Your customer decided to leave before your first QBR

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Good Morning {{first_name}}!

It’s Monday - and that means it’s time for your CRM Dispatch - an issue where we dig into your digital marketing with a CRM lens. ✨

Yes, you may have noticed that I accidentally hit send on Wednesday for two emails, and Friday was skipped. Totally a mistake on my part - yes, mistakes happen, but luckily, it just gave you more good info on Wednesday, and a Friday breather!

This week, we’ll dive into a trending topic that seemed to dominate much of the online chatter in the business space. And I actually had a similar experience myself this week with sales misalignment as well.

Let’s dive in.

As you can probably guess by the subject line, this newsletter is about retention - but more importantly, how the first 90 days decide whether or not they stay with you.

I’ve worked in the CRM space for quite a bit throughout my 20+ year career in digital marketing, and most CRMs are all about closing the deal. So as soon as the deal is dragged into the close-won stage, it’s dead silence. The lifecycle stage flips from SQL/opportunity to customer and reporting updates.

No stage for onboarding, no property for when the customer first got real value, no owner for the window that matters most. The system treats day one of the relationship like the end of the story - but it’s actually the most important phase of the relationship.

Here’s the problem no one is talking about - roughly 70% of churn happens in the first 90 days.

Ever worked with a salesperson who worked “so hard” in landing the deal and then the onboarding team failed so miserably that the client churned?

Yeah - not a fun conversation.

Companies that get customers to experience value in under 7 days see about half the churn of everyone else.

And here's the part that stings, teams with aligned sales and marketing retain 58% better, yet only 8% of companies say their alignment is actually strong.

So the highest-leverage retention window of the entire customer lifecycle is sitting between two teams who aren't talking, inside a CRM stage that doesn't exist.

I do think this is simpler than it sounds.

First, create a real onboarding stage between Closed-Won and Customer, with a named owner. There has to be ownership as part of the onboarding process, whether it’s a project manager or an account lead.

Second, add a First Value Date property and start measuring time-to-value, since you can't shrink a number you don't capture. This may need to be updated manually, or if you can use email activity to measure sentiment, this could potentially be used.

Third, build a structured handoff record from sales to marketing, what the customer bought, why they bought it, and what they were promised, so the first email they get from marketing doesn't read as if it came from a company that's never met them.

Here’s your homework - pull every account that churned in the last 12 months and calculate how many left within 90 days of closing.

Then, try to find the date each of them first got value from your product or service. If the first number is big and the second field doesn't exist, you just found your Q3 project.

The Q2 Signals Report will be ready on Wednesday, and fittingly, it’s all about the cost of acquisitions, the growth and reliance on AI, and the need for stronger retention. As a subscriber, you get a free copy!

It’s no secret that sales reps work hard to land and secure deals for a company. But if those new clients don’t see a valuable win within the first 90 days, the churn rate goes up. Your CRM can be programmed to help identify those first 90 days and add insights into whether value has truly been provided or whether the onboarding team is dropping the ball.