Our heads of sales & marketing Amanda makes a really good point here. It's not about the loss (which is always going to be hard), it's about what you can learn from it and how we come out of it stronger than we were before. Let's. Get. Going.
We lost our first customer in December. I didn't hear about it for 2 weeks. I'm still trying to figure out what's harder -- the loss 👎 or the delay in hearing about it. Before I had context about what happened, I thought as the head of sales & marketing I would be one of the first people who gets informed when, for one reason or another, the product did not meet expectations. But I'm not taking it personally! We're a small business. Things at my company move a million miles a minute. We have a lean team with everyone wearing multiple hats and we're too early to have processes in place for things "churn announcements." Here's what actually happened -- this customer had implemented BlinkMetrics for a client, and the client severely cut budgets across their business for 2025, including the small amount that was being spent on business reporting. (Not sure I agree with this approach for any business, but sometimes you just have to do what you think is right in the moment until you're past the chaos and can reestablish solid business practices again.) I learned a few things from this -- 1️⃣ Even if our end user is a step removed, we need to make our product so invaluable that the person we're working with fights tooth and nail to maintain budget for it 2️⃣ Maybe we need to create a 'Depressing News' Slack channel for churn and hard-to-hear feedback from customers and prospects 3️⃣ Until we have an internal flow for information like this, I need to keep a closer eye on our Stripe account Silver lining? 🩶 BlinkMetrics connects to Stripe and we've already added a 'Subscription Count' metric to the weekly scorecard so we can see changes like this in real time moving forward, in context with 'MRR' and 'New Demos Scheduled' from Pipedrive. For all my B2B SaaS folks out there: what was your experience like going through your first customer churn and what did you learn?