What are your nonnegotiable Rev Ops metrics specifically for Customer Success and Renewals? (I.E., Retention revenue-focused KPIs.)

When we think of some core KPIs, the buckets that are critical to understand - 

• Direct impact on revenue/growth: These metrics directly reflect your ability to retain/grow customers and generate recurring revenue and accelerate growth.

• Actionable insights: Insights enable outcomes. Identify areas for risk and opportunity to operationalize the CS strategy

• Leading indicators:While outcomes are paramount, key metrics, like CSAT, usage insights (product adoption), customer engagements etc can help assess risk and opportunity, and help us take proactive steps to deliver the right business and customer outcomes.

Here are some critical CS Revenue focused KPIs (not necessarily in order) -

• Revenue Retention (NRR/GRR):  Measure Gross & Net Revenue Retention. It tells  how much recurring revenue we are getting from existing customers, factoring in upsells, cross-sells, and churn. NRR > 100% ⇒means we are not just retaining revenue, but growing it from an existing customer base.  

• Customer Churn Rate (Full Churn & Contraction): The flip side of retention. It measures the rate at which we are losing customers.. I would say this is the most important indicator, as even small increases can significantly impact the bottom line. Deeply analyze, understand drivers to identify areas impacting customer experience and need attention.  

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): This predicts the total revenue we can expect from a customer throughout their relationship with your company. A higher CLTV means more profitable customers, so focus on strategies that increase it (e.g., onboarding, engagement, upselling).  

• Renewal Rate: A straightforward but crucial metric. It shows the percentage of customers who renew their subscriptions. Track this over time and dig into why customers don't renew to address any underlying issues.  

• Product Adoption- Usage : This measures how well customers are using the product or service. Higher adoption usually correlates with higher satisfaction and retention. Monitor feature usage and identify any roadblocks hindering adoption.  

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS): These gauge customer experience and happiness. While not directly revenue-focused, they're strong indicators of future retention. Unhappy customers are more likely to churn, so address issues promptly and proactively.  

• Time to Value (TTV): How long does it take customers to realize value from the product? A shorter TTV leads to quicker wins, increased satisfaction, and higher retention. Optimize onboarding and ongoing value process to accelerate TTV. 

It is also important to understand the leading indicators (for your core KPIs) to ensure you are able to operationalize the strategy to impact both top line and bottom line growth. Good Luck!

There are several non-negotiable KPIs for measuring retention and revenue, which include:

• Product usage = Understanding metrics such as "Depth of Usage"; and "Feature Adoption Rate" to understand how customers are using product; and to improve their product usage before contract renewal time.

  • You can also build a "Customer Health Score" which is an aggregation of product usage metrics based on assigned weightings to analyse health score of customers with your product.

• GRR or Gross Rev Retention = This metric is to measure churn, excluding any expansions and upgrades. It's really to understand how sticky are the customers with the product suites they have. Improvement in GRR is a healthy sign to upsell / cross-sell customers

• Net Retention = which is includes GRR + expansions + upgrades. This is to understand how customers are growing their spend with the company

• CSAT or NPS to understand customer sentiments and loyalty, which are strong predictors of retention.