Written for people who own the retention number
Retention problems start upstream of where they show up
Each one takes a number an executive is held to and traces it back to the stage of post-sales that produced it. I ran these organizations for fifteen years. The loss usually started months before anyone wrote it down.
Your retention forecast depends on the part of the company you can see least
Retention drives SaaS valuation, but the data behind the retention forecast often comes from the least instrumented part of the business. Five post-sales numbers can expose churn risk, margin leakage, and forecasting blind spots before they show up in the quarter.