Why you don't need a complex health score to identify churn risks & upsell opportunities.

Paying customers who don’t receive value are the ultimate churn risk.

Especially as companies tighten their software budgets in uncertain markets.

The good news…there’s a simple way to proactively identify those “ghost accounts”.

By calculating an “Account Utilization” metric.

Here’s how:

1. Create a property that captures your expected usage for a key metric.
Eg. Projects created

2. Create a property that can be dynamically updated with the current value of that product usage metric for an account.
→ 3rd party tools like Hightouch and Syncari make this easier than you might expect in HubSpot

3. Create a calculated “Account Utilization” property that compares the 2 properties and creates a percentage.

4. Optional but powerful: Use a workflow triggered by breaking a threshold of your “Account Utilization” metric to kickoff internal workflows
→ 💰Notify an AE if utilization exceeds 90% - upsell potential
→ 🤔 Notify a CSM if utilization falls below 50% - potential churn risk
→ 👻 Notify sales and marketing if utilization 0% - were they even qualified

At Arrows we call our account utilization metric “Engaged Plans”.
It’s the number of onboarding plans an account has created in a rolling 30 day window that has active participants AND tasks completed.

By comparing:
→ engaged plans in the current period vs the previous period
→ actual engaged plans vs expected plan usage

We can proactively identify both:
→ churn risks and
→ expansion opportunities

Metrics don’t need to be complex to be effective.

Focus on the internal metric best aligned with creating successful customers.

How to engage hard to reach customers

Your onboarding plan will likely get ignored if it’s not clear what needs to happen next.

Customers have their own projects and tasks filling their calendar too.

That makes clearly communicating the next step that much more important. A few of my favorite tips:

📣 - Communicate the plan as early as possible to set expectations
👀 - Don’t assume clarity, have a colleague in a different role test your task descriptions
🤝 - Align each task with how it will help customers achieve their goals
⏰ - Communicate what’s next and when it needs to happen frequently
🔁 - Solicit feedback from customers on plan and iterate

An onboarding plan that exists in a vacuum gets overlooked, clearly communicate what’s next to drive faster progress and customer value.

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