CS Leaders: Here’s How to Build OKRs That Survive the Summer Slump

Q3 is brutal for SaaS.

Your targets stay high - even as customers disappear on vacation and internal teams slow down.

As a CS leader, you’re stuck in the middle: expected to deliver outcomes, keep morale high, and translate lofty OKRs into something your team can actually act on.

If that’s where you are right now - this article will help.

I’ll walk you through how to build CS OKRs that are realistic, strategic, and motivational - with examples you can steal.

So let’s start with what are OKRs? Maybe you know it, then skip and go to the next section.

Website whatmatters.com tells us that

OKRs stand for Objectives and Key Results, a collaborative goal-setting methodology used by teams and individuals to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results.

The concept of OKRs were introduced in Intel Corporation in 1970s by Andy Groove (former CEO Intel). Then they became popular in 1999 when Larry Page and @Sergey Brin introduced it for the first time in Google to the team of 30 employees.

During my 10 years working in tech I believe it’s one of the most popular frameworks used by SaaS companies.

Brett Knowles provided very precise answer why OKR framework became too popular in SaaS:

OKRs are a powerful tool for any organization, but especially a SaaS (Software as a Service) because the primary characteristics of a SaaS company are significantly different than most other companies and OKRs are particularly well suited to their unique needs:

• Agility - SaaS companies need to change/refine their strategy five times as often as most companies. They need a strategy system that can 1) identify when a change is needed, and 2) make the change happen quickly
• Cross-functional work - because SaaS companies are constantly entering new markets and new applications, which requires tight coordination between sales, marketing and operations. OKRs make “silo behavior” a thing of the past through shared Objectives and shared Key Results.
• Data-rich environments - By their nature, SaaS companies produce HUGE amounts of data, much of which is business-critical. Data in SaaS can be overwhelming if there is not a ‘filtering’ system to allow leadership to focus on the few core things which are important to the current strategy - OKRs are that filtering system
• A quarter is too long - SaaS companies have a cadence that is, on average, three times as fast as a traditional company. What does that mean? Maybe even a quarterly strategy refresh is not a fast enough cadence! It means that waiting a month before looking at your OKR may not be fast enough - hence the need to Tasks - the ability to closely monitor what has happened since last week’s OKR meeting. OKR systems for SaaS companies need tasks and detailed KPIs to respond to their business cadence
• Accountability - with such velocity, cross-functional work, abundance of data and the need for agility, SaaS companies depend on OKR’s ability to assign clear ownership to a very finite level, to ensure nothing gets missed, or pulled between two Owners.

Why is it important to know? As a leader you need to understand the roots, so any time you will have an employee who’s doubting whether OKRs are useful and why your SaaS use it you can easily refer to historical facts.

I think it’s very persuasive that it was invented by Intel and adopted by Google, two large companies in the world and both successful in the tech world. 

And you know…sometimes our employees need this additional conviction (like for children).

The trick with OKRs is the struggle of executives to translate this big ambitious goal to measurable results and also bring it down to earth for simple individual contributors.

Why? In many organisations (not Big Tech Companies) there is no separate OKR training either for executives or regular employees.

Ideally, this function should be done by a separate person from the HR or Operations department. Because it is how departments operate and work together.

I was lucky enough to work in the company where we had a subscription to Allyy we specifically purchased the subscription to track the OKRs. 

They offered an amazing onboarding experience, where CSM would sit with your HR person and help to design OKRs for the company and then do training sessions for the management team.

The right tool doesn’t just track OKRs — it helps your team understand and own them

So here we are, you already know:

• What are OKRs
• When they were invented
• Why they useful for SaaS
• That you need to track it in separate tool related to HR

So let’s get back to the reality where you have the tool, but you don’t know how to translate your OKRs into actual measurable results for your team and not put them into a coma.

The sad truth is usually the CEO designs this one big ambitious OKR for the company and executives. For example, “Become number one solution on N market within a year” or something like this, and then CEO tells to executive: 

Now, send me OKRs of your departments that are aligned with this.

I pray that in your company there would be a dedicated goal where you will all discuss how you can align teams.

But what if not?...

Then I would help you to design your OKRs for your CS team right now.

As a leader of Customer Success you should focus on making sure customers are getting value for the product, so they continue to stay and buy more.

Following this, you already have at least two metrics you can monitor: Churn and NRR.

But keep these metrics to yourself and executive dashboards, it doesn’t mean your team should not have access to it. Our goal is to make the life of the team easier, which means in daily life they need clear actionable goals. NRR and Churn you can present on weekly team standups.

So instead of writing your OKR for Q3 

Increase Net Revenue Retention (NRR) by 15%

Write it 

Customer Success team will generate $300K in expansion revenue by Q3

And your key results will be:

• $ value of new modules upgraded/added
• Collaborated with marketing team on launching 1 webinar for ICP cohort
• % of Tier A accounts with mapped expansion path
• X% of ICP customers were moved from At Risk Stage

Do you see? Becomes a little bit easier, but again, this is the first part, this is your executive OKR that you should track.

Next step, let’s break it down to Team Level:

The OKR for the team from your OKR will sound smth like: 

Drive expansion through strategic account engagement

With following Key Results:

• Identify 30 expansion-ready accounts
• Ensure 90% of CSMs complete Success Plans for Tier A clients
• Track expansion pipeline via CRM with >80% coverage
• Collaborate with Sales to close 10% of identified expansion opps

We’re almost here, now from the Team OKRs above (that ideally should be calculating on itself from software) we come to the OKR of individual team members, which can sound like

Proactively drive value and uncover expansion in portfolio

And key results for it:

• Book 10 QBRs with Tier A customers
• Identify 5 expansion opportunities monthly
• 50% of customers have live Success Plans
• Improve product adoption score by X% for 3 key accounts

From this, your CSM knows on daily basis already what she/he should do: 

- write to top A customers to arrange QBR

-check their portfolio for expansion

-go check CRM and see how many customers have live Success plans

- choose 3 key accounts with whom they work closely to improve product adoption

Of course this is only the example, and I choose numbers from my head, you should operate in your environment.

So let’s summarise.

Don’t push abstract metrics to your CSMs - give them actions they can own.

• Align with execs, but advocate for realism.
• Track what matters, but celebrate what’s done.
• Don’t build OKRs alone - loop in HR, Ops, and Product.
• Use the quarter as a reset - not a panic.

Leading CS in SaaS isn’t about copying Big Tech OKRs.

It’s about translating strategy into action — without breaking your team.

If you’re navigating Q3 goal-setting now, I hope this gives you clarity and confidence.

🧠 Got questions?

Book a coaching session with me via email alexandra@aicshub.com