at the same tier. Silence is a signal, and the account nobody has talked to is the one where the least is known.

Neither factor alone works: ARR-only prioritization systematically starves the SMB book until an SMB account becomes a P1; recency-only prioritization ignores that not all accounts carry equal consequence.

What this framework deliberately does not do

It doesn't rank by who asked. A customer request is an input, not a priority tier. Requests from healthy accounts land at P7 unless they carry a real deadline. This is the practical meaning of the level of service is determined by the coverage model, not by who asks loudest — an inbound SMB request does not outrank an at-risk Mid-Market account.

That said, customer requests are answered (2.2 Meeting Standards & Working Norms, response norms) even when the underlying work is queued. Acknowledgement is fast; the work is prioritized.

It doesn't override judgment. The tiers are the default ordering, not a rule that removes discretion. A P5 account where the champion just resigned is not really a P5 — the framework exists to make the default sensible, not to replace reading the situation.

It doesn't schedule the work. Tiers say what's most important, not when it happens. That's 2.3 Operating Rhythm.

Using it

The weekly risk review produces a list. Assign each item a tier, sort, apply tiebreakers, and work down until the week's proactive capacity is spent. Anything that doesn't get reached rolls into next week's review — and anything that rolls three weeks running is itself a signal, either that the tier is wrong or that capacity is genuinely short. Both are worth surfacing at the quarterly system review (2.3 Operating Rhythm).