Whether it’s a total shock or you saw it coming, customer churn deserves your serious attention.
September 17, 2025
By Rachel Smith
As though losing a customer weren’t bad enough, you’re then expected to stare into the lifeless eyes of your dead account and perform a post-mortem. As much as it would be preferable at the time to keep going and pretend nothing happened, it would prevent you from learning what went wrong and making sure it doesn’t happen again.
This week, I sat down with Maestro’s Customer Success and Account Management Strategy Expert, Chelsea Madden, to discuss what should happen when we lose a client. So, grab your scalpel and your bone saw and let’s go.
Sometimes you suspect ahead of time that a customer is going to churn. But what about the ones that come as a total shock? The account fits your ideal customer profile (ICP), their usage of your product is high, and they have been engaged with their customer success account manager. “You want to dig into figuring out where the key milestones were to uncover,” says Chelsea. “Typically, you’re going to see that it’s multi-threading at that particular juncture. You’re with somebody who you think has the power to make a decision. They could have been the decision-maker last year, but the organizational structure has changed, or they brought in a different leader, or whatever the case may be. There is some type of ‘above-the-umbrella’ impact that occurs.”
“Often, a customer success manager will get stuck talking to their main point of contact because things are easy. We’re happy-go-lucky. I know your birthday; you know that I went on vacation last week. I know you’ll answer the phone when I call. Any time we schedule a meeting, you show up. But you want to make sure you’re introducing yourself to other people, that you’re talking and having those more aggressive conversations with your point of contact.”
When you’re talking to a new prospect, you ask questions like, “Who besides yourself is involved in decision-making?” Those kinds of questions, with a slightly different approach, need to be asked of current clients as well. “It’s a ‘hunting’ act to understand the hierarchy in an organization without stepping on the relationship’s toes that you have constructed and built,” says Chelsea. We often think of salespeople as the hunters and customer success as the ‘farmers,’ but in reality, it’s not so neatly divided. That’s why Chelsea recommends hiring people for customer success who have had to handle objections and loop in additional individuals. “Those behaviors are needed when you have to go resell the product,” she says.
So, what are the kinds of signs that could have alerted us to the fact that churn was a possibility? The same tools you’re using in sales and marketing should be used for CS. If a customer is considering a switch to a new provider, chances are they’ve been evaluating how you compare to other providers for some time. Just as your marketing team uses intent data to know who and when to target, customer success should be using that data, as well. Chelsea explains that, when someone is your customer, they have established a kind of baseline in terms of how much they visit your site.
If a client company typically visits your website to log in 100 times a day because they have 100 employees who use your service, but then there’s a sudden spike to 150 times a day, that means there are other people, likely ones who are not using your product, visiting your site. “They are coming to your website to potentially compare your price,” says Chelsea. “Or they’re coming to your case study page, or they’re coming to your new-business sales-funnel functions that you would typically capture on the marketing funnel.” This is valuable intent data, but it’s intent to churn (and in some cases, upsell) vs. intent to buy data.
“You create everything in your CRM and your marketing automation systems for the front end of the house,” says Chelsea. “While you’re doing everything for the front end, you need to be thinking about what that looks like on the back end. Do you have renewal opportunities? Are you tracking customer engagement? Are you tracking how many meetings they’re attending versus not attending? Are they responding to your emails? Do you have the phases of your customer lifecycle mapped out like you have the stages of a deal? All of those things need to be considered in your CRM so that you have reporting on that.”
Is it always worth doing a post-mortem? Chelsea says no. “Organizations that are really small tend to have higher churn rates because they eat everything,” she explains. “They’re the shark in the water that eats the license plate because it wants to think it’s a seal. The worst-case scenario is that you start looking at the license plate and think, ‘Oh, what could I have done to keep that in my stomach?’”
“When you have churn, you tend to dig into it, asking yourself what you could have done to save it,” Chelsea says. “When in reality, you might have wanted to say goodbye to the account a long time ago. It might not have been the best fit for you. It could not be your ideal customer profile—they’re trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, which is now increasing the servicing cost on that account. You want to focus on your ideal fits that actually take less servicing and have room for growth and expansion.”
Maybe your organization doesn’t have the fancy marketing tools or hasn’t been using the CRM to track engagement for current clients. What can you do when you’re blindsided by churn? Chelsea has several recommendations.
Chelsea says that the example of being totally blindsided by a perfect client and trying to salvage a would-be seal are the two extremes. Ideally, you want to have a process in place so you can capture whether or not an account is going to churn. Your health score—which includes a ton of components like usage behavior, support, ICP fit, and engagement—should be able to predict whether or not the account is likely to churn. And if accounts are churning, what in your process is broken?
“A post-mortem is ultimately an internal executive business review (EBR), but post the exit of a customer,” says Chelsea. “You should be having these on a quarterly basis, where you’re prepping, and you have insight into what your funnel looks like, and your reps should be providing you with all the details. Make sure the hierarchy of the account has been mapped out; the technology landscape has been mapped out. Are they surging on first- or third-party intent? What do their support tickets look like? What does their adoption look like? How much have they been engaged? And more.”
It’s all the information you should be proactively looking at. “All of those same things need to be dug into in a post-mortem,” says Chelsea. “Because you want to find out where the misstep was. Is it just a CSM misstep, or is it a process misstep?”
If your health score hasn’t been alerting you to the fact that your accounts are likely to churn, but churn continues to happen, well, grab your rib shears. You’ve got some work to do.
Maestro Momentum: The Ultimate Revenue Summit is October 20–22 in Washington, DC! Click here to learn more and register. And, yes, Chelsea will be there!
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