Identify Departing Champions

And Reduce your Customer Churn

Your Job: Reducing Churn

Customer Success is tasked with reducing Customer Churn. The challenge is that while churn is easy to track after the fact, there are very few leading indicators of customer churn.

Leading Indicators

In broad strokes, the two ways to anticipate customer churn is through monitoring usage, and through tracking job changes. For usage, you can turn to tools like Gainsight, Churnzero, or even Pendo. But how do you track job changes, and what exactly does that mean?

The Magic Wand

Imagine a Customer Success magic wand. You might wave it and say

Every time a champion of our product leaves one of our customers, I want to be alerted. I then need to find out if their departure is going to hurt usage, or renewals, or upgrades. I might need to find a new champion, or even just find a new person who will sign off on our Invoice.

Salesbolt provides this magic wand. We can identify when people leave the employment of your customers. And armed with this knowledge, you can direct your energy and focus at the most high-risk companies.

The Mechanics

Salesbolt can check your Salesforce Contacts to see if they've changed their Employer, or even changed their role within a company. We do this by monitoring their LinkedIn Profile to see their headline experience and title.

Any changes will cause a series of actions in your Salesforce Org:

  • A record will be created, on the related list of the Contact
  • That record will show the old employer and new employer (or the old title and new title, if the move is within the same company)
  • An email alert or Slack message can go out to the Sales and or Success team at your company, proactively alerting you to this (Slack messaging is currently in beta)

With this information, you can prioritize which accounts you put your energy towards, focusing on the most at-risk accounts.

Job Change Data vs Usage Data

We're sometimes asked why Job Change Data is better than Usage Data in identifying high-risk customers. It's not better. It's different and the two should be used in tandem.

Usage data is great when it can inform you about gradual changes, or adoption issues, or general dissatisfaction. However, usage is often a trailing indicator. If a company switches from Salesforce to Dynamics, or Marketo to Eloqua, usage will usually remain steady until it drops off a cliff after the customer has already migrated to the new solution. There's nothing you can usually do at this point; you are simply too late.

So, how do you identify the leading indicators, not the trailing indicators, of customers cancelling? What are the causes of customers switching systems? One of the major causes is turnover. Your champion leaves, and their replacement has never used your system before, and prefers the system they used at their old job. This is the most critical moment for Customer Success to engage. And Usage based data cannot help you identify this situation.

Pricing

Pricing for this is usage based. You pay per-record fee, per job-change-check. There are no minimum volumes, nor required contract length. You can check 100 records once a quarter, or a million records once a month. It's totally up to you. And, you have complete control of which records you check, and how frequently.

While a free trial is available, the real benefits come from checking a core set of Contacts, month after month, indefinitely. An average tenure between 24 and 36 months correlates to 3-4% of your customers changing roles every month. So to truly appreciate Job Change alerts, you need to have Salesbolt running monthly, even on a limited (and affordable) group of contacts.