While the hosts focused on B2C subscriptions—highlighting how easy it is to sign up and forget to cancel—there are relevant lessons for B2B SaaS and technology companies who rely on MRR (monthly recurring revenue).
Consumers aren’t the only ones overwhelmed by subscription sprawl; businesses are also subscribing to more tools and platforms than ever. Think about your own martech stack. Is it larger and more expensive than it was five or ten years ago? For most, the answer is yes.
Your clients are no different—they’ve built dependencies on a wide array of B2B SaaS tools to get their jobs done. While your product is hopefully a key part of their workflow, it’s competing for relevance in an increasingly crowded field. The tipping point where businesses begin cutting subscriptions that offer the least value can’t be ignored.
The Subscription Economy: Past vs. Present
Past:
In the past, customer retention often felt like a given. Marketing teams brought in leads, passed them to sales, and those leads became long-term customers, nurtured by customer support.
Present:
Now, I’m hearing more stories about even large, long-standing customers canceling their tech subscriptions—often without warning or an opportunity to re-engage. They’ve already decided to move on, drawn by competitors offering better features, lower prices, or both. Once the perceived value of your product diminishes, it’s nearly impossible to rebuild it.
The Risk of Churn in Today’s Competitive Landscape
Retention now requires more than simply delivering the product, support and outcomes promised during the initial sales process. You must optimize, personalize, and actively adapt to your customers’ evolving needs. Competitors aren’t just innovating on their products—they’re investing heavily in targeting your customers.
With advanced ABM tools like 6sense and demandbase improving precision, your competitors are laser-focused on capturing your customers. To succeed, you must strike a balance between acquiring new customers and retaining your existing ones.
So, what’s a marketing team to do?
Strategies to Combat Churn
1. Track Competitor Activity
Be on top of what your closest competitors are doing. Obviously, view their websites, check their tier pricing options and the benefits they tout. But in addition, do you know how their SEO is performing? Are there gaps where your brand can swoop in and do better? Are they bidding on your brand name in search results?
If you haven’t done a full competitor analysis for a while, take advantage of a slower holiday time and do so in a methodical way – and then make it a habit by repeating the work and comparing quarter over quarter.
2. Conduct Customer and Stakeholder Interviews
We always interview our clients’ customers and stakeholders as part of our website redesign process, but have found that beyond that, there is a lack of bandwidth, importance or enthusiasm for doing more interviews as time goes on. I get it, it’s not something with an obvious ROI, but what you don’t know can hurt you.
Asking for a review might be common practice, but it’s not at all the same as having someone (a third party can be especially helpful here) interview your customers for 30 to 60 minutes asking very specific and in-depth questions about their likes, dislikes, needs and wants from your product. Want to do even more? Some of the most successful B2B SaaS companies hold user meetings and conferences. (This doesn’t negate the need for interviews though and mostly happy and engaged customers come to this, thus you’d miss the opportunity to hear from customers who might be considering leaving and an opportunity to save them).
3. Foster Cross-Department Collaboration
If your marketing team isn’t regularly communicating with customer service and product teams, now’s the time to start. Customer service teams offer a wealth of insights into post-sale experiences, while product teams can share updates on upcoming features. By bridging these gaps, marketing can craft campaigns that resonate more deeply with your audience and address their real pain points.
Final Thoughts
The subscription economy is evolving rapidly, but the right marketing strategies can help you keep up by being dynamic, flexible and creative. High churn rates make your job harder, requiring you to fill an ever-growing pipeline with new leads. By understanding why customers leave—or why they’re unhappy—you can help reduce churn, protect your bottom line, and build lasting loyalty.
