Report Churn to Leadership 📉

My big mistake: Not reporting on Churn more thoroughly 🤦🏻‍♂️

If I were to do it again, here are 6 things I will do:

1️⃣ Top 10 churn reasons

2️⃣ Tie it to revenue impact

3️⃣ Segment % roadmap to battle churn

4️⃣Check-in with engineering team

5️⃣ Share business decisions with leadership

6️⃣ Rally organization that customer success is everyone's job

We launched PLG in 2022

We acquired 1000+ customers

We upsold

Every month

We were growing 📈

But we were leaking as well 📉

🤔 Should we increase acquisition to overcome?

🤔 Or should we stop the churn?

Reflecting back…

While not 100% of churn can be prevented

Having direction is key

Going back, here's what I would do:

1️⃣ Analyze The Top 10 churn reasons

Whether it’s free customer churning or becoming inactive

Or paid customers unable to renew

It’s important to communicate how poorly that is

With reasoning

With Gong call clips 📞

With exit interview calls 📞

Have insights on churn

Reverse engineer the pattern

And zoom in on current customers at-risk 🔎

2️⃣ Tie it to revenue impact

No one wants churn ☹️

But what level of impact is it having on our business

Tying at-risk churn to contract $$$

We can be more informed about the level of severity

Without the revenue at stake

Churn is nothing but numbers and complaints 🤬

3️⃣ Segment % roadmap to battle churn

Before informing the Engineering team

Figure out how much you want to allocate

Building for new sales💰

Vs.

Retaining current sales 💰

Prioritization will be based on

▶ What's already on the roadmap

▶ What's the effort level of each request

▶ How can you set expectations with customers

▶ What's the revenue impact, and how soon will that be realized

I would discuss with other Product Managers on resource allocations

4️⃣Check-in with the engineering team

Our Engineers want to know… 👩‍💻

How the product affected customers

Having them in the loop will

▶ Add an extra layer of info to customers

▶ Work on in-progress areas for customers

▶ Keep Informed

5️⃣ Share business decisions with leadership

When presenting to the executive team

I have insights into why customers churn

How we are allocating resources

Have a thorough revenue impact discussion

Gives me a seat at the table 🪑

6️⃣ Rally organization that customer success is everyone's job

Now equipped

… with the roadmap 🧭

… with the churn reasons 🗣️

… with the revenue impact 💰

I have a game plan to rally the organization

🙋🏻‍♂️Why we need to build this

🙋🏻‍♂️How soon

🙋🏻‍♂️How much revenue are we protecting


Presenting that with confidence

Turning at-risk customers

Into


"Control"

Driving Business growth

I write daily about #productledgrowth.

See the comments here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/report-product-led-growth-churn-leadership-gary-yau-hzd6e/?published=t 

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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.