What determines whether accounts renew and expand rather than churn?

Harry Stebbings · Nov 10, 2023

In the current macro climate, customers no longer auto-renew and upsell, so vendors must restructure their org around proving ROI, usage and efficient spend.

Customers are going flat and demanding data showing their dollars are being spent efficiently.

Scope: framed as ZoomInfo's experience

46:30 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake

Steve Goldberg · Dec 13, 2023

Every renewal should be treated as a new deal, because CFOs now ask what would happen if you didn't have the product.

His own CFO's first question on any renewal is 'what if you didn't have it?'

0:00 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft

Harry Stebbings · Dec 13, 2023

Buyers no longer auto-upgrade seats and now demand usage data proving value inside their org.

32:10 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft

Steve Goldberg · Dec 13, 2023

The CFO is now the buyer on every renewal, so vendors that fail to show insights around business value will not be renewed.

32:42 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft

Sean Murray · Jan 24, 2024

The two things you must prove at renewal are data-backed measurable improvement on the problem you solve, and what next problem you can solve for the customer

Proof is what carries a renewal now

23:28 20Sales: How to Scale Into Enterprise Effectively and the Biggest Mistakes Made When Making the Move From PLG to Enterprise, Why Discovery Today is F***** & The Biggest Lessons on How to Do Sales Team Compensation with Sean Murray, CRO @ Greenhouse

Rich Liu · Jun 7, 2023

When a customer base was acquired bottom-up without value framing, the vendor has to effectively redo the sale properly at renewal — with value messaging and executive buyer engagement — which is harder than doing it up front

Deals sold to a developer or mid-level user for a single project never established ROI with the person who ultimately approves spend

11:55 20Sales: PLG and Early Adopter Sales are Gone, How to do Sales Forecasting in 2023, Why You Cannot Do PLG and Enterprise from Day 1 at the Same Time and Which is Easier to Start, How to Onboard, Manage and Scale Reps with Rich Liu, CRO @ Everlaw

Lori Jimenez · Aug 2, 2023

If you haven't built value with the economic buyer, you are very likely to be consolidated away when companies cut costs

Only an economic buyer who understands how you solve their problem and sees it on their P&L will protect the spend

Scope: especially in the current cost-cutting environment

31:02 20Sales: Why The Founder Has To Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, When To Hire Your First Rep, Why Junior is Better Than Senior, How to Manage Sales Rep Compensation, How To Onboard New Sales Reps and more with Lori Jimenez, CRO @ WorkRamp

Doug Adamic · Sep 8, 2023

Expansions, add-ons and additional product purchases are a byproduct of consistently delivering business outcomes the customer cares about, not something to be pursued directly

You're only as good as the last promise you fulfilled; the moment a customer thinks you're acting for your own or Brex's benefit rather than serving them, all trust is lost

Scope: requires a business review process supported by value engineering, research and experts

34:54 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex

Carles Reina · Feb 14, 2026

Land and expand works well only if you work closely with customers, and doing so produces very solid GRR and NRR

Their own NRR target of 115 is smashed every quarter because of close customer work

40:52 20Sales: Inside ElevenLabs $330M ARR Sales Machine | The 20x Sales Comp Plan Reps Must Hit | How to Land and Expand in a World of AI | Why Product-Market-Fit is BS, Reps Should Not Be in the Office and Outbound is King with Carles Reina

Steve Goldberg · Dec 13, 2023

Post-sale measurement should shift from adoption metrics to outcome metrics, with health scores built on the leading indicators of those outcomes.

Customers don't care about logins or activity counts; they care about pipeline metrics and the revenue outcomes the platform drives, and health scores let you act proactively when an account moves from green to yellow.

Scope: done continuously through the year, not just at renewal

33:02 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft

Kim Graves · Jun 27, 2025

The AI companies that actually win will be the ones whose customers renew a year or two later because they tied AI to real business priorities, not the ones capturing experimental 'vibe revenue'

Enterprises are shifting from experimental AI budgets to asking what outcomes AI drives, and AI only becomes sticky when tied to outcomes; even her own performance review is still measured on revenue and pipeline, not AI savviness

55:53 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves

Chris Degnan · Nov 10, 2023

A consumption business model lets you see churn and account health in real time, unlike seat-based models.

Revenue can be watched daily; sharp increases or drops in consumption immediately signal overspend risk or a problem in the account.

Scope: specific to consumption pricing models; losing a workload isn't always full churn

35:40 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake

Steve Goldberg · Dec 13, 2023

Proactive customer engagement should be deep analysis of the customer's business use case and product usage gaps, not generic marketing material

Spotting things like a customer stuck on a three-step cadence or broken integrations lets you fix problems proactively

33:59 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft

Ishan Mukherjee · Apr 4, 2025

There will be significant retention and churn problems in enterprise AI tools, driven primarily by users losing trust when nondeterministic outputs are bad

These products are probabilistic systems, so two users can get different quality outputs from the same agent; a bad output shaves away trust and once trust is gone the user does not come back

40:45 Nondeterministic output quality destroys user trust

Lori Jimenez · Aug 2, 2023

A QBR should validate progress against the goals originally set using the customer's own data, and then surface untried opportunities and roadmap — it should not be a checkbox readout.

Showing what's happening with their investment plus what peers like them are doing well turns the review into a moment of value rather than administration.

39:21 Qbrs must prove value against original goals

Lori Jimenez · Aug 2, 2023

Churn can be anticipated by combining usage data with anecdotal engagement signals — missed or repeatedly pushed milestone calls — into a health score; when both are down, that's a risk signal.

Pushed calls mean you're not a priority, and marrying that with product data tells you where risk is emerging before it becomes churn.

41:06 Health score blends usage data with engagement signals

Martin Gontovnikas · Feb 14, 2024

Enterprise expansion never happens passively — founders who say revenue 'will come' without actively fostering it are wrong

At Auth0 they asked champions to invite other business units to workshops and sent DevRel to interview and convert new champions; without that action expansion doesn't occur, just like claiming a product sells itself

42:48 Expansion requires active fostering not passive emergence

Sean Murray · Jan 24, 2024

Renewals are harder than in the past because new personas create dysfunctional consensus and vendors must now prove time-to-value, not just ROI

CFOs, IT and unfamiliar functions show up in renewal conversations, budgets are tight, and nobody feels comfortable making firm decisions

22:41 New buying personas and time to value proof not just roi drive harder renewals

Ben Fiechtner · Aug 2, 2024

Renewal prioritization should come from cross-referencing adoption/usage telemetry against contract value, focusing on large contracts with poor usage

Bad adoption plus a big contract is the highest-risk combination and deserves the first conversations

18:44 Large contract poor usage combination is highest renewal risk priority

AJ Tennant · Oct 23, 2024

The biggest mistake founders make building CSM teams is failing to tie the function to clear metrics that act as leading indicators for future upsell, NDR and GRR

28:04 Csm function must be tied to leading indicators for upsell and retention

AJ Tennant · Oct 23, 2024

Leading indicators — time from signed contract to launch, and share of paid seats actually active — matter more than GRR itself, because nailing them systematically makes GRR a non-issue

If customers deploy fast and users are actively using the service, retention takes care of itself

28:31 Time to launch and active seat share matter more than grr itself

Kyle Norton · May 30, 2025

Customer success in a transaction-revenue business should be run off a data model that scores configuration quality, because specific product setup choices measurably drive customer GPV and retention

A regression analysis identified which in-product setup factors drive GPV and growth; if the customer makes money they make Owner money and retain far better, so the onboarding rep can be shown exactly what to fix

48:59 Configuration quality scoring predicts account gpv and retention guiding onboarding fixes

David Schneider · Sep 11, 2024

Even inside multi-year contracts you can detect product-market health through ACV expansion — a healthy deployment should show 20-40% ACV growth roughly six months after go-live

Once implemented, more users show up than the customer originally sized for, so usage-based expansion reveals whether the first experience was good; a bad first experience also shows up as refusal to buy the second product

39:40 Acv expansion six months post go live signals health within multiyear contracts

Raaz Herzberg · Dec 12, 2025

Logins from teams outside security — especially developers — are the key second metric, because multi-team adoption is what makes a product hard to rip out

Developers own the infrastructure while security owns the risk, so cross-team usage proves the product is driving real change; SaaS is easy to deploy and easy to replace, but embedded cross-team workflow is not

35:02 Cross team adoption beyond the buying team is the stickiness metric

Harry Stebbings · Jun 7, 2023

According to Henry Schuck, ZoomInfo is having to change its org structure because renewals have become much harder, shifting more people into data and data enforcement to prove the tool is efficiently used within organizations before upselling.

Previously everyone simply upsold; now proof of in-org efficiency is required first.

11:31 Proven in org usage gates upsell