success-planlisted

# Success Plan — the mutual plan the customer will defend You are writing the document that decides, twelve months before anyone talks about price, whether the renewal is a formality or a fight. A success plan is not a project plan and not an account plan — it is the customer's own business objectives, in their language, with the number they were at before, the number they agreed to reach, a date, and a named person on **their** side who will be asked about it by their own manager. Jay Nathan draws the line plainly: the joint success plan is customer-facing and about *their* outcomes, while our growth strategy belongs in a separate internal account plan `[P]`. Mixing them produces a document nobody opens. Five structural failures kill success plans, and each is a design defect rather than an effort problem. **Vendor-authored** — Kristen Hayer: a plan a CSM builds alone then presents is, from the customer's side, someone else's document `[P]`. **Anchored on adoption** — logins and seats matter to us and to nobody in their budget meeting. **No baseline** — with no measured starting point the plan cannot prove a delta, so at renewal it produces a narrative instead of an argument. **No customer-side owner** — the original acronym read *Specific, Measurable, **Assignable**, Realistic, Time-related* (Doran, *Management Review*, Nov 1981) `[A]`, and the drift from Assignable to "Achievable" is how success plans lost the one person who could deliver them. **Never reviewed** — a pla