Peter Walker (Head of Insights at Carta) shared new SVB + Carta benchmarks that should reset how you think about renewals: median ARR to raise a Series A is now $2.8M (top quartile: $6.9M), as he shared in his LinkedIn post.
Here’s the part most Customer Success teams miss:
This is not a “founder problem.” This is a buyer behavior reset.
When capital gets stricter, exec teams stop buying “tools” and start buying proof. That pressure first shows up in renewals, then in expansion.
If you’re still walking into renewals with activity updates, you’re about to get priced like a commodity.
Teams that tie outcomes back to exec metrics (see Customer Success Metrics Executives Actually Care About) keep price, keep scope, and keep trust.
And “impact” now needs to be provable fast, not poetic.
If you can’t show impact in tight loops, your renewal story gets vague, then it gets discounted (this is exactly what the 15-Minute CS Impact Loop was built to prevent).
What to do about it is the whole game.
Because the new bar isn’t “be helpful.”
It’s “show proof without begging for time.”
Premium members get the full Renewal Proof Pack system to run in real accounts, with copy/paste artifacts.
If you want to defend price and stop last-minute scramble, this is the playbook.