Ten Plays to Mitigate Churn Risks and Maximize Net Revenue Retention in 2025

Retention is the cheapest form of growth for SaaS companies, but net dollar retention rates are trending downward across the board. For companies aspiring to buck this trend in 2025, it is important to embrace these ten tried and true procedural tactics for reducing logo churn.

Retention is every company’s cheapest form of growth, so net revenue/dollar retention (“NRR”) is an important north star metric for customer success teams. A business with 120% NRR could theoretically never sign another new customer ever again—not that I’m recommending that as a strategy!—and still grow 20% year-over-year, which is pretty incredible.?

There are two key levers SaaS companies pull to move the NRR needle: 1) mitigating the risk of gross churn (which includes both full-out logo churn as well as contraction/downsell) and 2) growing their existing customer contracts/ACVs. Both are important, but today we’ll focus on churn reduction.

Recent benchmarks have confirmed that median NRR rates are down from their 2021 peaks across the board, even for top quartile companies. There are myriad macro factors at play with that reality, but there are also procedural “fruit on the floor” opportunities holding companies back.?

While most organizations understand the cost of churn—both the dollar impact and the qualitative repercussions, as detractors tend to be 10x louder in the market than promoters—far too many teams tackle churn on their heels. A proactive, preventative approach to churn reduction—a strategy that thoughtfully incorporates risk mitigation efforts into all points of the customer lifecycle—pays dividends in boosting NRR. The best churn management programs combine both internal processes and customer-facing playbooks to mitigate risk throughout the customer lifecycle.

As companies seek to optimize NRR in 2025, they should start by embracing these ten “plays:”

Internal Plays

Leverage—and action!—customer insights

Businesses must continuously revisit their working assumptions about which attributes yield the stickiest customers, both in terms of explicit traits such as company size and resourcing, industry, contract size, etc. as well as more implicit usage and adoption information; it is imperative to have a strong command of the company-specific “sticky drivers,” a topic I reviewed in detail a few months back.

Leaders must study their retention curves and optimize both their new business and customer success strategies accordingly. If small customers regularly churn (or put undue resource strain on your team), consider instituting a minimum deal size. Once you have enough data to unlock your business’ unique sticky drivers, your onboarding and broader customer success playbook need to be maniacally focused on driving customers toward those milestones and behaviors. At Sailthru we identified adoption of our personalization technology as the stickiest driver of them all. Once we identified the striking difference between customers using this technology and the have-nots, we changed our time-to-value calculation to when customers sent their first communications using that personalization technology, and we wouldn’t consider an implementation complete until that happened. Yes, the metric looked much worse, but we were okay with that given this behavior had positive long-term benefits.?

Run an internal line-by-line process with executive team involvement

A quarterly line-by-line process (“LxL”) wherein CSMs review a segment of customers one by one is a powerful accountability framework for the entire business.?

The LxL is a forum for the entire CSM team plus other CS leadership (e.g. head of technical support, head of implementation) and the entire executive team to discuss key accounts. Generally, CSMs will present accounts in their books that are either at-risk—because a calculated health score tells them as much or because the CSM can sense it—or ripe with expansion potential (and sometimes those two traits are one and the same!). The CSM will provide a brief history of the account, key challenges, and then make very specific requests of the business to support the partnership (e.g. CEO alignment, resolution of a bug that has been stuck in the backlog).?

The LxL ensures that all of the right people are in the room to align on the requests and/or to brainstorm tactics for saving and growing the customer. LxLs also serve as a great platform for CSMs to gain visibility with the executive team.?

Editor’s note: LxLs should be a key ingredient of the weekly operating rhythms for CS leadership and middle management, but this quarterly step-back is usually the right cadence for bringing in cross-functional support.

Build internal feedback loops to ensure a customer-first culture

Customer success is everyone’s job, but it is challenging to excel without visibility into what customers need. It is important to build a customer-first culture where there is radical transparency around customer feedback. I’m a proponent of all NPS data (including verbatim write-in comments) being made public to the company, and believe it should be heavily considered in dictating product roadmap work. NPS write-in responses are also helpful for identifying relevant candidates for beta tests. Rapid UX prototyping and beta testing are both inherently customer-centric practices.

That said, it is important to diversify the customer feedback mix beyond just NPS and customer satisfaction surveys, especially given those surveys often yield only a ~10–20% response rate. Hosting customer talk forums where an executive interviews two or three customers in a panel-type format is a great approach for gathering live feedback. To capture your technical team’s attention, consider inviting a technical stakeholder from a customer account to meet with the sprint team that supports a product they use.

For companies post product-market fit, customer advisory boards of 12–15 client executives are also extremely valuable. These groups convene live a few times per year and provide executive teams direct feedback around the competitive landscape, the product roadmap, customer service and so forth. Radical transparency around company challenges is also important with these advisory board participants for deriving maximum return. Executive sponsors in your accounts will of course seek input from their direct reports, so it is helpful to assign a bit of homework in advance of advisory board meetings to ensure that participants are properly informed by their key stakeholders. Editor’s note: Advisory boards can certainly be helpful to companies pre-product market fit, but the format fundamentally looks quite different at that stage.

A prior Tactic Talk installment, ”It Takes a Village: Ten Tactics to Drive Customer-Centric Thinking in Every SaaS Function,” offers more suggestions for driving customer centricity across the organization.

Align incentives to outcomes

CSMs may technically “own” customer relationships, but again, customer success is everyone’s job. If companies do everything in their power to ensure customer success, it would take something catastrophic for those businesses not to be successful themselves. Aligned incentives ensure everyone is rallying behind the customers, and that alignment starts at the top: Devising an executive bonus plan that is consistent for the entire leadership team cements the business’ priorities. Rather than just setting an NPS or NRR target for your customer success leader, set it as a component of every executive’s bonus plan; you will be amazed by how the customer influence on the roadmap subsequently unfolds! (The same calculus applies beyond customer success; for instance, if a company institutes cash or EBITDA bonus targets for everyone, not just the CFO, other leaders will prioritize strategies for improving margin, etc.).

Aligned incentives also need to trickle down into the broader organization. Companies most often use a bookings attainment figure to calculate a sales manager’s bonus; if they augmented that with a kicker for hitting churn targets, surely the sales manager would be thoughtful about investing time in helping to re-pitch at-risk customers. These incentives also apply to individual contributors. Even if CSMs do not manage renewals, they need to be compensated on NRR so that they are incentivized to both mitigate the risk of churn as well as to drive upsell and expansion in their accounts.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it over and over again: Your team can’t be aligned if their compensation plans are not, and variable plan targets should be aligned to a company’s most acute optimization opportunities.

Conduct churn retrospectives

Churn is inevitable, but it is important to learn from it. As a mentor once told me, “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Companies should conduct robust churn retrospectives when customers are lost, particularly in scenarios where the churned customers were not surfaced as risks in the aforementioned line-by-line exercises (this all comes full circle!); these retrospectives should summarize the history of the partnership and outline measures that could have been taken to prevent churn. Ideally, those learnings are then operationalized into the company’s customer success playbook.?

It is also important to learn about churn first-hand, ideally through both internal and external interviews. Customer success leadership is typically well-equipped to conduct an exit interview with churning customers, and that process is best handled once the customer has fully wound down so as to ensure the greatest level of transparency and detail (of course CS leaders should ask the “is there anything we can do to save your business” question? when they learn of the churn!). Conducting anonymous post-churn interviews with an external third party is often particularly helpful, so businesses should consider using a consultant or even investors for this tactic (we regularly conduct churn interviews for Primary’s portfolio company customers).

Customer-Facing Plays

Ensure a seamless onboarding experience, focusing on accelerating time to value

With time to value strongly tied to overall customer satisfaction and lifetime value, a seamless onboarding process is critical. To prevent a Groundhog Day effect for customers, businesses should always conduct an internal kickoff/sales to CS transition session prior to any customer-facing meeting, wherein there is a thorough review of customer goals and prior pain points. Ideally, implementation should be a key topic in pre-sales discussions to avoid surprises following the signature, e.g. sales teams should socialize onboarding plans and technical requirements before a deal closes so that the customer can allocate resources accordingly.

It is easy for implementation teams to fall into a “lift and shift” trap wherein they are mostly focused on translating the customer’s workflow with the incumbent partner to a new platform. Instead, success should be dictated by customers’ adoption of the new platform’s sticky drivers (consider the Sailthru personalization algorithm example I referenced earlier). To make product adoption easier, businesses often need to build technology to guide those outcomes; if you have a critical mass of customers coming from a particular incumbent, perhaps you build an “Incumbent X connector kit” that easily integrates the old data and transforms it into the ideal setup for the new platform.

Communication is also of paramount importance during the onboarding period. A customer-facing project plan is an important artifact for spelling out progress and for highlighting potential risks to project completion. While Professional Services Automation (PSA) tools are powerful, they are best suited for operations with some scale. Earlier-stage companies can easily build project plans with tools such as Google Docs or Monday.com. Beyond reviewing this project plan on a regular basis, implementation team leaders should plan for formalized midway-through-implementation touchpoint meetings with the customer’s executive sponsors as well as for a formal feedback loop once the customer has exited onboarding.

For those interested in reading more about implementation and professional services strategies, I think you’ll enjoy this piece from last year.

Devise customer value plans as living, breathing artifacts for your partnerships

A good rule of thumb is that your customer status meetings should never entail conversations about the weather. Every interaction should be rooted in a customer value plan that is agreed to at the onset of the partnership and refreshed in each quarterly business review. (Again, ideally, this value planning would start in the pre-sales process.) When considering successful customer engagement, think about the old CEB analogy of a bartender versus a personal trainer: The bartender listens to the customer’s problems and reacts to them (maybe by trying to sell them something additional!), but the personal trainer understands the customer’s desired outcomes and coaches her to get there.

Value plans are designed to do just that—ensure the customer extracts value from their investment—but they also drive focus. All too often customers’ eyes are bigger than their stomachs in the buying process and the “boil the ocean” effect kicks in. With value plans, CSMs can push customers to focus on no more than three strategies or tactics at a time; these tactics should be agreed upon in the quarterly business review and should be the focal point for status meetings for the 90 days that follow. If the customer is slow to adopt the agreed-upon plan, it is appropriate (and important!) to escalate the roadblocks to the customer’s executive sponsor. If the customer implements those three tactics faster than expected, you can certainly accelerate work on the next three.

Value plans actually become easier as companies scale, as they become richer with customer examples. Ideally, businesses should have a strategy playbook that outlines the 3–5 most important outcomes for that customer set (can vary by industry served, but should not be ad hoc per customer), and then maintain a repository of recommended tactics to achieve those outcomes (with supporting customer case studies and ROI metrics).

Perhaps most importantly, celebrate value. Provide regular updates to client stakeholders in between formal check-ins, whether that be in the form of automated reporting or even just a quick note. A customer may debate attribution in your ROI assessment, but it is better to put some number in front of them than nothing at all, as doing so will at least spark a conversation! When Sailthru was a customer of Rocketrip, an application for corporate travel spending by rewarding employees for saving, I vividly recall them making waves in offices after sending cupcakes with little flag adornments boasting the six-figure annual dollars saved for us.

Ensure quarterly business reviews are happening and meaningful

Quarterly business reviews (QBRs) are a helpful forcing function for ensuring that the partnership is meeting the customer’s expectations, as well as to push value plans and sticky drivers. To avoid unwelcome surprises at the renewal, always include contract details and seek to get a gut check on how the customer is thinking about the renewal, even if it is nine months away! Said another way, ask them right then and there if they intend to renew. Again, sunlight is the best disinfectant!

It is of paramount importance that a senior sponsor from the customer attends the meeting and that any materials reviewed are shared after the fact; if a CSM feels awkward sending a QBR deck to a CMO when only the VP of Marketing attended the session, she should ask her manager or exec to do so. CSMs should not be shy about insisting on rescheduling QBRs if a customer’s senior sponsor is unable to join. QBR coverage is not a vanity metric: The intention is not to have yet another meeting, but rather to drive value exchange with the customer. Great QBRs include customer performance data (including benchmarks vis-a-vis other customers), tactical recommendations for program optimization and feature adoption, and last but not least, a customer-facing product roadmap and a recap of recent releases.

Establish an executive sponsorship program, but don’t boil the ocean?

Stakeholder turnover is frequently a top reason for churn, which is why the “high and wide” concept is critical in customer success: When it comes to building relationships with enterprise customers, it is a best practice to be three-high and three-wide in terms of the span of contacts. Executive sponsorship programs help with the “height” portion of the equation: It can sometimes be challenging for a CSM to establish a strong relationship with a CEO, but any member of the CSM’s executive team can certainly do so.

The best executive sponsorship programs are tailored, consistent, and focused. If you have a highly technical customer, align a Product or Engineering executive sponsor to the account. Consistency is also critical; executive sponsors should attend QBRs and other key milestone meetings. It is also important to try to maintain the same executive sponsor for a prolonged period of time. (It’s fine for other leaders to check in on a customer if they are traveling to their location or checking in on a specific topic, but the primary executive sponsor should not change.) Because effective executive sponsorship programs are reasonably time-intensive, they should be focused. Rather than assigning an executive sponsor to every account above a certain ACV threshold, understand the Pareto dynamics of your business: if 80% of your revenue comes from the top 20% of your customers, focus on building a robust executive sponsorship program for your top 20%.

Leverage customer enablement programs

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” (or the duration of a software partnership). Perhaps more important than a proactive customer success program is exhaustive customer enablement. Product marketing is inherently important for educating customers on features and benefits, but customer enablement programs are critical for ensuring customers feel in control of unlocking the benefits of your product.

It is most often the case that customers who attend training programs (or who watch them online) are stickier and happier, so it is worth investing in those programs early and often, even if you are directing customers to a low-production quality video. Focus your training programs not only on unlocking the sticky driver components of your platform, but also on support ticket deflection. Study your most frequent support ticket topics and build content around them (e.g. knowledge base articles/FAQ and videos); in addition to making the information discovery possible easier for customers, these tactics also boost margin in the longer run. Best yet, leverage other customers to deliver this content via real case studies and hands-on examples.

Bonus play

Don’t forget about contraction risks!

Churn is a frequent topic of discussion for most SaaS companies, but its cousin metric contraction—when existing customer contracts shrink in size—is often forgotten. Contraction can be a silent killer of NRR and requires focused attention. At one point during my tenure at Sailthru, we uncovered that almost half of our gross churn—the sum total of both full logo churn and contraction—was ACV contraction versus outright churn. When we dug a level deeper, we ultimately discovered a pricing issue: Our core contract values were derived from customers’ estimates of their annual email volumes, and it turns out customers were really bad at estimating, ultimately resulting in contraction upon renewal. Is contraction better than outright churn? Sure, but it is critically important to understand the root cause of contraction, e.g. pricing problem, satisfaction issue with a particular product SKU, etc. And if a contraction risk does exist, consider that a great opportunity to “plug” the resulting ACV gap with another cross-sell SKU.

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So far as timing for building formal customer success playbooks is concerned, it’s never too soon. While advanced tooling and customer success platforms can certainly be helpful for scaling programs, they are by no means required; the vast majority of the initiatives outlined here can easily be tracked with a reasonable Google Docs setup. When it comes to implementing a customer success playbook, it’s best to follow this Chinese proverb: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”