Churn Discovery and Recovery

Elizabeth Italiano has 19 years of experience across GTM with a focus in sales and customer success. She has experienced what works and what doesn’t work in all aspects of revenue generation and management.

Not only does her experience include sales and customer success, individual contributor and leadership roles, but she has also navigated numerous economic downturns, industry booms, and tech transformations. If Elizabeth is teaching about it or talking about it, it means she has seen it work (or not work) in real life. Her work is rooted in reality. She focuses on knowledge transfer and not theoretical ‘thought leadership’.

In this workshop, Elizabeth shared how to uncover, assess, and act on churn risks.

Here are some key takeaways:

1. Identify the root cause of churn risks. 

• Common churn reasons some text
  • Low product adoption
  • Never completed onboarding
  • Loss of champion
  • No value realization
  • Support issues
• Root case some text
  • Failed to integrate into their workflow
  • Lack of change management and resistant to change
  • Single threaded; failed to secure DM buy-in
  • Failed to align to business priorities and KPIs
  • Bugs in product made it impossible to use; failed to identify key functions and prioritize

2. Understand why good fit clients churn. 

• Patterns why clients churn some text
  • Failure to address top business problems.
  • Actions taken with solutions misaligned to solving key problems and/or lack of integration into clients workflow. 
  • Quantifiable results and KPIs are not being tracked. 
  • The solution and the problem it addresses were not aligned with the company’s evolving top business priorities.

3. Realign with clients using the PART Framework for churn discovery. 

• Problem (P).  What problem did the customer come to us to help solve? What is the current problem the customer has?
• Action (A). What action has already been taken to rectify this problem? What additional action can we take?
• Result (R). What is the desired end result of solving this problem with our action? What results have we accomplished so far?
• Trigger (T). Why is now the appropriate time to solve this problem? Why is our solution relevant to their current problems?‍

4. Learn and master an effective discovery. 

• Demonstrate your understanding and gain credibility. 
• Start with questions that set the context for the conversation so it focuses on the right areas. 
• Discovery includes both business level and departmental level questions. 
• Discovery is ongoing and each stakeholder is asked diagnostic questions.
• Diagnostic questions dig into emotional pain that each stakeholder is experiencing in their roles. 
• Discovery is continuous and allows the CSM to align their solution to both quantifiable business goals and individual stakeholder pains. This allows for effective retention and save plans as well as business case creation. 

5. Use success plans to address churn risks. 

• Business goal alignment. How does this align to top business priorities? How will we measure and prove our impact? 
• Business goal to department alignment. How does this align to top business priorities? How will we measure and prove our impact? 
• Department to program goals alignment. How does this align to department goals? How will we measure and prove our impact? 
• Action items alignment. How does this align to top business priorities? How will we measure and prove our impact?  

6. Align short term recovery to long term retention. 

• Short term recovery
  • Determine root cause through discovery.
  • Identify short term actions that need to be taken to save the client.
  • Identify KPIs to track success. 
  • Align this to original goals and new/evolving goals.
  • Put short term milestones and action items in place to get the client to “back on track in the short term.”
  • Tie this to long term goals and priorities. 

• Long term retention
  • Identify long term goals and priorities. What does success look like in the next 12 months? At the end of the fiscal year? Build out your Success Plan with these goals. 
  • How will these goals be achieved? 
  • Add KPIs and Quantifiable goals that the client needs to achieve at the business, department and program level.

For more tips and discovery training, reach out to Elizabeth.

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