In the early days of a SaaS business, conducting a thorough churn analysis is usually the furthest thing from your mind. The focus is on go-to-market strategy, product-market fit, and winning new business.

However, SaaS businesses rely heavily on customer retention to ensure future growth. It’s never too early to dive into your customer data and develop a deep understanding of who your most at-risk customers are.

In this post, we’ll teach you how to conduct a thorough churn analysis to better understand which customer segments you serve best–and which segments best serve your business.

Take a deep dive into your data

In B2B SaaS, any two customers are rarely alike. The first steps in conducting a churn analysis are segmenting your customer data and creating churn profiles. Go back into the history of your data and segment your churned customers to identify and capture their behavior. You’ll find out when, where, and why customers churn. 

This is the type of exercise that takes a lot of time—which is why many businesses don’t do it regularly. By doing this churn analysis and getting the segmentation right during your downtime, you’ll be ahead when your business’s focus inevitably turns to retention and growth. You’ll have a much better reference point on the churn you’ve experienced and can therefore plan how to prevent it going forward. 

Creating churn profiles can unlock a lot of operational insight for your company. That’s not to say that focusing on new bookings isn’t still important because it certainly is. But keeping track of current customers and unlocking their data gives you a greater measure of control over retaining business over time.  

If you’re a current Maxio customer, a great place to start your churn analysis is in Cohort Reports. Cohorts represent a group of customers that share a common characteristic. Our Cohort Reports let you slice and dice your data in hundreds of ways in just a few seconds. Additionally, you can color-code by threshold and drop reports into role-based dashboards, or export them into a spreadsheet for more in-depth churn analysis by cohort. 

For more information about developing churn profiles, check out this article from The SaaS Playbook.

Now that you know how to set your SaaS business up for success, let’s get to work on customer churn analysis. 

By taking advantage of any downtime you might have now, you can set your business up for success by conducting a thorough churn analysis. 

If you need help implementing these changes or getting started with Maxio, we’re here to help. We know how hard it is to do this type of analysis well because we’ve done it ourselves and have helped hundreds of B2B SaaS companies do the same. You can request a demo here, or contact us directly for general inquiries.