Twenty years ago, Jeff was asked to become the Chief Operating Officer of the newly formed Baan Supply Chain Division and overcome business challenges similar to yours – he was responsible for launching a new business and making it successful; quickly!

Have you started to catch up on customer retention material or looked at software that tells how many times you have touched a customer in the past 90 days. Do we really want this type of information about all of our customers? Are all of your customers worth knowing – worth keeping? The better questions to ask might be “Do you know the customers you want to know”?

There are many valid reasons for caring about customers (particularly for companies with a SaaS business model where client acquisition and exit is faster and more frequent than purchased solutions). SaaS customer retention and preventing customer churn has a dramatic effect on the business and lead to a variety of critical business challenges including:

• Low-client retention dramatically lowers company valuation
• High costs - FTE intensive to save an unhappy customer (not scalable)
• “Save every customer” mentality which exacerbates the problem - no clear repeatable way to identify the right customers to retain (also not scalable)
• No way to identify how much resource and “when to apply”