Customer Intelligence

You're in the pros

By
Joel Passen
April 25, 2024
5 min read

My neighbor asked me to speak with his son (who is not connected here on LI). The son is a mid-market account manager (post-sales) at a large SI (pure services). His remits are expansion/upsell, renewal assistance, and retention/escalation. His book has 30 customers, and its approximate value is just shy of $1mm annually.

He's stuck.

He's stuck at his company. They pay well. His role isn't challenging him anymore. He doesn't want to do pure sales or pure CS work. He is smart. He is motivated to create a career path. Right now, he can't see the forest from the trees.

After 20 minutes, he asked me what he should start, continue, and stop doing. Great question in this context.

Here was my advice. If you know me well, you know it took many more words than LinkedIn will accept in a single post. 😉

🏅 Start thinking of yourself as a professional athlete.

Professional athletes spend +90% of their time preparing for competition. Prepare like a pro for both internal and external meetings. Study your customers and learn everything you can about them. This will prepare you for your account reviews with your leadership. This will help you blow out your KPIs. This will build the foundation of success. Preparation is hard. It's tedious. You will be working harder than ever. Keep doing it. You will not see results for at least 6 mo. Keep going.  

💡 Continue asking for help.

Tapping into the expertise and experiences of others is a dying art. New people offer new perspectives. Getting advice will help you learn how other pros have built their careers. As an early/mid-career person, building relationships and networks will serve you well now and in the future. You're defined by the company you keep. Expand your community. It will, eventually, unlock opportunities.

🛑 Stop going through the motions.

Lacking purpose, passion, and interest is a career-advancement death sentence. Most importantly, it leads to dissatisfaction, stagnation, and lack of fulfillment in every aspect of your life. Stop just trying to make your numbers. Kill your number. Stop relying on what got you here. Dig deeper to force yourself to grow. Every day can be the first day of school. You have the power to reinvent yourself every day.

You are in the pros now. Be a pro.

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Customer Churn

The Most Dangerous Threat to CROs

Joel Passen
July 1, 2025
5 min read

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.

Software

Have you heard this from your CEO?

Joel Passen
April 29, 2025
5 min read

"How are we using AI internally?"

The drumbeat is real. Boards are leaning in. Investors are leaning in. Yet, too many leaders hardly use it. Most CS teams? Still making excuses.

🤦🏼 "We’re not ready."Translation: We don't know where to start, so I'm waiting to run into someone who has done something with it.

🤦🏼 "We need cleaner data."Translation: We’re still hoping bad inputs from fractured processes will magically produce good outputs. Everyone's data is a sh*tshow. Trust me. 🤹🏼♂️ "We're playing with it."Translation: We have that one person messing with ChatGPT - experimenting.

😕 "Just don't have the resources right now."Translation: We're too overwhelmed manually building reports, wrangling renewals, and answering tickets forwarded by the support teams.

🫃🏼 "We've got too many tools."Translation: We’re overwhelmed by the tools we bought that created a bunch of silos and forced us into constant app-switching.

🤓 "Our IT team won't let us use AI."Translation: We’ve outsourced innovation to a risk-averse inbox.

It's time to put some cowboy under that hat 🤠 . No one’s asking you to rebuild the data warehouse or perform some sacred data ritual. You don’t need a PhD in AI.

You can start small.

Nearly every AI vendor has a way for you to try their wares without hiring a team of talking heads to perform unworldly 🧙🏼 acts of digital transformation.

Where to start.

✔️ Pick a use case that will give you a revenue boost or reveal something you didn't know about your customers.

✔️ Choose something that directs valuable work to the valuable people you've hired.

✔️ Pick something with outcomes that other teams can use.

Pro Tip: Your CEO doesn't care about chatbots, knowledgebase articles, or things that write emails to customers.

What do you have to lose? More customers? Your seat at the table?

CX Strategy

Talent gets you started. Infrastructure gets you scale.

Joel Passen
April 29, 2025
5 min read

We obsess over hiring A-players. But even the best GTM talent will flounder if the foundation isn’t there.

I’ve seen companies overpay for “rockstars” who quit in 6 months—not because they weren’t capable, but because they were dropped into chaos. No ICP. Bad data. No process. No enablement. No system to measure or coach.

Great GTM teams aren’t built on purple squirrels. They’re built on a strong foundation.

That foundation looks like this:

✅ A crisp, written ICP and buyer persona (not just tribal knowledge)

✅ Accurate prospect data to target the right ICP

✅ A playbook that outlines how you win—and how you lose

✅ A clear point-of-view that your team can rally around in every email, call, and deck

✅ Defined stages, handoffs, and accountability across marketing, sales, CS

✅ A baseline reporting system to see what’s working—and what’s not

When this exists, you can onboard faster, coach better, and scale smarter. It's not easy, and it’s not sexy, but it works.

Want to cut CAC and increase ramp speed? Start with your infrastructure. Hire into a structure.

How many customers will you have to lose before you try Sturdy?

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