When Nick Mehta became CEO of Gainsight in 2013, “customer success manager” was barely a job title. “If you looked on LinkedIn at that point, there were about 500 customer success managers [CSMs] in the entire world,” he said in an interview. Since then, he’s helped elevate the field into a core driver of SaaS strategy.
Under Mehta’s leadership, Gainsight has grown into a platform that helps companies not just retain customers, but build lasting relationships with them. Central to this shift is net revenue retention (NRR), which Mehta calls “one of the biggest drivers of shareholder value.” The metric captures how much customers expand their spending over time—an indicator, he argues, of product-market fit and long-term health.
According to Mehta, early-stage investors ask about it to determine product–market fit, and growth-stage companies monitor it constantly. He believes that companies with strong NRR are simply better positioned to grow efficiently.
Mehta calls NRR “a flashlight,” guiding companies toward what’s working—and what’s not.
Gainsight, which helps SaaS firms improve customer success and renewal rates, has built its platform around that principle. As software companies face pressure to do more with less, NRR is becoming the metric that separates the durable from the disposable. “Companies with high, natural net retention are just going to grow more efficiently, and easily,” Mehta said.
As a leader, Mehta is pragmatic and data-driven, focused on turning customer success into a repeatable growth model—one metric at a time.
