Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Willey: SaaS gross churn under 10% is good, under 5% fantastic

Tim Willey · 10 Rules for Defining Churn with ForgeRock and Solarwinds | SaaStr Software Community · Jan 14, 2021 · at 6:13

Tim Willey (SVP at ForgeRock) outlines SaaS industry benchmarks for acceptable and top-tier gross ARR churn rates.

0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Typically anything under about a 10% gross churn rate is pretty good. Anything under about a five percent gross churn rate is fantastic.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Tim Willey

Disclosure
Willey: ForgeRock allows up to six months renewal slippage before forced churn
“Because we focus mostly on enterprise customers. We have this idea of allowing a renewal to slip up to a period of six months. Oftentimes the customers maybe are negotiating and there may be a significant upsell associated with the renewal that we haven't mana…”
Tim Willey Jan 14, 2021 ▶ 10:12 10 Rules for Defining Churn with ForgeRock and Solarwinds | SaaStr Software Community
Insight
Willey: Short-term contract extensions at full run-rate do not count as churn
“Even if the customer is just renewing for one extra month, as long as they're renewing at the full ARR value, there shouldn't be any churn.”
Tim Willey Jan 14, 2021 ▶ 20:26 10 Rules for Defining Churn with ForgeRock and Solarwinds | SaaStr Software Community
Insight
Willey: Requests for short contract extensions usually signal intent to churn
“Typically if customers are looking for something like that, it tends to mean that they're interested in moving off or moving to something else.”
Tim Willey Jan 14, 2021 ▶ 20:45 10 Rules for Defining Churn with ForgeRock and Solarwinds | SaaStr Software Community
Disclosure
Willey: ForgeRock treats contract reductions lasting over six months as formal churn
“How, how we typically look at it is if there's a temporary reduction for a short period of time, let's say within, within the six month period, as long as at the end of that period, the customer is, is effectively renewing the full amount and kind of go get, g…”
Tim Willey Jan 14, 2021 ▶ 22:14 10 Rules for Defining Churn with ForgeRock and Solarwinds | SaaStr Software Community
Disclosure
Willey: ForgeRock counts ARR losses from channel partner margin shifts as churn
“Typically we would look at the ARR value coming in from that customer through that, that channel. So if that ARR goes down because the margin changes, then we would take some kind of churn on that.”
Tim Willey Jan 14, 2021 ▶ 27:48 10 Rules for Defining Churn with ForgeRock and Solarwinds | SaaStr Software Community
Insight
Willey: Paying full commissions for flat account renewals breaks SaaS unit economics
“If they're not growing customer accounts, the economics, the customer acquisition costs, the lifetime value doesn't really stack up to pay the full commission on, on, on effectively just treading water.”
Tim Willey Jan 14, 2021 ▶ 28:30 10 Rules for Defining Churn with ForgeRock and Solarwinds | SaaStr Software Community
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 400 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.