70% of churn happens before day 90

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Good Morning {{first_name}}!

It’s Fri(yay) - and that means it’s time for your Retention Play - where we talk about how to retain the business you’ve worked so hard to get.

You in?

Perfect!

This week, we've been talking about the first 90 days of a customer relationship, which I'd argue is where retention is actually won or lost, long before anyone opens a renewal spreadsheet and starts sweating. If your retention plan kicks in at month ten, this one is for you (and I say that with love).

You can forget everything after the first QBR.

Let’s dive in.

Marketing is a lot like dating. You either have a good feeling or a bad feeling. The good feeling will cause you to move ahead in the process. It’s all about how you feel about the situation and whether you are building trust.

70% of churn happens in the first 90 days.

Most retention programs are built around the renewal date, which means they show up months after the customer has already made up their mind. At this point, they may already be evaluating other vendors.

By the time the win-back email goes out, you're negotiating with a decision that was made in week three.

Onboarding is an interesting beast. New customers come in very excited, expecting to experience everything that the salesperson sold them.

But often, new customers wait too long to get real value, and teams that get customers to first value in under seven days see roughly half the churn.

Second, the handoff falls apart: sales closes, marketing goes quiet, and nobody owns the relationship. The new customer is passed around internal teams with no clear account leads, and customers start to feel like a transactional win to satisfy someone's sales quota.

Companies with aligned sales and marketing teams retain 58% better, yet only 8% of companies report strong alignment. Your CRM can help fix that gap.

You need to understand the entirety of the sales process in order to build a strong onboarding process that helps secure retention. Whatever sales promised needs to be delivered on - and ideally, beyond expectation.

Define the first moment the customer will feel the first value, record it in your CRM, and build your onboarding flows around that.

You can try to control the experience as much as possible, but it’s not always straightforward. Be ready to pivot and always go back to the customer’s expectations.

Use their expectations as your guide - not trying to fit them into a box.

So, what is it about day seven?

Set a behavioural trigger: if a new customer hasn't hit your first-value milestone by day seven, send a plain-text email from a real person offering to walk them through it. Not a newsletter or something that tries to educate on a new product or service.

Simply a human check-in and an offer to help, if the service is self-guided.

If not self-guided, set proper expectations for that timeline of value.

It’s interesting to read through retention plans. Oftentimes, a company secures the sale and then things calm down. Retention doesn’t start to make its way into the conversation until trouble appears or until renewal is coming up. But renewal conversations do not save your business.

Have questions? Email me at [email protected] and let’s talk!

Also, if you haven’t grabbed your Q2 Signals Report yet, it’s here!