Sales and Marketing leaders have lived in the US through an expansion period over the last ten years. It’s easy to fall into bad habits here when customer growth becomes the exclusive focus. Reflecting back on recessions in 2001 and 2008, quite a bit of attention was THEN focused on customer retention initiatives. By the time a recession hits, it’s too late for many organizations to then make that shift to hugging their customers.
More SaaS companies are assigning resources to the existing customer base, because they realize hitting their bottom line numbers are a function of not just retaining clients, but growing their revenue. With high churn SaaS models, companies are forced to work harder and more ineffectively on the sales side of the equation.
Here are some valuable churn statistics echoing the case for why it is important to allocate sales and marketing resource on both ends of the funnel:
✔️The median annual unit churn for SAAS companies was 10% in 2016. (forentrepreneurs)
✔️More than two thirds of SAAS companies experienced annual churn rates of 5% or higher. (Totango)
✔️If your Net Revenue Churn is high (above 2% per month) it is an indicator that there is something wrong in your business; this will become a major drag on growth. (forentrepreneurs)
✔️Net-revenue churn improves with larger Average Contract Value (ACV), likely due to more structural churn among SMB customers and higher switching costs associated with larger contracts. (Mckinsey)
✔️Between the SMB and Enterprise customer types, the top-quartile performers not only have net-revenue churn that is 14% to 23% percentage less than the average performers but also have net-revenue churn that is negative in an absolute sense. (Mckinsey)
✔️Gross dollar churn among companies with an internet go-to-market strategy saw a meaningful increase, up from 8% in 2015. (forentrepreneurs)
✔️The fastest growing SAAS companies averaged $250k in MRR and were only losing around 3.2% of that revenue each month to churn. (InsightSquared)
✔️As companies scale their growth engines, a slightly-above-average churn rate becomes harder and harder to offset with net new revenue growth, especially when the goal is to outpace it by 4x. (InsightSquared)
✔️The median SAAS business loses about 10% of its revenue to churn each year and that works out to about 0.83% revenue churn a month. (Tomasz Tunguz)
✔️The very best SAAS companies keep monthly revenue churn at around 0.58%, that’s only about 7% revenue churn a year. (sixteenventures)
✔️The very best SAAS business has a negative churn rate and will have a Dollar Retention Rate of greater than 100%. (forentrepreneurs)
✔️Median annual gross dollar churn was 8%, 7%, 6% and 8% in 2016, 2015, 2014 and 2013. (forentrepreneurs)
✔️The best SaaS companies achieve 5-7% annual revenue churn – equivalent to a loss of $1 out of every $200 each month. (sixteenventures)
✔️As with unit churn, companies with longer contracts (2+ years) tend to report lower annual dollar churn. (forentrepreneurs)
✔️ Non-renewal rates are higher than gross dollar churn rates and higher for shorter duration contracts. (forentrepreneurs)
Credit for stat aggregation: Despina Exadaktylou of Bad Ass Marketers Forum.