This week:
23 Ways To Reduce Churn: #18 Measure & Show Customer Results
Download the Report: 23 Ways to Reduce Churn in 2023
Churn Cheat #7: "Unavoidable" Churn
Quote of the Week: Customers don't want your product...
23 Ways To Reduce Churn: #18 - Measure & Show Customer Results
The most important thing you can do to engage customers and keep their attention is to track and review their measurable results.
👉 Results are the most important predictor of retention because they are the primary reason customers stay. 👈
🏢 CLIENT STORY:
One of my client companies has a standard 38-slide QBR deck which CSMs are required to use for every enterprise account.
The problem is that very few of their customers ever participate in these QBRs. And it's no wonder.
Like virtually every QBR I've ever seen, they are extremely tedious because they focus on the VENDOR rather than the CUSTOMER.
So I convinced them to allow one of their CSMs to try a radical experiment: Replace the standard deck with just THREE slides that cover only ONE topic: the customer's measurable results.
Instead of preparing the standard QBR decks, the CSM spent her time researching and quantifying her customers' results and emailed them.
THE RESPONSE WAS ASTONISHING!
7 of 10 customers emailed back almost immediately, eager to learn more. Within a week, all ten customers agreed to meet with her, excited to discuss their results and learn what they could do to improve them!
The Lesson Is Clear:
⦿ QBRs are a waste of the customer's time, so they're also a waste of your time.
⦿ The most engaging thing you can do is show customers their measurable results.
⦿ This is also the key to opening customers to your expert advice.
23 Ways To Reduce Churn in 2023
Proven Methods for Rapidly Increasing Customer Retention Backed by Real-World Data
By: Greg Daines, CEO ChurnRX
CHURN CHEAT #7: "Unavoidable" Churn
This is a sleight of hand trick to manipulate customer churn rates by writing off some customer churn as "unavoidable."
This cheat works because it's undeniable that we do not have absolute control over customer churn. The classic example people always use is customers going out of business.
But some big RED FLAGS prove this is false framing...
🚩⓵ First, the reality is that virtually ALL customer churn is ultimately outside our control to a significant degree.
Customer Success was created entirely to increase our leverage against customer churn. Nobody seriously believes we can ever achieve total control over churn!
So where do we draw the line on how much "control" makes churn "avoidable" vs. "unavoidable?" There's no clear dividing line.
But surely, a customer that goes out of business is unavoidable by any standard! Right?
Actually, NO, and this raises the second red flag...
🚩⓶ If your solution is for businesses, it exists to make them more successful.
Therefore, we can't claim unequivocally that we have exactly 0% influence over our customers' business failures.
Now, I'm not suggesting we have a high degree of influence, and that's precisely my point. Though our influence varies, I can't think of any single customer factor that we absolutely control.
⚠️ But, clearly, there are some customers that literally CANNOT succeed!
This is true, but pretending this is totally out of our control is a lie.
👉 If a customer cannot benefit from our solution, then why did we sell them in the first place? 👈
This is a HUGE driver of churn across the business world, and likely the biggest of them all. We will never solve it by dodging responsibility.
This brings me to the final red flag...
🚩 ⓷ "Unavoidable" churn is irrelevant.
Though it varies across industries and time, the rate of company closure never represents more than a trivial fraction of churn.
Overall, company failure averages only 6.5% over the first ten years of company life. Even in volatile industries, annual closure rates tend to be below 10%.
But the impact on your churn will always be much lower than these figures because most companies fail very early before they even get to the point where they are buying business solutions and services.
But very few companies accurately track customer closure, so they don't actually know how big this problem really is.
I have only worked with a few companies that track this, but every time we analyzed it the results show business closure is an insignificant share of their overall customer churn.
THE LESSON IS CLEAR:
► Don't waste your time and dilute the value of your churn data by participating in this fudge.
► The term "Unavoidable Churn" is ultimately poison to accountability and improvement.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
Customers don't want your product; they want the result your product promises.
