Why do Your Customers Leave You And What Should You Do About It?

Have you ever had a really good, high paying client leave you? For a competitor that too! It hurts, doesn’t it? We then for the next couple of weeks keep wondering, blaming each other & wondering was it the product? Was it customer success? Did we not give them what we had promised? Was it the poor sales guy?

Losing a big customer is a bad experience, with the potential for unpleasant consequences concerning the budget and possibly even the employees.

Now you could hang your head in analysis paralysis and give up. Or you can use this opportunity to learn. You can ensure that you never lose another big customer again!

Why Do Your Customers Leave You?

In my opinion, there are 5 main reasons why customers leave a B2B SaaS company like yours:

• Broken ICP: Your sales SDR hunted the wrong animal i.e. Wrong ICP.
• Broken Expectations: During the sales discovery process, you subtly or explicitly promised something which your product can’t deliver within the said timeline.
• Broken Use Case: You were not able to make the customer clearly see the ROI of your topmost use cases your product is an expert in solving.\
• Broken Onboarding: You were not able to clearly articulate the needs during the set-up moreover onboarding. Poor sales & CS cadence leads to the wrong set-up.
• Broken Customer Success: You gave them a poor customer success experience because you didn’t invest an adequate budget in CS hiring and training.

What Should You Do?

Your customer has left you. You can’t do anything about that. But you can ensure that others don’t follow suit. How? It’s important that you invest time in analyzing the reason behind your customer’s departure. Here are a few things you need to look at:

1. How was the customer’s journey like with your entire funnel?: Analyze your customer’s journey end-to-end. How long was this customer with you? What was their onboarding like? Did you have a good relationship with them? What were the hiccups? What were the positives?
2. Maybe every loss is not bad?: Sometimes the churn is not because of you. It’s the customer! Analyze the client expectations from you. Heard about good churn? Maybe there was the issue of the wrong ICP, but it’s better for you in the long run that they left you or vice versa. You now have the opportunity to go & fix your ICP in demand gen.
3. Look at the usage patterns & telemetry data: Analyze the initial usage and telemetry at the start & during the journey. Was it consistent throughout the journey or did it drop off in the later stages? Did your customer champion leave the organisation?
4. Where did your ex land up?: Finally, find out, where did your customers divert their business to. If they have moved on to one of your competitors, it’s important to find out why. What is your competitor offering that you don’t have?

After conducting your analysis, your work isn’t over!?

A quick tip: Always do an exit interview, listen to understand and keep the relationship even if you have lost the dollars.

Then sit with CS & Sales, come up with strategic steps that will ensure that you don’t lose more business in the coming months.

Happy to hear what do your SaaS growth teams do when they lose a customer?