The most expensive customer success lesson in enterprise - and the workflow that fixed it

Most enterprise software fails quietly. Not at launch. At month 4, when the original champion is pulled into a different project and nobody else fully understands why the system was bought.

Watched this pattern repeat across banking, healthcare, manufacturing deployments. The pattern:

→ Month 1: champion is energetic, adoption is climbing

→ Month 2: usage is real, some early wins

→ Month 3: champion is promoted, reassigned, or just busy

→ Month 4: usage plateaus, then quietly drops

→ Month 6: renewal conversation is awkward

What fixed it: a 'second champion' workflow. Within the first 60 days, identify and onboard a secondary stakeholder - usually an operations lead, not the original buyer. Train them, give them ownership of the workflow review, make them visible to leadership.

Costs almost nothing. Saves the renewal. Has anyone built a similar resilience mechanism into their CS playbook? Curious what other patterns work.