Recorded Future is the world’s largest cyber threat intelligence company, providing AI-driven cyber threat intelligence to more than 2,000 organizations across the globe. Chris Holden is the former Chief Client Officer and current Engineering Owner of the Intelligence Network at Recorded Future. Chris shares his experience working with SOAR across a now nine-year partnership (seven years at the time of recording). SOAR began working with Chris and his team in 2017.

Chris Holden joined Recorded Future as its first customer success manager. Since then, he has helped build and lead the customer success organization as the company scaled to become the market-leading cyber threat intelligence platform in the world.

The Challenge

As CCO, Chris decided to build a customer success team of intelligence career practitioners from the intelligence community whose expertise could best translate product capabilities into customer outcomes.

As the company scaled, the limits of a team built entirely around individual expertise became clear. Without a common methodology or shared vocabulary, execution was highly variable. “We had a lot of artists in our field,” Chris recalls. “And I love artists. But when you get into a scaling business, if you have too many people doing their own interpretations of what the job is going to be, then your results tend to be highly variable depending on the person and their behaviors and how they feel about how they should be doing their job.”

The team also needed upskilling in the discipline of customer success: discovery, outcome planning, stakeholder engagement, etc. Chris needed to combine the threat intelligence trade craft his team already possessed with the customer success skills they needed to operate as a world-class enterprise organization.

The Solution

SOAR has partnered with Recorded Future for nine years now, designing and evolving a customer success program that has kept pace with the company at every stage.

We started small and foundational, working with roughly 20 people in Boston to establish a common vocabulary, a discovery framework, and baseline skills that the team could build upon. Chris says these skills, frameworks, and concepts have endured, remaining foundational to the customer success organization at Recorded Future.

The scope of our work together grew as Recorded Future grew both globally and in the depth of its product offerings. What started as a room-full of people in Boston scaled to a global team of 100+, while the product suite grew from one to nine modules. SOAR helped design and instrument a program that could travel with that growth, so the team in Singapore was operating from the same playbook, concepts, and standards as the team in London, Dubai, or Boston.

One of the more complex challenges SOAR helped Recorded Future navigate was the bifurcation of professional services from customer success. As the business matured, it needed to clearly define what customers received as a baseline CS experience versus what was offered as a distinct paid professional service. “That has been not the easiest thing to do,” Chris acknowledges. “And I think with some of your guidance and structuring around what best practices in customer success look like, you’ve helped inform us about what we want our customer success program to be versus what we want to go to market with as a paid professional service.”

Every engagement was grounded in Recorded Future’s current reality: the team, the market, the product, and the customer. “As we’ve done these engagements over years, the content has evolved,” Chris says. “If we were doing the same thing today that we were doing seven years ago, then this may have run its course. And you’ve always been incredibly focused on understanding what we’re really trying to get out of these engagements.”

The Results

In the first year of our work together, Recorded Future saw an 18% increase in growth revenue retention. Over the years, annual recurring revenue has increased tenfold, from $3 million to $30 million.

The most significant result of SOAR’s work was consistency, a competitive advantage at Recorded Future’s scale.The organization moved from a team of talented individuals executing in highly variable ways to one operating with a shared methodology, measurable processes, and a common standard of excellence across every geography.

Playbooks and process design built through the partnership continue to shape how the Recorded Future customer success organization operates today. “The level of consistency that has brought to how we execute the different stages of customer success,” Chris says, “has really smoothed out what otherwise was a highly variable experience for our customers and for ourselves to measure how we have our CSMs doing their work.”

What Makes This Partnership A Success

For Chris, what distinguishes SOAR is the depth of preparation and the commitment to working in reality rather than theory.

“We’ve really appreciated how much energy you and the teams put into understanding who we are as a business, as a team, where we are in our program’s evolution,” he says. “There are much different experiences where it’s like, this is our consulting program, this is what we do, deal with it and I hope it helps you. It has been the furthest to the other side of the spectrum always in working with you.”

Chris says our reality-based work together supports the frontline CSMs who have to actually apply the training to their day-to-day work. Because SOAR takes the time to understand the team, the market, and the product at every stage, the people in the field consistently embraced and enjoyed the work of learning customer success skills.

Thank you, Recorded Future, for choosing SOAR Performance Group!

Why This Matters: Building CS Organizations That Scale Well

SOAR’s work with Recorded Future shows what’s possible when methodology is designed for the people who have to use it, grounded in the reality of the business, and allowed to evolve as the company grows.

For any CCO or VP of Customer Success navigating rapid scale, global expansion, or a growing product portfolio, Recorded Future’s journey demonstrates how consistency and craft can reinforce each other.

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