Why Your “Green” Accounts Might Be at Risk with Sean Reid

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In Customer Success, few things feel better than seeing your accounts glowing green on your dashboard. But what if those “healthy” accounts are actually hiding major risks?

In this episode of The Customer Success Pro Podcast, host Anika Zubair sits down with Sean Reid, an award-winning CS leader from Ireland, to unpack one of the biggest blind spots in Customer Success: the false sense of security that comes with traditional health scores.

Sean, who has led Customer Success teams at HubSpot, Personio, and Tive, recently created the Renewal Probability Score—a data-driven framework that challenges everything we thought we knew about customer health. Together, they explore why green accounts churn, what metrics really predict renewal, and how CS teams can evolve to meet the expectations of 2025 and beyond.

Rethinking Health Scores: From Reactive to Predictive

Sean’s journey into Customer Success started by accident. A marketer by trade, he joined HubSpot when they began hiring marketers into their CS organization. There, he realized how much impact he could make by helping multiple businesses succeed—and how much more rewarding it felt to be part of their growth stories.

But it was also at HubSpot that Sean uncovered a major problem with traditional health scoring systems. “They were all reactive,” he says. “They told us what had already happened with the customer, not what was coming next.”

After one of his biggest “green” accounts suddenly churned, Sean dug deeper. He discovered that while usage looked great and sentiment seemed positive, several key stakeholders had gone missing from customer calls. These silent influencers, who were part of the original buying committee, had lost confidence in the product—and no one had noticed.

That experience sparked a realization: CSMs need to track customer sentiment and confidence, not just system data. 

“Our systems can’t predict confidence,” Sean explains. “Only humans can. And that’s why we need to bring human insight back into health scoring.”

Introducing the Renewal Probability Score

Rather than tweaking traditional health scores, Sean advocates for killing the term altogether.

“If you tell your board you have a ‘health score,’ they have no idea what that means,” he laughs. “But if you say ‘renewal probability score,’ everyone instantly understands.”

His model combines automation with human insight in a 60/40 ratio—where 60% of the score comes from CSM sentiment and 40% from usage or product data.

This approach creates a fuller, more accurate picture of customer health. Instead of chasing vanity metrics like green/yellow/red statuses, teams assign numerical values that reflect renewal likelihood. A structured dropdown in the CRM allows CSMs to log nine types of sentiment (positive, neutral, and negative), from stakeholder engagement to customer confidence levels.

Sean calls this human element “the Sherlock Holmes effect.” By investigating the subtleties in customer behavior—like who attends meetings, who goes silent, and what language customers use—CSMs can detect risks long before they appear in a dashboard.

“AI can automate a lot of things,” he says, “but it can’t read the tone of a conversation or the energy in a room. That’s where humans win every time.”

Why Health Scores Alone Don’t Drive Renewals

Health scores have become a crutch for many CS organizations. They look neat in board reports, but they rarely tell the full story. As Anika and Sean discuss, health scores were designed for an earlier era of SaaS—one where customers bought software and stuck around by default.

Today’s buyers are more informed, budgets are tighter, and renewals are harder to win. Yet many CS teams are still using 2015-style models to predict 2025 renewals.

Sean argues that the biggest issue isn’t the metric itself, but how leadership teams interpret it. “Health scores make us feel productive,” he says. “They give us data to show we’re doing something right, even when we’re not.”

He also warns against using NPS as a proxy for success. “NPS is just a moment in time. It’s performative,” he says. “I’ve seen customers give a low score one day and renew happily later. Or give a 10 and churn three months after. It’s not predictive.”

Instead, Sean recommends tracking sentiment over time, asking customers how confident they feel about their goals after every major interaction, and using that evolving data to spot trends early.

“Executives don’t renew because of dashboards,” Anika adds. “They renew because they believe the story you tell about impact.”

Building a Model That Works

When it comes to implementing a renewal probability model, Sean has two core principles: take your time and include your customers.

He admits that in his early attempts, he rushed to roll out a scoring system under pressure to show performance results. The outcome? Missed signals, inconsistent data entry, and frustrated CSMs.

Now, he advises CS leaders to slow down and design the system collaboratively—with input from both CSMs and customers. “Ask your customers what success looks like to them,” he says. “If you’re not building around their definition of value, you’re already off track.”

He also stresses the importance of trusting your team. “Every CSM interprets customer sentiment a little differently, and that’s okay,” Sean says. “We hire them for their judgment—so we need to trust it.”

Finally, Sean encourages CS leaders to focus automation on the right areas. Automate repetitive tasks like onboarding or product education, not the deep relationship work that requires human nuance.

“If we stop treating health scoring as a data exercise and start treating it as a customer story, everything changes,” he says.

Listen Now & Build Data-Driven CS Strategies

This episode with Sean Reid is a must-listen for CSMs and CS leaders ready to modernize their approach to customer health and renewal forecasting.

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