Guidance

Your best renewal process contains judgment: which evidence the buyer will accept, which dependency still blocks a decision, and when to involve an executive. Guidance brings that procedure into the account's daily work. The team follows one process while each customer gets a plan informed by their own context.

This walkthrough shows the manually generated plan. For enrollments where automatic planning is enabled, see automatically maintained plans.

Create a Guidance

1. Open Guidances from the navigation rail or More and choose Create guidance.
2. Enter a name that describes the outcome, such as Renewal evidence review.
3. Select the Owner role. Cust uses that role's assignment on each company to assign its Guidance tasks. Check that the relevant account has a team member assigned to the role.
4. Write or paste the procedure into Instructions. Include the outcome, evidence to review, decision points, escalation conditions, and what counts as finished. Type @ to reference a configured signal.
5. Choose Create. Cust generates pipeline stages from the instructions. Wait for Stages are being updated... to disappear, then review the stage names and order before adding customers.

Use the Guidance menu's Edit action to refine the instructions. Saving changed instructions generates the stages again.

Example procedure: renewal evidence review

Consider the Pfizer renewal scenario: usage is improving, a sponsor is handing over responsibility, and Finance needs evidence that supports a purchasing decision. A generic reminder to "prepare a QBR" leaves the CSM to reconstruct the difficult parts.

Give Guidance the standards that make the decision credible. The following procedure can be adapted for your own renewal motion:

Purpose and ownership

Start the review 90 days before renewal. The Customer Success Manager owns progress. Keep the existing renewal decision separate from expansion.

1. Confirm the decision

Establish the renewal date, current contract value, decision maker, Finance review date, and deadline for evidence. After a sponsor handover, confirm who owns the operating rollout and who can approve the purchase.

2. Establish the evidence

Review the agreed success measures and original conversations. Compare measured results for the live baseline only. Separate released capacity from cash savings, identify estimates, and name the person who must validate each claim. Exclude sites that have not launched.

3. Close the evidence gaps

Give each dependency an owner and a date. A technical issue is resolved when the customer has verified the required result. Track Payroll validation and purchasing approval as separate decisions.

4. Prepare the decision brief

Summarize measured results, remaining assumptions, source references, the decision owner, and the next checkpoint. Prepare a follow-up for the CSM to review.

5. Confirm the outcome

Record the customer's actual decision. If evidence is missing, agree the next checkpoint and keep the renewal open. Close the process after explicit confirmation of the outcome.

A useful account plan can now distinguish "get the six-week baseline validated by Payroll" from "confirm the economic buyer's decision date." Those steps answer different questions and need different owners, evidence, and deadlines. Customer Memory supplies the changing account context; Guidance supplies the team's standard for what to do with it.

Add a customer and generate their plan

1. In the Guidance's Pipeline, choose Add to guidance.
2. Search for the company, select it, and choose Add. For a manually generated plan, the company enters Not started, and Cust creates a Start guidance task for its owner. When automatically maintained plans are enabled for new enrollments, Cust prepares the plan in the background.
3. Open the company in the pipeline or its task in Action Hub.
4. If the customer has no automatically maintained plan, choose Generate plan. This opens the Assistant with the Guidance and customer attached, ready to build a plan from the procedure and available account context.
5. Review the resulting items, source references, dates, and current stage. Make the next step specific enough that its owner can act without reconstructing the account history.

For automatic enrollment, configure a company workflow with the required trigger and an Add to guidance action. Select the Guidance in that action and publish the workflow. A timing instruction such as "90 days before renewal" describes the procedure; the workflow controls when accounts enter it.

Automatically maintained plans

Availability depends on your workspace and the customer's enrollment. Existing enrollments can continue to use Generate plan even when new enrollments use automatic planning.

For an automatically maintained plan, Cust uses the procedure, account data, and customer memory to decide which steps are ready, which must wait, and which are finished. Open the customer's plan from the pipeline, or use Show guidance progress on a related work item.

• A blue dot marks a current step. Later steps remain visible under their stages, with a For later tooltip. Completed and skipped steps remain in the plan.
• Your team's actionable steps become tasks. Open a linked step to review or complete its task. Customer-side steps can link to an existing dependency in memory.
• Source references beside a step let you inspect the relevant records and conversations. Use Leave a note to add context to the plan.
• While the enrollment is active, completing, dismissing, or reopening a linked task, or resolving or reopening a linked dependency, prompts Cust to reconsider the plan. Scheduled checks also reconsider the plan using the latest account evidence.
• When there is nothing actionable, the plan can show the next date Cust will look again. Cust can complete the enrollment when the outcome is reached or no unfinished steps remain.

These plans can also complete or dismiss their generated tasks as the evidence and next steps change. Review the task history and sources when checking why an item closed. The manual plan controls and revisit tasks below apply to enrollments using Generate plan.

Work through the plan

Open a customer's manually generated Guidance plan to review its stages and next steps.

For the renewal example, ask Assistant to draft a one-page decision brief that separates measured outcomes, estimates, and unresolved dependencies. Review its sources and proposed follow-up before sending. Completing a draft, validating a result, and receiving purchasing approval are separate milestones in the plan.

Bring the plan back at the right moment

For a manually generated plan, set the next revisit date in the customer's Guidance panel. The revisit summary also shows any email threads or signals referenced by the plan. A customer reply in a linked thread or a new occurrence of a linked signal can bring the Guidance back sooner.

Cust creates or refreshes the enrollment's actionable task in Action Hub for Plan revisit, Customer replied, or Signal fired. Open that task to review what changed and work through the plan. The plan's individual items stay together inside the customer's Guidance.

For example, set the next review for the day after Payroll promised its baseline. If the customer replies earlier in the linked thread, the CSM can revisit the plan with that new evidence instead of waiting for the checkpoint.

Maintain the process

Use Search companies, the owner filter, and Show completed to review the pipeline. Not started contains customers without a plan. Unknown contains customers that have a plan but no current stage.

Company cards use the workspace's selected card fields. Admins and owners can choose up to four fields to keep relevant account details visible while the team reviews the pipeline.

After editing the instructions, review the regenerated stages and active customer plans. In a manually generated plan, if a stage is removed, its plan items remain available under Unstaged. An account whose current stage was removed can appear in Unknown. Move its items to the appropriate stages and use Set as current to place the account back in the pipeline.

Choose the finishing action that matches the outcome:

Set up a Guidance