Do Churn Analysis for PLG

Get in front of the revenue forecasting

Author

Gary Chan
October 23, 2024

My job is in jeopardy… if Customers keep Churning

The 3 ways I keep an eye on churn 👀, "control" churn, and influence product roadmap:

A. Exit Interviews 🤔

B. Churn Reasonings 🤔

C. Product Usage Analysis 🤔

EXIT INTERVIEWS 🧑🏻💻

When we launched PLG in 2022

We didn't think about churn

It's back of our mind

We are playing a volume game 🎾

But…

After we acquire 1000+ customers

And upsell customers

We started to see churn

Customers say…

😰 "Close my account"

😰 "Please unsubscribe me"

😰 "We cannot renew. Please cancel my upcoming bills"

We say…

"Hold on. Lets hop on a call" 📞 

Don't let them go easily

Figure out why

See if you can savage it

We had savaged it multiple times

I think exit surveys are great…

But in a B2B software world, I want my reps to be on bat again 🏏

Make sure we got another chance ⚾️

If not, I want us to learn the reasons

So we can reverse engineer the reasoning

And stay on top of how at-risk customers better

Read my post yesterday on the top 5 churn reasons

CHURN ANALYSIS REASONING 🧑🏻💻

On our PLG check-ins

We got our team together

We listed our all the reasons churn happened 📝

Or

The reasoning the at-risk customers were telling us

We list out all the reasons 📝

And we ranked them from

🔍 Most Recent

🔍 Most Frequent

🔍

Most Vocal "Complaining"

We also evaluated the

🔎 One-offs

🔎 Feedbacks that didn't make sense

🔎 Ghosted customers

See if there was a pattern there

We consolidated the Gong recording calls to each customers

We didn't have many…

Highly recommend you record EVERY call 📹

We copy the email reasoning

We found the Zendesk support tickets

We present this to our engineering team and design team

It was very effective for them to hear from the customer

We were able to create a feedback loop

We couldn't improve everything... 😐

But…

This helped us gain the trust with the internal team

It provided directions

And areas we can improve 💪

Learn more from Paul Piazza's churn analysis approach, "The Top 10"

LOOK AT PRODUCT USAGE LEVEL 🧑🏻💻

Inactive for the last 3 months

They can still come back.

But the likelihood is very low 📉

For a more granular analysis

We look by

  • country

  • company size

  • expressed urgency from onboarding flow

And the spike in activity indicates they were actively pursuing compliance

then started to taper off...

While it didn't tell the WHY

The WHAT was leading up to it

And it was a sign for us 🪧

We had to engage with the customers ASAP

It was important that

We are taking action 👈👈👈

"No stones left unturned"

—

Churn Happens…

The analysis is to get you and your team

 

In a direction ➡️

Improve

Communicate 🗣️

Influence

Forecast 📊

"Control" Churn

I write daily about #productledgrowth. You can learn more about PLG & Customer Success, PLG & Paywalls, PLG & Upsells here on growthwithgary.com

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I write daily*** about my learning on launching and leading PLG. Feel free to subscribe.

I am Gary Yau Chan. 3x Head of Growth. Product Growth specialist. 26x hackathon winner. I write about #PLG and #BuildInPublic. Please follow me on LinkedIn, or read about what you can hire me for on my Notion page.