Prism

Success Plan Template

Prism Customer Success Handbook — Section 4.2

Mid-Market and Enterprise only. SMB accounts follow the standardized success path — the four adoption milestones — with no individually authored plan. Structure and reasoning in 1.7 Success Plans.

Before filling this in

The objectives come from the customer, in a discovery conversation, in their words. The CSM drafts structure around what they said. Not: the CSM writes plausible goals and asks for approval.

This isn't process piety. Success Plan Progress is the one health category where the CSM controls the input (1.6 Health Scoring Methodology), and objectives that originate with the customer mean scoring against a commitment someone else made. It also changes behaviour: a plan built from the customer's words gets reviewed with them; a plan the CSM invented gets reviewed alone and goes stale.

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

Keep it short enough to actually review. A plan nobody maintains scores badly on plan currency, and that's the metric working correctly.

The template

Account
Account
Segment Mid-Market / Enterprise
Plan created
Last reviewed with customer (feeds plan currency — advances only on a real conversation)
Next review due (quarterly minimum)
CSM

Stakeholders

Name Title Role Notes
Economic buyer / Champion / Implementer / Technical owner / User

Keep current. If this table has one row, the account is single-threaded — flag it (1.6 Health Scoring Methodology, 3.4 Champion Departure).

Business objectives

The heart of the plan. One block per objective; three to five is usually right. More than five and none of them are priorities.

Objective 1
What they want to achieve In their words. "Cut report prep from 6 hours to 1 per client per month." Not "improve efficiency."
Why it matters to them The business consequence. Freeing 20 AM hours a month, passing a client's audit, retiring a tool with a renewal of its own.
How we'll both know it happened The measure. Specific enough that neither side can argue about it later.
Owner — their side Named person.
Owner — our side Usually the CSM; sometimes SE or Support.
Target date Feeds goal timeliness.
Status Not started / In progress / Complete / Closed — no longer relevant
Dependencies & blockers Named explicitly. Access to a system, a decision from someone else, work on their side. Visible rather than discovered.

(Repeat per objective.)

Review log

Date Who attended What changed
Objectives added, closed, re-dated; blockers resolved; stakeholder changes.

What this deliberately excludes

Adoption milestones. They're the floor, tracked separately, and feed Product Adoption. Restating them here would double-count them across two health categories (1.7 Success Plans).

Our internal task list. That's what playbooks are for. This is a shared document about customer outcomes, not a CSM to-do list — and anything the customer can't meaningfully read doesn't belong in a document you review with them.

Aspirations with no owner or date. An objective with neither is a wish. Either it gets both, or it's not on the plan.

Rules for maintaining it

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 turns the plan into an artifact (1.7 Success Plans).

Last-reviewed only advances on a real conversation with the customer. The CSM re-reading the document is not a review.

Objectives change as their business changes. That's expected. A plan that looks identical after twelve months either describes a customer whose situation never moved, or hasn't been reviewed honestly.

Review cadence: Mid-Market quarterly, revisited formally at EBR-lite twice yearly. Enterprise quarterly minimum, at each EBR, and whenever a stakeholder or objective changes (1.7 Success Plans, 2.2 Meeting Standards & Working Norms).

How this feeds health scoring

Field Feeds
Objective status Goal completion rate
Target date vs. actual Goal timeliness
Last reviewed Plan currency

Together these are Success Plan Progress — 20% of the composite at Mid-Market, 35% at Enterprise (1.6 Health Scoring Methodology).

Plan currency and slippage are the anti-gaming guards. Both penalize neglect rather than rewarding optimistic self-scoring, and neither improves by declaring success.

Worked example

Illustrative fragment — a Mid-Market account.
What they want to achieve "Get every one of our retainer clients onto a monthly dashboard so our AMs stop building decks the week before each check-in."
Why it matters Roughly 30 AM hours a month across the team; check-in calls currently start with apologies for stale numbers.
How we'll know All 14 retainer clients live on the portal with scheduled monthly delivery.
Owner — theirs Priya, Client Services Lead
Owner — ours CSM
Target date End of Q3
Status In progress — 9 of 14 live
Blockers Two clients need branding sign-off from their marketing team; one has data still in spreadsheets.

Note what makes this usable: the objective is in their language, the measure is countable, both owners are named, and the blockers are specific enough to act on. Compare with "improve client reporting efficiency" — which nobody can score, own, or unblock.