How to spot (and stop) churn

What's more important -

Getting customers?

Or keeping customers?

I've talked to a lot of founders in my life who are great at getting customers — they could probably sell snow cones in a blizzard.

Then the chargebacks and the cancellations kick in.

And their business dies nearly as fast as it grew.

You can't just have a system for selling… you need a system for delivering.

Here's how I do it:

1. Track 4-5 key behaviors that predict success

In my software business, I measure:

→ Weekly logins

→ Usage of our primary feature

→ Usage of secondary features

→ Participation in training/webinars

Unlike satisfaction surveys, these are tangible actions you can measure objectively, not just how someone feels on a particular day.

2. Assign points to each behavior

Start by giving each behavior equal weight (let's say 5 points)

Keep it simple at first.

You might not know which behaviors matter most, so treat them equally while you gather data.

→ Over time, you'll discover some behaviors matter more than others.

For example, you might find that using your core feature is twice as predictive (so it gets 10 points) of retention as attending webinars (so it gets only 5 points).

And then you can adjust your scoring.

3. Calculate a simple 0-100 score for each customer

Add up all points earned, then divide by the maximum possible.

If a customer has 10 points out of a possible 20, their health score is 50%.

Whether you're scoring out of 20 points or 100 points, converting to a percentage lets you compare scores consistently across different products, teams, or time periods.

→ Update scores regularly (weekly is ideal) This gives you trend data so you can spot declining engagement early.

4. Group customers into actionable segments

I like to organize my customers in a simple dashboard with greens, yellows, and reds.

This visual approach makes it easy for my team to prioritize who needs attention right now.

We invest time in the yellows to get them back to green, and we jump on the reds immediately to prevent churn.

You can use a similar system with the score you got in the previous step:

🟢 70-100: Healthy: These customers are getting value and could become referral sources.

🟡 40-69: At-risk: Something's not working for them. They're using your product but not fully engaged. Need intervention.

🔴 0-39: Danger zone: These customers are likely to churn unless you intervene quickly.

With this system, when a customer slips from green to yellow your customer success team won't just know THAT they're at risk — you know WHY.

Instead of vague "how's it going?" calls, they can now say: "I noticed you haven't been using Feature X lately.

Many customers find it works better when you do Y.

Can I show you?

Here's an in-depth look at what a great CS manager should be.

And you don't need fancy software.

In fact, we run the most efficient systems in our company with only $972.

I've shared the full tech stack here.

You can just start with a spreadsheet.What matters is the insight, not the tool.To building healthier businesses