Retention and operations
Great sales cover a multitude of sins. We help auto retail software companies find where dealers leak out, put one person in charge of keeping them, and measure what actually moves churn.
The pattern
A company adds 20 to 30 percent to its customer base in a year because sales is crushing it. Meanwhile it loses 2.5 percent of customers a month because nobody owns retention. The growth number looks great, and the bucket is emptying almost as fast as it fills.
Ask the leadership team for monthly churn over the last twelve months. If the answer is "let me check," nobody is managing it.
Where we start
- Who owns retention
- "We all own retention" means nobody drives it. We help you make it one person's or one small team's main job, and keep the tension with new sales visible.
- The retention team's day
- Time spent feeding internal systems is time not spent talking to dealers. If your own tools pull people away from customers, something is inverted.
- The scorecard
- Fifteen measures on two pages usually means nobody has decided what retention is. We cut it to the few that matter.
- Where the leaks concentrate
- The sales-to-operations handoff, and tenure complacency: the dealer who has been with you two years, hears little from you, and has a disruptor knocking.
- Leading indicators
- Churn lags. We show leadership what to watch before the number moves, like fewer escalations reaching executives and growth in upsells and referrals.
Our line on churn
Only two reasons are uncontrollable: the dealer sold the store, or the dealer went out of business. Everything else is ownable.
In a prior operating role, a member of our team was asked to cut retention headcount by about 10 percent and improve churn at the same time. The answer was subtraction: every model and activity metric came off the scorecard except one, value delivered in conversations with dealers. A smaller team delivered better churn.