I've spent 25 years in customer success (CS), working with companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, as well as many SaaS businesses in between. One thing has stayed remarkably consistent throughout: most businesses measure a lot and understand very little.

That's the uncomfortable truth I want to dig into here.

I'm not going to walk you through NRR definitions or explain what churn means; you already know all of that. Instead, I want to share observations from the field: patterns I've seen repeatedly across companies of all sizes that deserve far more attention than they're currently getting.

Metrics belong to the whole business

Here's something that genuinely surprises me every time I see it: in most SaaS companies, the core package of business metrics (NRR, ARR, churn rates) lives almost exclusively with the CFO and the finance team. The rest of the organization has a vague awareness of them at best.

And that's a problem.

There's an old saying that it takes a village to raise a child. The same principle applies to your metrics. If your customer-facing teams don't understand what these numbers mean, how they're triggered, and why they matter, you're essentially asking them to drive a car without explaining what the dashboard does. 

That includes:

  • Support teams
  • Professional services
  • CSMs
  • Anyone else who touches the customer relationship

Churn is a good example. It can silently erode your metrics without anyone realizing it's happening. But when your whole organization understands the mechanics of churn and what behavior contributes to it, you create a different culture: one where people across functions are actively working to protect revenue, not just the finance team staring at a spreadsheet once a quarter.

Companies that get this right tend to have a noticeably different approach to sales, customer relationships, and internal collaboration. The old tension between CS and sales, sometimes described as "throwing unicorns over the fence," tends to dissolve when everyone works from the same understanding of what success actually looks like in numbers.