Trim Size: 6in x 9in  Mehta572763 flast.tex V1-04/03/2020 11:45pm Page ix Foreword “The term Customer Success has become a buzzword in today’s business world.” The statement that I wrote four years ago to begin the foreword of Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Grow- ing Recurring Revenue now seems antiquated in 2020. After all, Customer  Success is light years past buzzword status these days.  In 2016, most people in the business world, even those in cutting-edge, pure-play SaaS companies, were unfamiliar with the concept of Customer Success. It was crystal clear that the economy was rapidly changing. The old model of customer service—reactive, costly, bare-minimum customer service—was no longer going to work now that customers were holding all the cards. Nick,Dan,andLincoln’sbookwastheperfectbookattheperfecttime. It gave forward-thinking leaders a blueprint to adapting to the changing market. It taught them the necessity of Customer Success as a strategy and an organizational function. It gave them the tools to create a Customer Success Management team from scratch and to lay a path to grow their careers in an emerging field. Four years later, dog-eared copies of that book are on the desks of tens of thousands of leaders and practitioners of Customer Success around the globe. I’ve even seen it on several CEOs’ shelves! It’s been translated into four languages and has helped fuel a movement that’s become one of the fastest-growing emerging jobs on the planet. There’s a pretty simple reason for it: churn. As the subtitle of the book suggests, Customer Success was focused on twodeeply intertwined topics: “Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring ix