The Situation
A global enterprise infrastructure and data software company was four years into its PE hold, with an 18-24 month exit window closing in. A previous attempt to stand up a Customer Success function had failed. The company could not afford a second failure.
A new CEO inherited the problem – and inherited the clock. His personal network pointed him to ESG directly; several executives who’d worked with ESG previously made the introduction.
He was also fighting a bigger, existential battle. The product needed a major AI-era overhaul just to remain competitive; survival-level work that demanded his direct attention on product and engineering. He couldn’t run that overhaul and personally rebuild Customer Success at the same time. He needed a partner he could trust to own CS end-to-end, so his own time stayed where only he could spend it.
Underneath the CS problem was a compensation structure quietly working against itself: Sales was paid equally on new logo growth and retained growth, which meant the highest-paid people in the revenue org had no financial reason to prioritize either one. New logo growth had dipped into single digits. Retention was flat. Cost of sale sat at 26%, against a board-level target of 12%.
The pressure wasn’t only operational. What began as $2.1 billion of acquisition debt in early 2022 had swelled to more than $3.5 billion by mid-2024. The debt was growing faster than the business, leaving less margin for covenant performance and making a successful exit increasingly difficult. Against that backdrop, cost of sale wasn’t an efficiency metric – it was a direct lever on the EBITDA the company needed to service its debt and defend its valuation at exit.
A long diagnostic phase wasn’t an option – not because the diagnosis didn’t matter, but because the CEO didn’t have the runway to spend a quarter finding out before acting. A CS leadership search alone would have burned two quarters he didn’t have. His mandate to ESG: “Bend what’s possible without breaking us.”
The Objective
Build a global Customer Success function from scratch, in under two quarters, while the company simultaneously ran its search for a permanent CS leader – freeing the CEO to stay focused on the product overhaul the business’s survival actually depended on.
The Approach
ESG deployed a full operating team providing immediate execution support – not a consulting framework, an execution oriented team:
- Senior executive consultants to own strategic direction, financial analysis, and prioritize which changes would yield the highest financial return – not a generic CS playbook
- Senior program managers to herd the cats – driving change at a pace the organization had never operated at, in a culture where average tenure was measured in decades, not years
- CS operations managers to analyze data and tooling, and to implement the measurement systems and technology needed to scale the new model across the full customer base
- CX facilitators to ground the design in what customers actually needed, not what was administratively convenient
The structural fix: separate the specialization. Lower-cost, retention-specialized CS resources took over renewals and retained growth. Higher-cost sales resources were redirected fully toward new logo acquisition. The comp structure that had been quietly neutralizing both motions got corrected at the source.
The Result
New logo growth continued to underperform, holding in single digits – the honest cost of a sales org that had been running unfocused for years and was now being rebuilt sharper.
Retention did the opposite. In Q4, the new function outperformed board expectations by 8 points. The CCO put it directly: retention “carried the company from an overall revenue performance standpoint” in a quarter where sales missed plan. In Q1 of the following fiscal year, retention outperformed again – proof this wasn’t a one-quarter anomaly but a structural, repeatable shift.
The Takeaway
The CEO didn’t need someone to hand him a CS framework. He needed someone to own the function outright, fast enough to matter inside an exit window, so he could stay focused on the product work that determined whether the company survived at all. ESG built the function, fixed the incentive economics underneath it, and gave him back the only thing he couldn’t buy more of – his time.