NPS (Net Promoter Score)
NPS doesn't measure satisfaction. It measures a customer's willingness to put their own professional reputation on the line to recommend you to someone else.
“An NPS of 60 collected from the wrong users predicts nothing. It only predicts how polite the people who don't decide the renewal are.”
Otto GTM ObservatoryWhy it must be treated differently than in B2C
In B2C, NPS benefits from large numbers and broad distribution. In B2B, where a single account can be worth as much as hundreds of consumer customers, who responds and in what role matters much more: an economic buyer, a power user, and an occasional user give different signals about the same account.
B2B NPS must always be segmented by respondent role and cross-checked with real product usage data, otherwise it measures average politeness instead of the real probability of renewal or expansion.
Anti-patterns
Common mistake: sending the NPS survey to every user on an account without weighting respondent role, letting junior, non-decision-making users determine the final score.
Second mistake: using NPS as the sole customer health KPI, ignoring far more predictive behavioral data like usage frequency, feature adoption, and support ticket history.
Practical Application
Out of 85 responses to a B2B survey, 52% are promoters, 31% passives, and 17% detractors: NPS = 52 - 17 = 35. Segmented by role, NPS among economic buyers (the renewal decision-makers) drops to 18, while among power users it rises to 61: the signal that really matters for the renewal forecast is the former, not the aggregate average.