I would fly by myself in the late 1980s to summer camp across the country. I lived in rural Pennsylvania, so I would need to connect through larger airports and different planes to get to my destination. One of the planes I would find myself on was the DC-10. I love the DC-10. It’s a widebody but what separates it visually from other widebodies is its passthrough tail mounted engine.
In the 1970s and 80s this plane had problems. Its most recurring problem was that its rear cargo door would open mid flight. Big problem. It resulted in crashes. But possibly more terrifying for my juvenile brain was the possibility of explosive decompression and getting sucked out.
That nearly happened on American Airlines 96 when the faulty cargo door did its thing and opened mid-flight. The resulting decompression caused the floor in the passenger compartment above the door to partially collapse. This did not result in a disaster in this case but pointed to a design issue that wasn’t rectified until another DC-10 went down completely for the same problem.
Needless to say, I was anxious about traveling on this plane by myself. I didn’t have the knowledge to understand the physics of aviation, so whenever I experienced turbulence or sounds that the plane would make, my mind would go to a worse case scenario. I had a legitimate fear of flying.
Enter my uncle Bob. Bob was a decorated Pan Am pilot. He flew the 747 internationally and he had a lot of stories. Beyond the headlines I would be exposed to, Bob had inventory of all the near misses that I never heard about. He would tell me all about them and the ways that the pilots and the redundant systems would work together to remedy these incidents and land safely.
At first I was terrified hearing these stories, but over time I began to understand the physics of flight. I could attribute sounds that I heard to the pilot actively controlling the plane and instead of being fearful I developed confidence. I knew what noises or sensations to pay attention to and what they meant and I knew which ones to dismiss as normal. I nerded out to defeat my fear of flying.
A parallel can be drawn here to managing churn in B2B SaaS. Churn is bad. Without knowing what to pay attention to you can waste time, money and energy focusing on the wrong things.
Similar to an airliner, you need a system to put your customers on a path to value and impact. Your customers buy because they have business challenges and your product can solve them. You need to get surgical about those desired outcomes, benchmark, iterate and prove that you are meeting them. If you do this, your customer will renew and your revenue and growth will be protected.
You need a linear process for managing ALL renewals so that warning signs can be identified early and corrected before it’s too late. Once implemented you can be confident that your customer will renew or that you’ve done all you can to manage churn. The rest is waste.
If you have late renewals this is a sign that you are not doing this – that your customer journey is disjointed and has waste. You have opportunity, but you are squandering it by focusing on the wrong things.
If you want to nerd out on your customer journey and put systems in place that give you confidence of renewal but also catch the early indicators of churn before it’s too late, give me a follow and let’s talk.
Maintain elevation and airspeed while course correcting.
-bw