Recently I was catching up with a good friend who used to be CEO of an enterprise-y SaaS social networking company — and the usage and engagement numbers of his business were just awful.
Customers bought because they thought their organizations needed this functionality, and so they wrote the checks for Year 1, and even Year 2. But the end-user usage just never appeared …
In SaaS, it actually takes until Year 3 for your customers to churn out from low engagement / low usage.
The reason is as follows:
- Year 1 – the enterprise buys, but often doesn’t even fully deploy until month 6-9, or sometimes even longer. So the buyer really doesn’t even have any success metrics going into the first renewal.
- Year 2 – renewal comes up, deployment only finally got going a few months ago. Engagement Metrics are often low but (x) it’s already in the budget, and (y) what do you expect, we finally just deployed? It took us 9 months to get our act together and use the service. OK, just renew at last year’s price.
- Year 3 – hmmm. OK, finally, 15-18 months under our belt — and engagement / usage is still low. Should we renew? Meh. Well, if we do, let’s get a big price cut if usage isn’t high. Or put it aside for a year.
It’s probably not a coincidence ServiceNow, with 1,000+ $1m ACV customers, signs all 3-year contracts!! More on that here:
We also saw this at Adobe Sign / EchoSign, at least in small parts. Most of our larger enterprise customers deployed relatively quickly – the first 60 days. But some, most often due to internal manager changes (our purchase/champion quit, promoted, etc.), would never ever deploy at all in Year 1 despite all our attempts. Yet they would still renew for Year 2. And as long as we got them rolled and successful – we were good for the Year 3 renewal. If not, the customer would churn – but not until month 24.
So if a SaaS app is fast growing, often because there’s segment pull, and there’s a lot of churn in Year 3, it can take a long time to see it, as the numbers can be masked at first by all the new Year 1 and Year 2 deals. In other words, you just can’t tell unless you look at the engagement numbers, not just the churn numbers.
Churn is a lagging indicator. Especially where business process change is involved. Don’t let low churn give you comfort, unless it’s attached to high NPS and net retention.
(note: an updated version of a classic SaaStr post)
Great post. (I just discovered your blog, hence I am looking at this early post!)
What do you think are the main reasons for non-use?
We are seeing some of these customers who finally pulled the plug after 2 years of not using an expensive SaaS coming to us saying they didn’t use it because it was too complex to use or was too much more than what they were looking for. Competitive replacement, IMO, can be huge in any SaaS segment with a bunch of players.
For us, the #1 issue was a dependent integration. Most typically, their Salesforce deployment would be delayed and our contingent integration thus wouldn’t be deployed.
This so happened to us. At least it was predictable and we knew what will happen so we tried everything we could to prevent that.
Thanks. Any thoughts on how to measure user engagement in-product to provide this early warning about possible churn risk? Both in terms of what to measure, which tools to use, and which teams (customer support/success, product, etc.) should be involved.
There are tools like getamity or other customer success tools that will measure how often a certain user has logged in, their engagement and activity. At Promomash, we measure how long it takes for a user to submit a report (usually if its under 3 days, they got it, if its over 10 days, we give them a call)