Prevent Churn & Drive Expansion

Customer Success (CS) teams can use people signals to stay ahead of potential churn risks and uncover expansion opportunities within existing accounts. This playbook provides an end-to-end strategy for leveraging signals to strengthen relationships, retain customers, and grow revenue.

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Understand People Signals

People signals help identify shifts in your customers' organizational structure that impact your solution’s adoption or relationship. These include:

Past Champion Joins the Account

Expansion Opportunity: Champions are familiar with and trust your solution, making them natural allies to advocate for new use cases, increasing adoption, or expansion opportunities.

Past Champion Leaves the Account

Churn Risk: Losing a key advocate creates a gap in buy-in and familiarity. New stakeholders may deprioritize your solution if relationships aren’t maintained.

New Hire or Promotion Within the Account

Expansion Opportunity: New leaders often have budgets and priorities that align with your solution, enabling expansion conversations.

OR

Churn Risk: New decision-makers may not know or trust your technology or may bring a preference for different tools.

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Set up actionable alerts for Customer Success 

Set up a workflow that sends  alerts in either email or Slack  for new hires, promotions, or champion departures to prompt timely action by the CS team. Its’ best to have a recommended action 

Here are some examples of how that could look:

Past Champion Joins the Account: Drive Expansion

Actions:

• Send slack message to alert CSM of new potential stakeholder
• Send a congratulatory email acknowledging their new role.
• Schedule a check-in to discuss how you’ve already been helping their team and invite them to the next meeting
• Highlight past successes and explore potential expansion opportunities.

Past Champion Leaves the Account: Multi-Thread to Prevent Churn

Actions: 

• Send slack message to alert CSM of champion’s departure
• Use Multi-thread signal to Identify other influencers and decision-makers within the account.

Example Notification:

Example email:

New Hire or Promotion Within the Account: Prevent Churn or Drive Expansion

Actions:

• Send slack message to alert CSM of new potential stakeholder
• Congratulate them on their new role and introduce yourself.]
• Offer a tailored onboarding session to familiarize them with the value your solution provides.
• Share customer success stories or metrics relevant to their role to build confidence in your solution.

Example notification:

Example Email:

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Additional Resources

• Prevent Churn and Drive Expansion: Lessons for Customer Success Teams