When Vanessa Brangwyn stood on stage at her company’s annual meeting last January, she delivered a message that initially made the room go quiet: “Retention is the foundation of all growth.”
For a software executive with two decades of experience in B2B enterprise sales across HR tech and finance, Vanessa has seen first-hand how the relationship between churn and growth has evolved. What was once viewed as a customer success problem has become a company-wide imperative—and with good reason.
The Leaky Bucket You’re Trying to Fill
The analogy is familiar to anyone in software: you’re trying to fill a bucket with new revenue whilst holes at the bottom leak existing customers. You can pour faster at the top, but if the leaks grow larger, you’re running on a treadmill that only gets steeper.
“We couldn’t get to the aspirational levels we had for ourselves without taking a really hard look at our churn metrics,” Vanessa explains. But the real insight came from recognising that those holes aren’t created by any single department—they’re the result of experiences across the entire customer journey.
Churn Isn’t Just About Lost Logos
One critical distinction that often gets overlooked: churn isn’t solely about customers who walk away. Down-sell—when customers reduce their usage, licences, or consumption—can be equally damaging to your growth trajectory.
“Sometimes people think churn and immediately think ‘we lost this percentage of customers to competitors,'” Vanessa notes. “But it could be that you haven’t lost the customer whatsoever. You might have just lost a portion of their business.”
The hierarchy of outcomes looks like this:
- Best: Expansion (growing the account)
- Next best: Retention (maintaining the current spend)
- Third: Down-sell (reduced usage or licences)
- Worst: Lost logo (complete churn)
Why does down-sell rank above lost logos? Because you still have a relationship. You still have a chance to reignite growth. Once a customer leaves entirely, that door typically closes.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Early-Stage Churn
When Vanessa’s team conducted a deep diagnostic on why customers were churning, they uncovered something uncomfortable: a meaningful portion of lost logos never even implemented the solution.
“These were customers who paid for their first year but never got a chance to see value because they never went live,” she explains. “And as hard as it was to acknowledge, eight or nine times out of ten, this was within our control.”
The root cause? Sales issues.
Perhaps the customer wasn’t sold what they actually needed. Perhaps they didn’t fully understand what they were buying. Champion changes and shifting business needs play a role, certainly, but the primary driver was often misalignment during the sales process.
The silver lining? If it’s within your control, you can actually do something about it.
What Every Department Can Do About Churn
When you accept that churn is a company-wide responsibility, you start asking different questions. Here’s what that looked like across Vanessa’s organisation:
Sales: Are we truly selling customers what they need? Do they understand what they’re buying? Are we setting realistic expectations?
Product: Is the platform stable and reliable? Are we delivering genuine value that solves customer problems?
Finance: Are invoices accurate? Is the renewal contracting process smooth?
Customer Success: Are we providing regular business reviews with ROI analysis? Are we evolving our service as customer needs change?
Support: When customers encounter issues, are we resolving them quickly and effectively?
It sounds simple when laid out like this. But getting 200+ people across different functions to genuinely own their piece of the retention puzzle requires more than a town hall presentation.
From Insight to Action: Making It Work
The executive team alignment came first. Then came the hard work of cascading this mindset throughout the company, helping each department identify their specific role in customer retention.
For the sales organisation specifically, this meant implementing several key practices:
Demo certification: No rep can deliver a demo until they’ve passed certification. This ensures customers see the product positioned correctly from the first interaction.
Weekly deal coaching: Rather than waiting for quarterly reviews, Vanessa’s team conducts weekly pipeline coaching sessions focused on the quality of opportunities, not just quantity.
Renewal team integration: Rather than customer success managers juggling both retention and expansion, Vanessa created a dedicated renewals team. This allows CSMs to focus on expansion opportunities whilst renewals specialists handle contract negotiations.
The results? A five percentage point improvement in gross retention over 12 months—a significant shift for a company of their size.
The AI-Powered Early Warning System
One of the more interesting developments in Vanessa’s approach involves using AI to identify at-risk customers far earlier than traditional methods allow.
Her team built a risk-scoring model using about ten different metrics: executive sponsor changes, usage patterns, support ticket volumes, and escalations. The model flags potential problems months before renewal, giving the team time to intervene meaningfully.
“In previous years, we were getting to the renewal and asking ‘how’s this customer doing?’ At that point, it’s really too late to effect change,” Vanessa says.
But here’s where it gets clever: they flipped the same model to create a propensity-to-buy score, identifying thriving customers most likely to expand. For account managers with hundreds of customers in their portfolio, this data-driven approach helps them focus their limited time where it’s most likely to generate results.
The caveat? AI can identify the problem brilliantly, but it can’t solve it. For high-touch customers with dedicated CSMs, the team built playbooks that trigger when certain risk indicators appear. For digital customer segments without dedicated resources, they’re exploring how AI-powered automated journeys can deliver similar interventions at scale.
The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything
Perhaps the most powerful takeaway from Vanessa’s approach is this: stopping customers from leaving is fundamentally different from helping customers grow.
“I challenge my CSMs to think about their role not as preventing churn but as driving growth,” she explains. “That mindset shift is huge because you’re not in a defensive posture. You’re in an offensive, growth-oriented posture.”
This isn’t just semantics. When your focus shifts from preventing loss to driving expansion, you start asking different questions, having different conversations, and uncovering different opportunities.
What This Means for You
If you’re a sales leader heading into a new year with aggressive growth targets, the maths is straightforward: you can’t pour enough new business into the top of the funnel if your existing customer base is haemorrhaging revenue.
The uncomfortable truth is that churn often starts with how you sell. The empowering truth is that this means you can do something about it.
Start by asking these questions:
- Are your reps truly selling what customers need, or what hits their quota fastest?
- Do you have demo certification to ensure consistent, accurate positioning?
- Are you coaching weekly on deal quality, not just quantity?
- Have you analysed why customers churn in the first 12 months, specifically during implementation?
- Can your customer success team focus on expansion, or are they drowning in firefighting?
The companies that will thrive in the year ahead aren’t necessarily those with the most aggressive new business engines. They’re the ones who recognise that retention truly is the foundation of all growth—and they’ve got everyone in the organisation rowing in the same direction to make it happen.
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