Churn Reduction

Customer’s don’t “churn”. They fire you.

Customers fire you for clear reasons:

  • Doesn’t Fit: The customer experience isn’t aligned with their needs, team, or culture.
  • Doesn’t Add: There’s a lack of realized value and broken outcome promises.
  • Perceived as Replaceable: When your service seems easily substituted, customers move on.

Siloes are not the Answer

For years we've kept Sales apart from Customer Success. This siloed approach makes it much harder to fix churn issues, because much of the problem which manifests itself in post-sales is actually caused before the customer signs the contract.

Critical Investment

Your churn rate is driven by three key factors:

Experience x Outcomes / Perceived Replaceability

Churnville can help you to identify how to improve each of these areas. This is critical to reducing churn and building lasting relationships.

Action Plan

1. Where’s the Problem?

  • Problems are Caused Before Symptoms: Often, the seeds of churn are planted long before traditional leading indicators tell you that there's a problem. For example, a failure to engage with executive stakeholders during the Sales phase can doom Customer Success to an uphill battle to prove strategic value.
  • Analyze the Data: Leverage customer feedback, usage patterns, and support interactions to pinpoint critical drop-off points.
  • Rethink your Sales Process: Your sales-centric Sales and CS process (such as the Bowtie model: Awareness → Education → Selection → Commit → Onboarding → Adoption → Expansion) isn't helping. Rebuild your Sales and CS process based upon buyer-centric customer journey mappping. This will enable you to run effective post-mortems on churned customers to identify the true - and hidden - causes of churn.

2. Elements of Great Customer Success

Experience

  • Crystal-Clear Pricing & Expectations: Ensure customers understand costs and benefits from day one.
  • High-Quality Handover: Seamlessly transition from sales to customer success for a frictionless experience.
  • Validated Narrative with Executive Sponsors: Develop and communicate a compelling story that resonates at the highest levels, reinforcing a positive customer journey.
  • Internal Success Stories: Continuously share case studies to build credibility and enhance the overall experience, while encouraging the customer to build their own internal case study.
  • Good Ol' Fashioned Customer Service: Make sure your teams are incentivised, enabled, and led to deliver exceptional care to customers. Your goal should be to be the most pleasant vendor that your customer is paying.

Outcomes

  • Clear Outcomes & Business Case: Define measurable success criteria that align with customer goals and executive priorities.
  • SMART Plans: Collaborate with customers to build relevant and time-board execution plans that sustain momentum.
  • Maturity Curve with KPIs: Establish a roadmap with clear milestones and performance indicators that track progress.
  • Targeting ICPs & Selling to the Right People: Engage with customers who are the best fit and positioned to achieve real outcomes.

Perceived Replaceability

  • Stakeholder Involvement: Proactively involve all key decision-makers to deepen engagement and foster a sense of partnership.
  • Identify Drop-Off Points: Know where you’re falling short and take corrective actions to reinforce your value.
  • Differentiate Your Value Proposition: Create a narrative and service model that make your solution indispensable, reducing the risk that customers see you as a replaceable commodity.

3. Rough Quarter?

  • Translate Your Funnel: Ensure that you're enabling your customer at all points on their buyer's journey. This is also important when forecasting.
  • Work from the Bottom Up: Identify where you’re seeing problems. For example, if customers start to disengage after deploying, it's likely that the onboarding process has gaps, and you might be failing to align with the customer's executive initiatives.
  • Dig into the Causes: Churn often originates further up the funnel than where symptoms appear. Use these insights to drive valuable actions.

Churn cannot be effectively addressed by repeating the behaviours and organization design that created it. The resolution is bring Customer Success much closer to Sales. Integrate them with a holistic buyer-centric sales and post-sales process, and a progressive qualification method like Practical MEDDPICC or PRIORITY, which will serve as a common language.

Book a consultation with Churnville to bring this into your Revenue organization.