Smart CTA Prioritization: Helping CS Teams Focus on What Matters Most
May 21
3 min read
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Introduction
Recently, we’ve been hearing a consistent piece of feedback from Customer Success (CS) Leaders: “How can we help our teams prioritize CTAs more efficiently?” It’s a great question — and one that gets to the heart of effective customer management.
The truth is, many Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are juggling far more than 8–10 open CTAs at a time. It’s understandable — customers are complex, timelines shift, and business needs evolve. That said, there are smarter ways to work. And yes, it goes beyond using just High/Medium/Low priority tags or starring CTAs.
Here are a few proven strategies you can adopt today to empower your CSMs and give CS Directors better visibility and control via Gainsight.
Prioritize by Customer Value (ARR-Based Scoring)
One practical approach is to tie CTA priority to customer value — specifically, ARR/ MRR. Here’s how it works:
Assign a numeric score to the CTA priority: Low = 1, Medium = 2, High = 3.
Multiply this by the customer’s ARR.
The result is a score that reflects both urgency and business impact.
This method helps ensure enterprise and strategic accounts with high revenue potential don’t fall through the cracks, and lets CSMs focus effort where it matters most.
Use CTA Type & Reason to Signal Business Objectives
Another powerful method is to map CTAs to your customer success objectives: Retention, Expansion, Efficiency, Risk, etc. By assigning importance or urgency scores to different CTA Types and Reasons, teams can build a prioritization model that reflects real business value.
For example:
A CTA with a Reason of Product Risk might score a 7
A CTA with a Reason of Internal Activity might score a 3
This approach allows CS leaders to spot which types of CTAs are taking up most of the team's time — and whether that's aligned with your strategic goals.
3. Score-Based Workload Balancing
If the concern is more about CSM workload management, it’s time to think in terms of effort points.
Let’s say a CSM has a weekly capacity of 100 points. Each CTA gets a score based on effort, urgency, or value — possibly using a Fibonacci sequence or prime number system. Now you can:
See how many "points" each CSM is handling across different CTA types.
Understand whether they're overloaded or under-utilized.
Redistribute work to optimize productivity and impact.
You might find one CSM is carrying 40 points in Risk CTAs while another is deep into lower-impact Campaign work — and be able to act accordingly.
4. Balance by Business Goals & Strategic Focus
Once scoring is in place, CS Leaders can take a higher-level view. For example:
30% of a CSM's workload should be Risk-related CTAs
20% could go toward proactive relationship-building
The rest could be divided among campaign follow-ups, internal tasks, etc.
This approach brings in the Pareto Principle — identifying the 20% of CTAs that deliver 80% of the value — and helps teams align better with overarching CS strategy.
5. Automate Where Possible
Last but not least: automation.
Once we understand what the ideal CTA workload looks like (by volume, score, and impact), we can begin to automate the lower-priority, repetitive CTAs — freeing up CSMs to spend more time on high-touch, high-value interactions.
Conclusion
CTA overload is real, but it doesn’t have to be unmanageable. By applying structured prioritization strategies in your CSP instance — based on ARR, CTA type, effort scoring, and business goals — CS teams can work more efficiently and effectively.
The result? Less stress, more impact, and a clearer view for CS leaders into how time is being spent — and how success is being driven.
For more details on improving ROI with Gainsight, feel free to reach out to us at Wigmore — we’re here to help.
