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This week: Churn School: Does EVERY Customer *REALLY* Need Onboarding? Churn KPIs: A Better Way to Measure Churn Early Access to My New eBook: 23 Ways to Reduce Churn in 2023 Churn Cheats #4: Delaying or Accelerating Churn Upcoming Webinar: How To Reduce Churn Fast Quote of the Week: Start with customer results... DOES EVERY CUSTOMER REALLY NEED ONBOARDING? I've often heard: "Every customer is different, so it's best to let each customer decide whether they need onboarding." WHAT DOES THE DATA SAY? 📈 The data shows that customers who choose to participate in onboarding stay significantly longer (2.4 times!) than customers who waive onboarding. Why does it matter so much? The ultimate reason customers stay is because they get measurable results. But customers do NOT get results unless they change how they work. 👉 The purpose of customer onboarding is to get customers to change how they work in ways that lead to measurable results. 👈 ❓ But what if this data is merely revealing who the "good" customers are, and not really showing the value of onboarding? This is almost certainly true, but there's a big problem: ► Experience tells us that the customers who need onboarding the most are the least likely to choose to participate if it's optional. Making onboarding optional is a great way to identify 🥱 low-effort customers. ⚠️ But there's a big problem with this... ⛔️ Without onboarding, how will you intervene to help them succeed? TRUE COMPANY STORY: 🏢 I recently worked with a company offering onboarding for free but participation was not required. Their churn was much too high. I suggested two simple changes that made a HUGE difference in their churn: ⓵ Require onboarding for EVERY customer. ⓶ Charge a modest fee for onboarding. The result was an 80%+ reduction in their early churn, which massively improved overall customer retention. THE LESSON IS CLEAR: ⦿ Onboarding is the key opportunity to help customers change. ⦿ Do everything you can to get customers to engage in onboarding. ⦿ Make sure your onboarding focuses on behavior change and results. THERE'S A BETTER WAY TO MEASURE CHURN There's a much more effective way to measure and manage your REAL churn. I'll gladly show you how to do it with a FREE CHURN ANALYSIS of your real data! (click the link below ↓) Get your Free Churn Analysis and start measuring your churn accurately with the ultimate Churn Dashboard! EARLY ACCESS FOR NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIBERS! 23 Ways to Reduce Churn in 2023 I'm excited to offer early access for newsletter subscribers only to my latest eBook which will be officially released next week! This document summarizes 23 actions companies can take to quickly reduce customer churn and the data proving their effectiveness. Each action is supported by compelling data from our benchmark database of real-world customer retention data comprised of more than 1.3 million customer data points. Here's the link to get your own copy before it's released: https://www.churnrx.com/23-ways-to-reduce-churn CHURN CHEAT #4: Delaying or Accelerating Churn This cheat is when a company delays or accelerates the official recording of customer cancellation dates usually to hide a big spike in churn. ​ A prime example is delaying (or accelerating) churn to move it to another reporting cycle in order to "smooth" churn across periods. Another situation is to avoid reporting churn until after a key funding or valuation event. ​ When challenged, people usually attempt to justify this practice by referring to the complexities of contract terms and billing cycles or using other such reporting skullduggery. ​ 👀 This cheat is particularly insidious because it's virtually impossible to detect without direct and deep access to the raw customer churn information. For the same reason, it is difficult to know how common this practice is. But from what I've seen, it's probably more common than people may know. UPCOMING EVENT: How to Reduce Churn Fast Thursday, June 8 @ 1pm ET New Churn Research Alert! Next week I will be publishing my data backed report "23 Ways to Reduce Churn in 2023" and jumping on a webinar with Dave Blake CEO & Founder of ClientSuccess to talk all about it (Thursday, 6/8). You are not going to want to miss this extremely practical conversation with immediate actions you can implement to drive down your churn. Link to register: https://info.clientsuccess.com/23-ways-to-reduce-churn?utm_campaign=Webinar&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=260812852&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8aSKeI0Q5kLlyY8dn1O0T_sS6nPqBTLcGs0E3jTTLDKr-RsU4_YE46vs-aArxQ10JWjEJki2Gk1Fa81_Ta_-zLOpNEIo_7VhGmysNFqS3VpaciTJ4&utm_content=260812852&utm_source=hs_automation QUOTE OF THE WEEK... You start by identifying the customer’s key results for the same reason that you aim before you shoot.

This week: Churn School: Are Free Trials the 'Silent Killer' Driving Your Churn? Churn KPIs: The Ultimate Churn Dashboard Churn Cheats #3: Focusing on "Dollar Churn" QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Companies buy more churn than they make ARE FREE TRIALS THE 'SILENT KILLER' DRIVING YOUR CHURN? In our latest study, we analyzed companies that offer customers both a paid and a free trial option to find out if free trials drive churn. The results are absolutely clear: 📈 Customers who start with a free trial stay LESS THAN HALF AS LONG as customers who pay to start! ⚠️ WHY DO FREE TRIALS CONSISTENTLY DRIVE CHURN? The key is understanding that customer results are the fundamental driver of retention. So the relevant question is: 💭 How do free trials impact customer results? 👉 Customers who start with a free trial do not put in as much effort as customers who pay from the start. 👈 Customers who pay have "skin in the game." They are anxious to ensure their money isn't wasted, so they try harder to make it work. Customers who start with a free trial do not have the same incentive; the inevitable outcome is that these lower-effort customers don't get nearly as good results. ► Anything that reduces customer results increases churn. This tells us that free trials are a reliable way to acquire low-effort customers. THERE'S A BETTER WAY TO MEASURE CHURN There's a much more effective way to measure and manage your REAL churn. I'll gladly show you how to do it with a FREE CHURN ANALYSIS of your real data! (click the link below ↓) Get your Free Churn Analysis and start measuring your churn accurately with the ultimate Churn Dashboard! CHURN CHEAT #3: Focusing on "Dollar Churn" ​ It has become common for companies to rely on lost revenue as their primary churn KPI. But this is a really bad idea because... 📈 High-value customers consistently retain at a much higher rate, so dollar churn ALWAYS looks much better than account churn. WHY IS THIS DODGY? ☒ It makes retention look better than it really is - temporarily. ☒ It obscures the relationship between account churn and long-term growth. ☒ It perniciously incentivizes efforts to resist customer down-sells, which ironically drives more customer churn! https://lnkd.in/gWdPhX3P ⛔️ HERE'S THE PROBLEM → 👉 In SaaS, growth is ultimately founded on account expansion, and you can't expand accounts you no longer have! 👈 That's why account churn is a much better predictor of long-term financial performance than revenue churn. 3 REASONS TO USE ACCOUNT CHURN: ✅ Your executives and your board need to compare BOTH Revenue Churn AND Account Churn to understand short-term and long-term financial performance correctly. ✅ Account churn is invaluable to improvement because it reveals the most important factors that drive and impede customer results. ✅ Account churn restrains the tendency for the entire company to become "captured" by the perspective of only the biggest accounts, a form of myopia that has proven to be disastrous to many businesses. Download your copy of the 2023 Customer Churn Benchmark Report Learn what benchmarks impact customer churn, such as Customer Satisfaction, Customer Size, Sales Discounts, and more! QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Companies buy more customer churn than they make.

Is your company really Customer Centric? Come and learn from Dave Jackson (Founder and CEO of TheCustomer.Co) and Greg Daines (Founder and CEO of ChurnRX) as they discuss why your company is NOT customer-centric, and exactly what you can start doing to make it customer-centric.

This week: Churn School: Churn Rate is the WORST Metric Churn Benchmark: Get Your Free Churn Analysis and Join the Benchmark Upcoming Speach: I'm Speaking at Pulse 2023 Upcoming Webinar: Why Your Company is NOT Customer Centric 2023 Churn Benchmark Report: 10 Key Churn Factors to Understand in 2023 QUOTE OF THE WEEK: The most important question in business... CHURN RATE IS THE WORST METRIC Does your churn rate appear to fluctuate constantly? Have you ever had your churn rate suddenly spike upwards, seemingly out of nowhere? ❌ The problem is not your churn; it's your metric! It turns out there's a flaw built right into the formula that ruins churn rates. Let me explain... ↓ ➗ THE DENOMINATOR PROBLEM First, we have to remember that churn rate is a simple equation: CHURNED CUSTOMERS ← is the numerator _____________________ TOTAL CUSTOMERS ← is the denominator 👀 Notice that churn is not the only number in the equation. ↑ ⏱️ CHURN IS DELAYED The other thing to understand is that churn is delayed, which means that time passes between when customers join and when they leave. 🤔 THIS IS WHY CHURN RATES ARE DISTORTED... Increases or decreases in sales change the denominator - and the churn rate - before the churn for those customers arrives. The impact of this is HUGE: 👉 When your churn rate suddenly goes up (or down), it does NOT mean that your REAL CHURN has changed. 👈 FOR EXAMPLE: When sales go up, the denominator (total customers) increases right away, but churn doesn't. So your "churn rate" will go DOWN immediately and then back up again when the churn later arrives. REVERSE EXAMPLE: This also works in the other direction. → When sales go down, the "churn rate" will go UP, instantly making churn look worse than it really is! 📈 This is why so many companies appear to experience a sudden spike in churn! When sales slow down, the "churn rate" invariably shoots upward, even if churn hasn't actually gotten worse. 🎲 This is why you can’t use the churn rate to manage your churn effectively. In fact, you can't even compare your churn over time using "churn rates," meaning you can't tell if your churn is getting better or worse. ⚠️ WARNING: ANY ATTEMPT TO OPERATE USING CHURN RATES IS DANGEROUS! ⚠️ The common pattern is for companies to underinvest in customer success during the rapid growth phase because the churn rate appears low, and then they panic when the churn rate suddenly spikes due to slowing sales. ✅ I do real churn analyses for companies every day, and it's amazing how consistently they do not know beforehand whether their churn is getting better or worse! THERE'S A BETTER WAY TO MEASURE CHURN There's a much more effective way to measure and manage your REAL churn. I'll gladly show you how to do it with a FREE CHURN ANALYSIS of your real data! (click the link below ↓) Find out how your churn compares and become a part of the world's largest anonymous churn benchmark for free! I'm Speaking at Pulse 2023 Come see me at Gainsight Pulse this coming Wednesday (5/17) at 10:30am! I am speaking with 🗺️ Todd Kirk ⛷️ AVP at Brainstorm. We are diving into the 3 kinds of customer churn and how customer behavior change is the key to high retention. If you can't make it, come say hi at booth G4 where ChurnRX is being hosted by Brainstorm." Upcoming Webinar: Why Your Company is NOT Customer Centric Join Dave Jackson, CEO of TheCustomer.Co and me on Wednesday, 5/24, as we take on what it really means to be CUSTOMER CENTRIC. (I'll give you a hint, it's not about having a high NPS!) Download your copy of the 2023 Customer Churn Benchmark Report Learn what benchmarks impact customer churn, such as Customer Satisfaction, Customer Size, Sales Discounts, and more! QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Anything that decreases customer results will increase churn.

This week: NEW DATA INSIGHT: Integration is a strong predictor of customer results CHURN CHEATS #1: They were never a customer CHURN CHEATS #2: Redefining "cancellation" 2023 Churn Benchmark Report: 10 Key Churn Factors to Understand in 2023 QUOTE OF THE WEEK: The most important question in business... WHAT DOES THE DATA SAY: "It's a really good early predictor of success when customers integrate their solution with other systems." ✅ RIGHT! Many solutions are capable of integrating or connecting to other systems, usually to enable more or better results. The question is: ❓Does integration impact customer results? I took this question to ChurnRX's huge customer retention benchmark database, filtered it down to companies with integration options, and then divided customers into two groups: those who had integrated and those who had not. 📊 The results are fascinating... ⦿ Customers who connect the solution to another system have double [2X] the average lifespan of those who do not! ⦿ Integration is one of the earliest indicators of ultimate customer retention. WHY INTEGRATION MATTERS → ► Integration matters because it's frequently a key factor in achieving results, but also because it is often essential to MEASURING results. And measurable customer results are the most important driver of long-term customer retention. ► Integration is especially valuable as a rare LEADING INDICATOR of customer success. What makes it a leading indicator is that it's a step that happens BEFORE customer results arrive. Leading indicators are almost always early customer behaviors or actions. 💪 This all makes it important to track customer integration during onboarding and to add to the customer health score! CHURN CHEAT #1: They were never a "customer" 🤥 There's a lot of dodgy behavior when it comes to customer churn. It's such a big deal that it's no surprise people will find every way possible to fudge, contrive, and generally obfuscate things in their favor. I've been keeping a list of the dirty tricks and will be exposing them. Here's the first one... CHURN CHEAT #1: THEY WERE NEVER A "CUSTOMER" Companies use this dirty trick to make churn 'disappear' simply by declaring that those customers who leave before a key milestone were never really "customers," so it doesn't count as "churn." For example, they use the justification of a FREE TRIAL to suggest that these aren't real "customers" because they haven't yet paid anything. These are really just "leads," and this is just all part of the "sales process." ​ But the problem is there's a real cost to acquire these "leads" which won't be recouped if they don't stay. ​ In every conceivable way, these are customers: ✅ They were acquired through marketing and sales efforts → just like a "customer" ✅ There was a real cost to get them to this point → just like a "customer" ✅ They are using the product → just like a "customer" ✅ It costs the company to provide them the access → just like a "customer" ✅ Usually, the company also invests in support → just like a "customer" ✅ They can choose to stay or leave → just like a "customer" ✅ The company loses money when they leave → just like a "customer" THESE ARE CUSTOMERS, REGARDLESS OF WHAT YOU CALL THEM! Either way, it's still necessary to do what it takes to make them successful enough to "convert" to become "customers." And the only way to do that is to understand them and why they stay and leave in order to create processes that greatly improve their results. → Just like what you do for customers! ​ Don't fall for this obvious con. ​ CHURN CHEAT #2: Redefining "Cancellation" ​ Another dirty trick for hiding churn is to label churned customers something other than "canceled." An example is when companies classify customers as "paused" or "on hold," which is a favorite that always seems to reappear during hard economic times. The pretense is that these customers are merely "taking a break" for the moment, and a "pause" in their subscription is "doing them a favor." This is a classic churn deflection method made famous by the cable companies: they force customers to call the company to cancel, and then they coerce them into agreeing to put their subscription "on hold." WHY IS THIS DODGY? ☒ By deflecting cancelation requests from the churn numbers, it obscures (or at least delays) the most vital of all customer feedback signals. ☒ Classifying customers as "paused" isn't valid because there's no proof of any real change in the customer's intent. 🤥 I've even seen companies brazenly justify this tactic on the excuse that some canceled customers eventually resubscribe and therefore counting all of them as churn would "distort" their churn numbers. ​ The question of how to count customers who churn and then later rejoin is certainly a valid one to address. However, it's impossible to make a sincere case for this approach as the appropriate solution. 👉 CHURN IS THE TRUTH! 👈 ✅ Churn is the ultimate pain signal in any business. ✅ Like your hand on a hot stove, it's there to alert you to grave danger. ✅ Anything that obfuscates churn will limit your power to improve. Download your copy of the 2023 Customer Churn Benchmark Report Learn what benchmarks have impacts on customer churn, such as Customer Satisfaction, Customer Size, Sales Discounts, and more! QUOTE OF THE WEEK: The most important question in business is: WHY DO CUSTOMERS STAY?

This week: COMMON MYTH: Customer churn goes down over time... CLIP: Optimize your onboarding to get customers to first results 2023 Churn Benchmark Report: 10 Key Churn Factors to Understand in 2023 QUOTE OF THE WEEK: You can't expand a customer... COMMON MYTH: "Customer churn goes down over time as companies mature and the product and services improve." Wrong... 📈 I analyzed our customer churn benchmark data and found that churn got worse for the majority of SaaS companies: ⬇ Churn got WORSE over time for 63% of SaaS companies. ➡ Churn stayed the SAME for 14% of SaaS companies. ⬆ Churn got BETTER for only 23% of SaaS companies! This begs the question... ❓ IF YOUR PRODUCT AND SERVICES ARE GETTING BETTER, WHY DOESN'T CHURN GO DOWN? In my work with numerous SaaS companies, I regularly see the following three factors as the dominant reasons for worsening churn: ① THE APERTURE EFFECT: Under pressure for continuous growth, companies tend to expand the kinds of customers they target and sell to, which usually leads to an increasing share of new customers who are a BAD FIT. The outcome is more customers who do not get good results and churn at higher rates. ② THE ADOPTION EFFECT: The early adopters of a new technology or solution are usually the most enthusiastic about changing how they work, which is key to getting good results. Over time, subsequent waves of new customers tend to be progressively less adaptable, and their results aren't as good, which invariably leads to higher churn. ③ THE GRADUATION EFFECT: Customers who get good results often progress to a point where a solution is limiting their improvement, and they look around for a better alternative. This isn't about customers failing; it's about the company not providing customers with continual opportunities and functionality to increase their results. The common theme in all of these factors is CUSTOMER RESULTS, which leads to a simple and brutally reliable rule of thumb: 👉 Anything that leads to decreasing customer results will increase churn. 👈 Optimize your onboarding to get customers to first measurable results faster I was a guest on the very first Status Check podcast (from status.cx) and in this clip I talked about the absolute necessity to reduce the time it takes to get your customers to first measurable results! Watch the clip here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7057429987208925184/ Download your copy of the 2023 Customer Churn Benchmark Report Learn what benchmarks have impacts on customer churn, such as Customer Satisfaction, Customer Size, Sales Discounts, and more! QUOTE OF THE WEEK: You can't expand a customer you no longer have.

This week: WHAT DOES THE DATA SAY: Early Customer Problems ONLINE PANEL: Where will the pendulum stop for CS? WEBINAR w/ Peter Ord: Is your customer onboarding helping or hurting? QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Technology doesn't produce results... ANOTHER BIG MISTAKE: "Customers who quickly run into problems are at a high risk for churn." ❌ Wrong. I've previously published research that shows customers who submit trouble tickets have a much higher retention rate than those who don't. ► BUT → is this just because customers who stay longer eventually run into problems? The answer is definitively NO, and we know this because we see the retention effect immediately after customers start. 📈 In a study we recently conducted for a client, we compared customers who submitted tickets during onboarding to those that didn't. The results are very clear: 👉 Customers who submitted tickets during onboarding renewed at DOUBLE the rate of customers who didn't. 👈 ❓WHY? Remember that the fundamental reason customers stay is because they achieve and perceive RESULTS. ⦿ Tickets are a very clear signal that customers are trying to use the solution, which indicates they are more likely to achieve results. ⦿ Rather than looking at these early problems as risks, it's much more accurate to see them as signals of future success. ⦿ The customers who are most likely to fail and churn are those who don't run into problems because they aren't engaging enough. ONLINE PANEL: Where will the pendulum stop for CS? I was a panelist this week in an online event hosted by Planhat. The topic was interesting as it related to the recent signs of a shift for Customer Success closer to the revenue side of the house. The discussion was fascinating and I highly recommend taking a listen here. https://www.planhat.com/webinars/where-will-the-pendulum-stop-for-cs/ From the event page: "After years of growing as a practice and department we are seeing Customer Success (CS) being asked to prove it’s connection to value and revenue generation. Some companies are able to show this, while others are being forced to restructure their CS departments and approach in light of the current market. Our main question is, with these changes occurring, where will the pendulum stop for CS? Will CS move away from being a core business function? Or will it soon swing back and prove that it is vital to increase customer revenue in both the good and the bad times? Watch Greg Daines, founder and CEO of ChurnRX, Shanta Bodhan, Director of Customer Success at ArborXR, and Seth Johnson VP of Customer Experience at LearnUpon as they discuss: How can CS leaders demonstrate their value throughout the business? Will we see the return of Account Management instead of Customer Success? What is the ‘right’ version of CS, now and in the future? And much more…" WEBINAR: Is your customer onboarding helping or hurting your retention? This week I hosted 👋Peter Ord (Founder and CEO of GUIDEcx) to discuss why customer onboarding is so vital, what its purpose is in retaining customers, and how to ensure it is setting your customers up for success. The full video of the event is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WOza1rXS8I&t=172s Quote of the week...

Trying to build a better Customer Onboarding process to drive high retention? Then this discussion is for you! Come and learn from Peter Ord (Founder and CEO of GUIDEcx) and Greg Daines (Founder and CEO of ChurnRX) as they discuss why customer onboarding is important, what its purpose is in retaining customers, and best practices when it comes to building your onboarding machine.

In the inaugural episode of Status Check - The CX Podcast, we dive into customer churn with the man some call the "churn doctor" and take an honest look at why customer churn happens, and why the data behind churn isn't what you think.

This week: NEW DATA: The Myth of the Customer "Rescue" HOW TO: Should we try to rescue failing customers? UPCOMING WEBINAR: Is your customer onboarding helping or hurting? QUOTE OF THE WEEK... WHAT DOES THE DATA SAY: The myth of the customer "rescue." Bringing a customer back from the brink of cancellation can be a gratifying experience. You've saved a customer and have proven your value to the company. You’re officially a hero! 🦸 → NOT SO FAST... I've been there many times, but while everyone was celebrating the victory, I always felt uneasy, like maybe the story wasn't over. What if the customer wasn't really saved? What if all we did was DELAY THE INEVITABLE? Well, this is exactly the kind of question we need DATA to answer because we always have stories of rescued customers who stay forever. But those are just stories. Is that what happens most of the time? Are "rescued" customers usually saved? 📊 What does the data say? We tested this question on a set of customers at one of our clients, and the answer confirmed my worst fears... 📈 The data reveal that rescued customers subsequently churn at vastly higher rates than other customers. By the next renewal, rescued customers are already churning at more than TWICE THE RATE of non-rescued customers. And the hemorrhaging continues from there, with the majority of these customers ultimately churning. And this result confirms my experience of over 25 years with thousands of customers. The answer is clear: 👉 RESCUING CUSTOMERS IS NOT A VIABLE CUSTOMER RETENTION STRATEGY! 👈 But it's actually much worse than that because we also know that the majority of rescue attempts fail to begin with. So, not only do we lose most of the customers who get into trouble, but we will ultimately lose most of those we think we've saved! The only solution is to understand why customers really stay. The first law of customer retention says: CUSTOMERS STAY TO GET RESULTS. This law not only explains why customers leave but also why we are able to cajole some into not leaving. The reality is that we are rarely able at that point to fundamentally turn around their RESULTS. Usually, it's too late. They don't understand why they are failing, and they've run out of energy to try again. ⦿ THE ONLY EFFECTIVE SOLUTION IS TO PREVENT CUSTOMERS FROM FAILING IN THE FIRST PLACE. ⦿ The best way to do that is to operate a Customer Results Strategy: ① get customers to identify their key business results, ② agree with them on how they will be measured, ③ get them to change the behaviors necessary to achieve results, and ④ measure and materialize their results to them. SHOULD WE TRY TO RESCUE FAILING CUSTOMERS? Above I argued that "rescuing" customers is NOT a viable retention strategy. A particularly astute reader asked this key question: ❓"So are you saying we should not even try to rescue failing customers?" The answer is that we should try in *some* but not all cases. ► I use the following two key tests when deciding: ① WILL WE REALLY BE ABLE TO SUCCEED THIS TIME? The first test is whether our efforts have any serious chance of succeeding in turning the customer's results around. Too often, we jump into rescue mode without any substantive change in the key factors. If nothing is significantly different, the result will be the same. • Is the customer willing to commit to making key changes? • Have any of the important obstacles been removed? • Why do we think it will lead to customer results this time? My extensive (and sad) experience is that if nothing significant has changed, then the rescue is destined to fail. ② IS IT WORTH THE TRUE COST? Rescues take HUGE amounts of resources in time and attention, frequently absorbing energy high up the leadership chain in the company. 👉 In Customer Success, we NEVER have enough resources to do everything that is worth doing. 👈 So we should consider whether the rescue - with its low chance of ultimate success - is really worth the cost. • Is there anything we could be doing that would pay off much better? The answer is frequently yes. But crisis mode can actually be ADDICTIVE! And executives tend to demand action even if only for the "optics." But I’ve seen the “hero” mentality turn into a toxic and perpetual distraction machine that undermines our methodical efforts to prevent these crises in the first place. I call it THE ENDLESS FIREFIGHTING SYNDROME. While we are cleaning up the mess at the bottom of the cliff, we could be building the fence at the top that prevents it from happening. This is the case that must be made to leaders who often don't understand the real reasons it keeps happening. ► The true causes of customer churn are EARLY, which means that the only solution is to build processes that ensure customers get and stay on track right from the beginning. WEBINAR: Is your customer onboarding helping or hurting your retention? April 19th @ 12 pm MST Want to learn if your current onboarding process is helping or even hurting your customer retention? Come and learn from 👋Peter Ord (Founder and CEO of GUIDEcx) and Greg Daines (Founder and CEO of ChurnRX) as they discuss why customer onboarding is important, what its purpose is in retaining customers, and best practices when it comes to building your onboarding machine. This session will be available on-demand for all who register. https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/4216807194736/WN_YnVyDPW8QCanML8LpAaFSQ#/registration Download the full 2023 10 CUSTOMER CHURN BENCHMARKS FOR SAAS LEADERS now

Greg Daines of ChurnRX on "Building Account Strategy On The 3 Laws of Retention" at KAMCon 2023 in Boulder, Colorado.

This week: DATA STORY: What's the impact of fumbling the Sales to Customer Success hand-off? PODCAST: 10 Customer Churn Benchmarks for SaaS Leaders UPCOMING EVENT: KAMCon 2023, Boulder Colorado, April 12-13 QUOTE OF THE WEEK... What's the impact of fumbling the Sales to Customer Success hand-off? I've sensed for years that time is of the essence for new customers. Any delay in getting customers started always seems to be a bad sign. But the hand-off from sales to onboarding can take time because people are busy. Anyway, what do a few short days matter in the grand scheme of things? IT TURNS OUT IT MATTERS A LOT! 📊 To answer this question, we looked deeply into one of our clients' retention data by comparing long-term retention differences based on how quickly customers started. [COMPANY INFO: SaaS, B2B, $50m-$100m] The difference was astonishing... 👉 Customers that engaged with the solution within the first few days experienced virtually no churn over the next FOUR YEARS, whereas those who didn't get started quickly NEARLY ALL CHURNED over the same period! 👈 ► Why does speed matter so much? ⦿ Remember that getting good results always requires customers to expend effort and change their behavior. ⦿ Their willingness is a finite resource that is most available right at the beginning. ⦿ Customer enthusiasm drops with every minute that passes as other problems and priorities demand their attention. HOW TO GET CUSTOMERS GOING FAST 🚀 ① SET YOUR KICK-OFF SLA: Determine the maximum number of days within which the customer kickoff or first engagement will happen. For example, in many cases, I recommend ensuring that the kickoff happens within two business days of signup. ② SCHEDULE THE KICKOFF DURING THE SALE: I've found that meeting the kickoff SLA is difficult to impossible unless the meeting is scheduled during the sales process. Finding a time to meet often takes too long. Provide a method for sales reps to quickly set up the first call 'live' while they're talking to the prospect. ③ GET CUSTOMERS STARTED PRONTO: Even if implementation and onboarding will take time, it's extremely important to get the customer going quickly. Build a "quick start" playbook for new customers by identifying key things they can DO within just a few days. PODCAST: 10 Customer Churn Benchmarks for SaaS Leaders I had a terrific conversation last week with Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach on the Gain Grow Retain Podcast talking about my latest 10 Customer Churn Benchmarks for SaaS Leaders. UPCOMING EVENT: KAMCon 2023: Boulder, Colorado; April 12-13 I'll be speaking at the upcoming KAMCon event in Boulder in two weeks. The title of my presentation is: "Building Account Strategy On The 3 Laws of Retention" Quote of the week: Customers don't leave because they have a reason to leave. They leave when they no longer have a compelling reason to stay.