Sturdy Signals

What is a customer Signal?

By
Joel Passen
July 7, 2021
5 min read

Customer Signal
(noun) a gesture, action, or transmission delivered intentionally or unintentionally by a customer that conveys information, instructions, or insights. 

Customers send Signals that help us predict churn, capture references, get in front of renewals, prioritize features, and just run our businesses better. Our customers are giving us this information in Slack, Email, Salesforce, Webinars, training sessions, quarterly business reviews, Zoom calls, etc. 

For B2B SaaS businesses, these Signals are immensely valuable. For example, reducing churn from 10% to 9% in a $10 million ARR business means that every customer is worth $17k more in lifetime value (500 customers, $20k annual contract value). And reducing churn in this example is saving just five customers a year. 

Examples of customer Signals

Identifying, classifying, and escalating customer Signals to the right people at the right time empowers companies with information and insights to preempt issues before they spiral and seize revenue opportunities to improve the bottom line. 

For example, when a customer asks, “Can I have a copy of our contract?” in a support ticket, a Signal is sent. In a SaaS environment, the customer is likely signaling risk. Maybe they are evaluating a competitor. Maybe there has been an executive change or a shift in priorities. Regardless, every SaaS leader will agree that this signal needs to be escalated so action can be taken. 

Below are a few other examples of customer Signals. This is not an exhaustive list; every company will vary on what is important. An interesting exercise is to sit down and list out the Signals that your teams should be watching for. The output of this exercise can be used to improve operations, user experience, training workflows, and more.  


Examples of customer Signals

Where to find Customer Signals

Most of us have given our customers the ability to communicate with us using a variety of channels. After all, we want to hear from them. This allows us to gauge their health, status, and likelihood of buying more of our products and services. 

Given the prevalence of multi-channel communications workflows, critical Signals are often trapped in layers of technology across multiple teams, gathering digital dust. The most common scenario for most businesses is that important customer Signals are hiding in plain sight. They’re trapped in email accounts, ticketing systems, call transcriptions, chat logs, and CRMs. And for most of us, the only way we utilize this information is if someone manually identifies, records, and escalates it.

How to use customer Signals 

In today’s competitive SaaS environment, the most successful companies are learning to “listen” and interpret the Signals that their customers are giving them about their products and services. The category-leading companies are doing this at scale - automatically. 

With SturdyAI, teams can easily sign up for alerts on specific Signals, accounts, and even competitor mentions. For example, the most appropriate team member in any group can get an alert whenever:

  • One of your customers requests a copy of their contract or asks about their renewal date
  • An account has a new executive, point of contact, or executive sponsor
  • A user asks for information about adding more users or adding a new product or service
  • One of your customers mentions one or more of your competitors
  • A user reports an outage or bug
  • A customer is signaling satisfaction and, ultimately, referenceability

What’s exciting about customer Signals

Customer Signals undoubtedly help us understand our customers better. Specifically, by defining and leveraging Signals at scale, we can have a clear understanding if our products are delivering the value promised at the time of the sale. We can also better understand if our customers are willing to grow with us or if they are growing away from us. 

Rapid advancements in technology, especially AI, are making it easier to help brands quickly and responsibly use data to understand customer behaviors and predict customer needs. When we have the ability to discover new patterns and insights in our data, we are better able to anticipate future decisions. In the end, harnessing customer Signals presents opportunities—and incentives—to deliver better service and find new ways to grow.

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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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