Is all churn bad?

2 min read

Every SaaS business is fearing churn. It is also one of the most important metrics to be tracking for all Customer Success teams. But maybe not all churn is bad? For example, should it be okay to let go of bad fit customers? And when should a SaaS or tech company start monitoring and measuring churn?

In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats with Jennifer Cramer, VP of Customer Success at Planhat about ”is all churn bad”?

Jennifer Cramer is the VP of Customer Success at Planhat. Jennifer has over 15 years of experience in CS at some of the largest tech companies and spent 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem both as an employee and as a customer. She has held roles in implementation, partner enablement, CS management and pre-sales. She also spent the last 2 years at SAP as a CS leader helping to create a new customer engagement model for cloud solutions, and leading a global team focusing on transformation and change management, communications, and CS enablement.

If you think you can start monitoring and measuring churn after six months or maybe right before the renewal - think again! Churn indicators can start as early as in the sales cycle, even though you end up with a successful sale. It’s therefore important to identify and flag them early enough so you can do something about it.

“Don't look at your lagging indicators for churn, because if you're looking at invoices paid or renewals or whatnot, the customer is pretty much gone if you're identifying it then. Right?”

Mitigating churn is a company-wide concern, and a company-wide effort. But can we actually mitigate churn these days or is there really no way for us to avoid it?

“Every churn scenario can be mitigated. I think, especially if you get the indicators early enough that you have a runway to recoup from it.”

So, everyone should do everything they can to save every customer. No question about it. But one day you may get to a point where you're both putting in more than you're getting out. Should it then be okay to let go of non ICP customers?

“I think not all churn is bad because some customers are kind of costing you more than they're giving you.”

Listen now to the full conversation with Jennifer and Anika if all churn is bad.

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