Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A single question, asked to your customers, scored on an 11-point scale. NPS — Net Promoter Score — asks "How likely are you to recommend us to a colleague or friend?" on a 0 to 10 scale. The math is brutal. Scores of 9 or 10 are Promoters. 7 and 8 are Passives, who count as nothing. 0 through 6 are Detractors, every single one of them. Subtract the detractor percentage from the promoter percentage and that's your NPS, somewhere between -100 and +100.

How NPS Is Calculated

The formula treats neutrals as worthless:

NPS = % Promoters (9-10) - % Detractors (0-6)

Passives — your 7s and 8s, the people who probably like you fine — contribute zero to the score. This is deliberate, and it's why NPS punishes mediocrity harder than CSAT. A customer who rates you an 8 ("pretty good, would not actively warn people") is statistically identical to one who didn't respond.

Scores are typically reported relative to industry benchmarks. SaaS averages around +30. B2B enterprise software hovers near +40. Anything above +50 is genuinely strong. Above +70 usually means the survey methodology is broken or the sample is self-selected.

A Worked NPS Example

Stripe-competitor PayLane surveys 1,200 customers after their first invoice cycle. 540 respond — a 45% response rate, which is high. Of those: 270 score 9 or 10, 162 score 7 or 8, and 108 score 0 through 6.

Promoter % = 270 ÷ 540 = 50% Detractor % = 108 ÷ 540 = 20% NPS = 50 - 20 = +30

PayLane posts an NPS of 30 in the board deck. What the deck does not say: the 660 customers who didn't respond skew heavily toward dissatisfied — non-response bias adds an estimated 15-25 points of optimism to most NPS scores. The real number is probably +10 to +15. Nobody adjusts for this in the slide.

When Sales Teams Use NPS

NPS lives outside the sales org but lands inside every revenue review. VPs of Sales cite it when defending net revenue retention numbers. Customer Success teams use NPS cohorts to identify expansion candidates — Promoters expand at roughly 2.3x the rate of Passives. Finance includes it in board decks because investors ask for it by name. Recruiters at growth-stage startups screen for "NPS culture" in CX leadership hires.

Sales reps care for one reason: referral motion. Promoters generate roughly 4-5x more inbound leads than Detractors, and a tight referral program against the Promoter list is the cheapest pipeline generation channel that exists. A rep with three Promoter accounts who have referred each other is sitting on free territory.

Common NPS Gaming Patterns

Frederick Reichheld invented NPS in 2003. Every gaming pattern was discovered by 2006.

The deeper misconception: NPS is not a sales metric. It cannot predict renewal at the account level, it does not correlate cleanly with churn rate below a 6-month horizon, and a customer can score 10 in March and churn in May because their CFO replaced the procurement team. NPS is a brand-level mood reading aggregated across a population. Treating it as an account-health signal is a category error that costs companies real renewals every quarter — and the boards that demand it know less than the CSMs who roll their eyes at it.