Where to Start with Nick Mehta
Nick Mehta is the CEO of Gainsight, the company that created the customer success software category. More than any other individual, he has shaped how the business world thinks about the relationship between companies and their customers in the subscription economy. His books, co-authored with practitioners and operators in the field, have become the standard references for anyone building a customer success function. Mehta combines the perspective of a CEO running a fast-growing SaaS company with a genuine passion for making customer-centric thinking accessible to leaders at every level.
Start here
Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue
Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman & Lincoln Murphy · 256 pages · 2016 · Easy
Themes: customer retention, churn reduction, recurring revenue, SaaS business model, customer health scores
The book that put customer success on the map. Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman, and Lincoln Murphy wrote the first comprehensive guide to the discipline that has since reshaped how SaaS companies think about growth, retention, and the post-sale customer relationship.
Why Start Here
This is where Mehta’s thinking about customer success crystallized into a complete framework. Co-authored with Gainsight’s chief customer officer Dan Steinman and growth consultant Lincoln Murphy, the book lays out ten “laws” of customer success, each illustrated with examples from companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Oracle. It covers everything from why the subscription model made customer success inevitable to the practical mechanics of health scoring, segmentation, and churn prediction.
What makes this the right starting point is that it gives you both the why and the how. Mehta and his co-authors explain the economic forces behind the shift to recurring revenue, then show you exactly what a customer success organization looks like, how it measures progress, and where it fits within the broader company. The writing is clear and accessible, aimed at leaders who need to act, not just understand.
What to Expect
A well-structured 256-page guide that covers the full scope of customer success as a business discipline. No technical background needed. You will come away understanding not just what customer success is but why it has become essential to modern business, and how to start building it in your own organization.
Alternatives
Nick Mehta & Allison Pickens · 384 pages · 2020 · Moderate
Mehta’s second major book, co-authored with Allison Pickens (former COO of Gainsight), expands the customer success conversation from a department-level function to a company-wide transformation. Where the first book explained what customer success is, this one shows how it changes everything about how a business operates.
Why This One
The Customer Success Economy picks up where the first book left off. By 2020, customer success had moved from a novel idea to a standard practice at most SaaS companies. The question was no longer “should we do customer success?” but “how do we make the entire organization customer-centric?” Mehta and Pickens tackle this larger challenge, drawing on interviews with dozens of CEOs, investors, and Chief Customer Officers from the Fortune 500, private equity, venture capital, and Silicon Valley.
The book covers organizational redesign, leadership role changes, digital customer success implementations, and the strategic shifts needed when customer success moves from a team to a philosophy. It is more ambitious in scope than the first book and assumes you already understand the basics.
What to Expect
A substantial 384-page read aimed at leaders who have already embraced customer success and want to take it further. The writing is practical and grounded in real examples, but the material is more advanced than the first book. Best read after you have a foundation in customer success fundamentals.