You Can Hear Churn... if You Listen.

The clues are there. The customer is giving you all the information you need. Are you listening?

By: David Groves Churn doesn’t shout. It whispers. Most churn stories don’t start at renewal; they start on day one.

You know that once you hear: “Well, budgets have been cut this year,” it’s often already too late. The first few weeks of a contract usually tell you what will churn a year from now.

🔹 Implementation and license deployment are not adoption. Have we trained users well enough to pull them in?

🔹 “Weekly active users” ≠ value delivered. People might just be clicking around. We need to support them in achieving outcomes, seeing value in their daily workflow; and that value must be refreshed and demonstrated continually.

🔹 Contact tracking isn’t just email logs and Zoom invites. True contact is persona, ideally in-person. It might be tech, but it’s people that stick to it, or don’t.

🔹 NPS from stakeholders ≠ NPS from users. Let’s not risk having “satisfied” buyers while the end-user sentiment could be slipping away.

🔹 Dashboards on their own aren’t insight. I’ve seen people point to dashboards lighting up while real value quietly sank in the background.

Contracts trending towards churn must be sounded out and understood. The earliest whispers of untethering must be enfolded in supporting initiatives and gently reined in.

Every contract starts full of energy, ready to run, like a racehorse at the gate, but only if it can be guided onto the track where value lives. That’s why you need a churn whisperer.

🙋 I’ve seen these signals across different SaaS businesses; sometimes missed, sometimes caught in time. Curious: What’s the earliest churn whisper you’ve learned to listen for?

About the author David Groves is an industry expert with decades of experience helping companies of all sizes with GTM and Operations strategies. Having worked with firms like Adobe, HP, Contentsquare, Cognism, and others, David has a reputation for keen insight, focused analysis, and effective strategy development. You can find out more about David on his LinkedIn page here: David Groves