The most dangerous threat to CROs doesn’t live in the opportunity pipeline.
It's churn.
- It doesn’t scream like a missed quarterly pipeline goal.
- It doesn’t show up in dashboards until it’s too late.
- It's rarely caught by a generic 'health score'.
- It's the board meeting killer.
Retaining and growing our customers is the only repeatable, compounding, capital-efficient growth lever left in B2B businesses.
📉 CAC is way up.
📉 Channels are saturated.
📉 Talent is expensive.
📉 Competition is fierce.
📉 Switching costs are low.
The path to $100M used to be “sell, sell, sell.”
Today? It’s “land, retain, expand.”
No matter how strong your sales motions are or how slick your product or service looks during the sales process, if your customers are churning, you’re stuck in a leaky bucket loop of doom.
Every net-new dollar you win is offset by dollars you lose. It's just math.
Yet most GTM orgs still operate like retention is someone else’s problem. "That's a CS thing."
- The CS team might “own” the customer post-sale.
- Account Management may own the renewal and growth number.
- Support is in the foxhole on the front line.
- RevOps might model churn with last quarter’s data.
- Marketing might send an occasional newsletter via email.
- Finance may be leaning in on the forecasting.
- Product is building things that supposedly the customers want.
But in reality, churn is the CRO's problem. We wear it - or should.
If your go-to-market motion isn’t designed to protect and grow customers from Day 1, you’re not just leaving money on the table — you’re setting fire to it.
Retention and expansion aren’t back-end functions. They’re front-and-center revenue motions.
The most valuable work these days starts after the contract is signed — not before.
We need to stop treating post-live as a department and start treating it as the engine of durable growth.