In the 2010s, customer success (CS) teams were expected to keep their accounts happy. But in 2025, happiness is no longer an acceptable measure of customer value. Margin-conscious B2B revenue leaders—and the investors who back them—want to see how every post-sales effort materially contributes to revenue and NRR growth, too.

Unfortunately, traditional customer success roles aren't structured to meet these demands. So, we decided to create a role that could: Head of Customer Performance. And the first to take it on is Lee Beddows—Trig's first official post-sales hire.

By adding roles like Lee's, CS and sales teams can take responsibility for retention and revenue generation, not just relationship building. Let's take a look at what a head of customer performance does, and what benefits your team can unlock by hiring one.

Introducing Lee Beddows: The world's first B2B Head of Customer Performance

As a company focused on reinventing post-sales growth for our customers, we were well aware that we’d have to lead by example. And the only way to do that was by inventing a new leadership role that went above and beyond the scope of traditional customer success.

We knew right away that Lee was the person to pioneer it. He's a post-sales savant with years of experience leading account management and success efforts at top B2B SaaS companies, including Datadog and Airtable. Most recently, he led the CS and post-sales teams at Synthesia, managing $100 million in revenue across thousands of accounts, while reimagining engagement approaches with personalized AI-generated videos.

Over the course of his career, Lee has helped CS and sales teams manage billions in ARR and NRR through his visionary post-sales strategies.

Needless to say, Lee isn't your everyday CS leader. With his track record, he's perfectly positioned to guide us through a shift that all B2B companies must navigate: from measuring success to driving performance. And as AI notetakers and other self-serve tools render traditional success interactions increasingly unnecessary, this pivot is only growing more urgent.

What's the difference?

Customer success has long focused on building lasting customer relationships. The ultimate goal is to keep customers happy enough so they renew their contracts.

Customer performance describes the forward-thinking, proactive job of driving revenue growth by encouraging product use and expansion. It's not just about managing relationships and maintaining the status quo; it's about using data to help customers discover new ways of unlocking value from the product, which naturally leads to deeper adoption.

Put simply, customer performance is much more of a numbers game than its predecessor. Everything Lee does at Trig is quantitative as well as qualitative, from digging into customer data and zooming in on new revenue opportunities to realizing them with personalized outreach. No matter what, he's always working explicitly in service of Trig's larger growth goals.

“We're moving past the old model of customer success—which is centered on relationships and account health—and redefining what post-sales can deliver. Lee's title reflects the vital role he'll play in driving revenue and NRR growth for Trig. – Tom Richards, CEO of Trig”

Performance is the new success in today's outcome-driven climate

We hired Lee to head customer performance at a time when CS as we know it is facing a downturn.

As we suggested above, the recent surge of self-serve tools, like AI notetakers and chatbots, has reduced customers' appetites for the one-on-one connections that CS was built to provide. When customers can help themselves more, they meet with their CSMs less, denying teams regular opportunities to check in on their accounts and find out what they actually need.

At the same time, precarious economic conditions and rising investor expectations force companies to put a dollar value on every business function. CS teams have become revenue owners almost overnight.

To hit their unrelenting new growth targets, these teams now need a way to quantify the value (or potential value) of all their customers. That requires digging much deeper than what's being purchased. It means measuring what outcomes customers are achieving over time and what outcomes are still ahead—whether that's completing the next integration, adding more seats, or moving to the next tier.

But most teams don't have the data systems in place to accurately forecast these outcomes, let alone realize them. That's where solutions like Trig and hires like Lee come in.

How Lee and Trig are turning happy customers into more revenue

Lee was drawn to Trig because it moves far beyond the scope of a traditional customer success platform (CSP). Instead of offering static (and quickly outdated) health reports, it quantifies how successful and satisfied customers are in real time.

And with a unified view of sales and product usage data, Trig also eliminates the need for teams to rely on one-on-one account management to understand their customers. Rather than wasting time on defensive "vibe checks"—which, at best, reveal who's about to imminently churn—they can use Trig. Its proactive AI agents are always on call, scanning for hidden signals of churn and expansion.

But the story doesn't end there. Trig's agents instantly follow up their insights with orchestrated and measurable actions directed at the end user. This empowers post-sales teams to drive retention and seize growth opportunities at scale.

“I spent a decade hacking together different tools to get a comprehensive view of customer performance, and I never quite got there. Trig takes all your sales and product usage data—and then uses it to trigger highly contextual agent actions that are specifically designed to drive retention and expansion. It's just amazing. – Lee Beddows, Head of Customer Performance at Trig”

In this way, Trig also equips leaders like Lee to assume responsibilities that have typically been spread across success, RevOps, and sales teams. "When so many people own the post-sales process, it's really hard to act on your data," Lee explains. "By consolidating all this work into one business function, Trig empowers you to operate a lot more strategically and holistically."

And as our resident Trig power user, Lee will stretch every use case and stress-test every release, ensuring our customers realize value and our teams hit ambitious growth targets. He'll also pave the way for a more productive future for post-sales teams across the B2B landscape.

The benefits of investing in customer performance early

A customer performance function—complete with a purpose-built platform like Trig—can transform your organization and multiply your post-sales capacity.

By investing in one, you can:

• Gain a dynamic view of post-sales activities: With the right leader and tool, you'll be able to take every customer's full context into account and measure exactly how they're getting to value—no guesswork needed. Lee's strategic data use is already driving early results for customers who are still implementing Trig. By surfacing bottlenecks in the onboarding process or unconventional aspects of their customer journey that impede adoption, he stops pre-live churn in its tracks.
• Engage and expand *every* customer segment: When you have thousands of accounts, ranging from very small to multimillion-dollar, you need a way to engage with each one personally. Lee is committed to giving every segment exactly what they need to achieve the next outcome. How? He deploys Trig's AI agents to target every account with a playbook tailored to their customer journey. That might mean engaging PLGs stalling onboarding with a discount incentive—or using a nurturing flow to target high-value accounts with expansion signals. Plus, he can use Trig's platform to see how much revenue each initiative represents.

At its core, a dedicated customer performance function enables your company to focus on what matters most: unlocking more value for your customers while you deliver more renewals and expansions for your business. And with Lee as our guide, we know we’re in good hands. Between scaling customer performance in Trig and summoning his deep reporting chops to share the results, he holds our whole company accountable to every post-sales goal we set.

Join the future of post-sales revenue generation

Trig is redefining how B2B teams bring their customers to value with a bespoke performance solution that blends all the power of AI with human expertise.

That's why the most forward-thinking companies, from high-growth scale-ups to listed enterprises, trust Trig with their post-sales goals.

See what Trig can do for your NRR growth by booking a demo today.