The 10% Rule: How Much Should You Really Invest in Customer Success? With the CRO of Notion and VP of CS at GitHub

Every B2B CEO asks this question. So at SaaStr Annual + AI Summit we brought together the CRO of Notion and VP of CS at GitHub to answer it.

Featured Speakers:

Erica Anderson – Chief Revenue Officer, Notion
Erica stands at the helm of Notion’s revenue strategy as Chief Revenue Officer. With a remarkable 10-year tenure at GitHub before joining Notion, she brings deep experience scaling technology companies from startup through IPO. Her approach to customer success transcends traditional sales models, focusing on sustainable growth through customer obsession. At Notion, her team targets an ultra-efficient 3.9% of ARR for customer experience—well below the 10% industry benchmark.

Abbas Haider Ali – VP of Customer Success, GitHub
As VP of Customer Success at GitHub, Abbas has been instrumental in transforming how technology companies approach customer engagement. His leadership focuses on building robust CS frameworks that drive both customer satisfaction and business growth. He’s known for his 50-page operational document outlining missions, KPIs, and leading/lagging indicators for every CS function—reviewed monthly and continuously evolved by his entire team.

Fun fact: Their professional relationship began with an unusual twist—Erica informed Abbas of her departure from GitHub on his very first day at the company. This set the stage for a collaborative relationship that demonstrates the interconnected nature of tech leadership.

This post synthesizes insights from SaaStr Annual’s Chief Customer Officer Summit discussion between these two seasoned operators who’ve scaled CS organizations across multiple high-growth phases.

The Bottom Line Up Front: You have 10% of your revenue to spend on all things post-sales. Period. If you’re spending more, you better have a damn good reason.

I get this question constantly from SaaS leaders: “How much should we invest in Customer Success?” It’s the million-dollar question that keeps CEOs up at night, especially as they’re trying to balance growth with profitability in today’s market.

After years of operating at scale and advising hundreds of SaaS companies, I’ve landed on a specific number that might surprise you with its precision: 10% of revenue for all post-sales activities.

Why 10% Isn’t Just a Nice Round Number

This isn’t some back-of-the-napkin calculation. The 10% rule comes from hard math around what it takes to run a sustainable, scalable SaaS business that can:

• Maintain Rule of 40 compliance
• Raise follow-on funding effectively
• Scale toward an eventual public offering
• Generate predictable, profitable growth

When you look at the unit economics of successful SaaS companies at scale, the pattern is clear. Companies that consistently outperform allocate roughly 10% of revenue to the entire post-sales engine—and they stick to it religiously.

Two Ways to Think About CS Investment

There are really two lenses through which you need to evaluate your Customer Success investment:

1. The Pure Numbers Game

This is where that 10% rule lives. You can slice it as:

• Percentage of ARR
• Absolute dollar investment
• Cost per customer
• Investment per cohort

Professional Services often gets lumped into this bucket, and you need to be surgical about what counts as “CS investment” versus what’s actually a revenue center.

2. The Functional Investment Model

This is about how you deploy those dollars across the customer journey. Think of it as three distinct investment areas:

Dedicated Hands-On Support: Your high-touch, white-glove customer success managers and technical account managers. These are your relationship owners who live in Slack channels and know your customers’ kids’ names.

Pooled Resources: Shared services that can scale across multiple customer segments—your CS operations team, shared technical resources, cross-functional support specialists.

Digital-First Experiences: Self-service portals, in-app guidance, automated health scoring, digital onboarding flows. This is where you get your scale leverage.

The Customer Journey Drives Everything

Here’s what most SaaS leaders get wrong: they start with the budget and work backward. That’s ass-backward.

The customer journey should drive your functional requirements, which then inform your investment model. If you’re not making customers successful, the numbers stop mattering because you don’t have a business.

Map out every critical moment in your customer journey:

• First value realization
• Onboarding milestones
• Expansion conversations
• Renewal discussions
• Advocacy development

Then ask: what functional capabilities do we need at each stage? That tells you where to invest.

The Evolution: From Support Ticket to Revenue Engine

The modern Customer Success organization isn’t your grandfather’s support team. As companies scale from $1M to $100M ARR, the CS function evolves dramatically. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

The GitHub Journey: Started with Professional Services and support, then layered on specialized roles as the platform grew. The initial focus was getting developers onto their software development platform—a land-and-expand motion that required deep technical enablement.

The Notion Path: Began with support and customer success due to the product’s learning curve, now layering on professional services and renewals. Their focus has been on hands-on onboarding support to help users navigate the platform’s flexibility.

Your CS org structure will include:

• Customer Success Managers
• Professional Services teams
• Technical Account Managers
• Renewals specialists
• Account Management
• Customer Experience teams
• Engineering support resources

The key insight: your CS organization should flex with your growth stage. What works at $5M ARR breaks at $50M ARR.

Two Organizational Models That Actually Work

Based on real-world experience at scale, there are two dominant CS structures:

Pod Structure (GM Mode): Different goals clustered together with clear accountability. Notion uses this approach, where revenue-focused pods align around customer segments and outcomes.

Functional Structure: Centralized CS teams organized by function rather than customer type. GitHub operates this way, with specialized functions serving the entire customer base.

The choice depends entirely on your growth stage and complexity. You can—and should—switch between models as you evolve.

When to Break the 10% Rule (Spoiler: Almost Never)

I’m not completely dogmatic about the 10% rule. There are exactly three scenarios where I’ll entertain going above it:

1. You’re in true land-and-expand mode where post-sales investment directly drives net revenue retention above 130%
2. You’re managing a complex migration or platform consolidation where temporary over-investment prevents massive churn
3. You have a compliance or regulatory requirement that mandates specific support levels

Notice what’s NOT on that list:

• “Our customers are really demanding”
• “We’re in a competitive market”
• “Our product is complex”
• “We want to provide amazing experiences”

Those are table stakes, not exceptions to good unit economics.

Measuring What Matters: Beyond Gross Retention

Here’s where most CS teams get it wrong: they focus on lagging indicators like gross retention rate (GRR) and net retention rate (NRR). Those matter, but they won’t help you course-correct in real-time.

The Leading Indicators That Actually Predict Success:

At Notion, they track:

• Database usage and editing activity
• Integrations enabled per customer
• User engagement within first 90 days
• Monthly active users by cohort
• Onboarding velocity metrics

At GitHub, Abbas’s team developed a comprehensive framework with leading indicators for every function, documented in a 50-page operational guide that gets monthly reviews.

The Monthly Business Review Reality Check: If your business reviews don’t have yellow and red indicators to discuss, you’re not being aggressive enough with your goals. The magic happens when you focus conversations on what’s not working—not celebrating the green metrics.

Pro tip: Document how someone becomes an advanced user within 90 days. That journey map becomes your success playbook.

The Revenue Reality: Yes, CS Should Sell

This is where the rubber meets the road. The question isn’t whether Customer Success should be monetized—it’s how to do it without destroying trust.

Professional Services: Your Budget Lifeline
Smart companies use PS margins to protect their core 10% CS budget. When you can generate positive margin contribution from services, you free up investment for new CS initiatives.

The Priority Support Model
Customers will always pay for priority access. Think VIP line at the airport—same concept. This isn’t about creating artificial scarcity; it’s about acknowledging that some customers need and value faster response times.

The Shift from “No” to “Yes”
The goal is cultural transformation within your CS team. Moving from order-takers to proactive value creators. This doesn’t happen overnight—it’s a continuous journey that requires enablement, incentives, and leadership modeling.

At Notion, this approach allows them to operate at 3.9% of ARR while still delivering world-class customer experiences. The math works when you’re strategic about monetization.

When Internal and External Magic Happens

You know you’ve built something special when the magic becomes visible both internally and externally.

Internal Magic Signals:

• Everyone knows where they fit in the customer journey
• Clear role definition with no overlapping confusion
• Leadership interchangeability—your CS leaders can walk in the shoes of their revenue peers
• Common language across the organization for customer lifecycle stages
• Joint recognition and mutual respect between departments

External Magic Validation:

• Unsolicited customer praise on social media (screenshot those LinkedIn posts!)
• Customer stories that spread organically
• Public case studies that customers volunteer to participate in
• Reference calls that customers eagerly accept

Abbas’s team at GitHub tracks these moments religiously—they become powerful recruiting and retention tools for CS talent.

The Ultimate Test: When recently onboarded customers post positive reviews without any prompting from your team, you’ve achieved true customer obsession. That’s the kind of validation that drives sustainable growth.

Your Action Plan: Getting to 10%

If you’re currently above the 10% threshold, here’s your systematic approach to optimization:

Immediate Actions (Next 30 Days):

1. Audit your current spend across all post-sales functions—break it down by role, tool, and program
2. Map your customer journey from onboarding to renewal and identify automation opportunities
3. Establish your KPI framework with leading indicators, not just lagging metrics

Strategic Moves (Next 90 Days): 4. Choose your organizational model—pod structure vs. functional structure based on your current scale 5. Layer your investment starting with digital-first approaches before adding human resources 6. Implement monetization strategies for Professional Services to protect your core budget

Scale Discipline (Ongoing): 7. Measure relentlessly on customer outcomes per dollar invested 8. Scale deliberately as revenue grows—maintain that 10% discipline at every stage 9. Document everything—create your own 50-page operational guide like Abbas’s team

The companies that master this balance—the ones that can deliver incredible customer experiences within disciplined unit economics—those are the ones that build enduring, valuable businesses.

Remember: your customers don’t care about your CS budget. They care about outcomes. The 10% rule ensures you can deliver those outcomes sustainably, profitably, and at scale.

The Bottom Line: Track your CS investment as a percentage of ARR. Know it cold. Defend it religiously. Your future fundraising success depends on it.