Churn Bites Episode 5

ChurnBites - OpMethods Interview

Host: Dan Wilson (ChurnBites)
Guests: Deb Schleede (Chief Experience Officer, OpMethods) & Eric Potter (Chief Operating Officer, OpMethods)

Dan Wilson:

Hey folks, welcome to Churn Bites. I'm Dan Wilson with ChurnAssassin and today we're going to talk about what happens when you have rapid growth and all of a sudden realize you're winging customer retention and renewals. Today I'm with the fine folks at OpMethods. Deb and Eric, why don't you introduce yourselves.

Deb Schleede:

Sure. I'm Deb, and this is Eric from OpMethods. We are a revenue operations consulting and agency firm. We help companies who are growing to better operationalize their sales, marketing, and customer success motions in tandem to make sure that their revenue engines and go-to-market engines are as healthy as possible to make sure that the company can continue their growth. And that usually includes their technology systems, their staffing systems, and processes that staff take on a day-to-day basis, as well as the life cycle reporting and foundational items that keep their money growing.

Dan Wilson:

Nice. Eric?

Eric Potter:

Man, all's I would add there is that we're also technology MSP so we can help our customers along their purchasing journey to pick the best in breed technologies to help their business scale.

Dan Wilson:

Phenomenal, that's excellent. So today we're gonna talk about what happens when your company's been growing very fast and you realize you have no process for customer retention and renewal. So describe the problem to us, Deb.

Deb Schleede:

Sure. Something we commonly see with a lot of different companies is if you have rapid growth, you've probably been focusing a lot on new business sales for quite a while, and that's been going great. And you're hitting it, you're nailing it, you're getting a lot of new customers come through the door, and they're very happy. Eventually, that might start to plateau and you'll start to see churn coming through—customers that aren't renewing or customers that want to scale back or something along those lines. And you'll sit there and you say, we have no idea why this is happening or no way to really respond to this or be proactive. Instead, you're in a reactive state of, oh, crap, we've got this huge customer that's been foundational with us for years, and we need to scramble to solve and make sure that they stay around. And that problem kind of sucks.

Dan Wilson:

So what do you do in this situation?

Deb Schleede:

Yeah, so the first thing we usually recommend a company do is take that step back and identify all of the scenarios that would cause a customer to become at risk or a churn risk and operationalize their system to track those items. So all of the at-risk possibilities, all of the churn possibilities, where those things are happening in the life cycle—is it at renewal, is it mid-contract, you know, that sort of stuff. So setting up those, identifying all of those reasons and getting the system, their CRM and data systems, to track that as a data point so they can actually reflect upon it and not just talk about it conceptually.

Eric Potter:

Yeah. And I would say that, you know, building on what Deb is saying, obviously that's step one, making sure that all your data is where you do business and where you track it in your CRM or wherever else that may be, ideally your CRM. But from there, it's, you know, Deb mentioned it perfectly. How do you be proactive? How do you stop being reactive and get out of that mode? We often see companies developing these kinds of strategies as well when they say, hey, I want to get more juice out of my customer base, how can I enhance my account management motion? So something we often recommend and to great success is making sure you're generating your renewal opportunities or deals significantly before that contract ends.

Deb Schleede:

Umm. Make sure that your team is aligned, your leadership is all aligned. Make sure everyone is understanding the same definitions that you're working on—what all the at-risk situations are, making sure that they are all in agreement on how a renewal takes place and how maybe an upsell takes place so that you're not scrambling at any point. You don't want to get to that point where you do a check-in at 90 days before renewal and they say, yeah, we've been having this problem with your product and we're actually kind of thinking about looking at competitors. You don't want to scramble. Like that scramble, even at 90 days, kind of sucks. So when you turn around and have to talk to the product team about what those problems are, make sure that they're aligned.

Eric Potter:

And they expect those conversations. Building on what Deb was saying too is, you know, once you have this timing and the ability to react, then it becomes necessary to say, oh, now that we're all aligned, we know why folks might churn. Let's start leaning on maybe the marketing order, another part of the business that is helping with communications to develop what we like to call playbooks for folks to run—to say when these scenarios, when we're dealing with these common causes of churn, especially now that we have these earlier warning signs, how do we go and mitigate those? We should have organizational playbooks for those bigger buckets that you know you're going to encounter out there in the marketplace.

Dan Wilson:

Yeah, that's a great point. It also makes sense from a resource perspective, because if everything has to be thought through as a net new problem, there's no efficiency. And the last I heard, customer success teams weren't overly staffed with way too much headcount. They're usually scrappy and trying to get the most done possible in the littlest time available.

Eric Potter:

That's why templates are so, so important and making sure that everybody has that reflexive lane to go into. Another final note there, I think Deb touched on it, is organizationally, it's really important to understand who is running what part of that renewal process so no one's stepping on each other's toes and you can be more agile. Making sure that, say, your CS person's handling the customer conversations, but a sales person's handling commercials—just having those lanes defined is very helpful.

Dan Wilson:

Well there you go folks if you find yourself rapidly growing and realize you have no customer success process and you want some success get your data in the system, track the reasons why, formulate process, align stakeholders and then use the templates that work to get the most done possible. That's it for this episode of Churn Bites. Thanks OpMethods! You can find them at opmethods.com.