Sydney explains how Catalyst improved gross retention by 20% through cross-functional meetings and account-tagging that assigns responsibility for retention risks to Marketing, Sales, CS, or Product. Net Revenue Retention isn't a CS problem alone: product gaps and sales misalignment often drive churn, so leadership must prioritize roadmap items and teams must break down silos.
When I look at Catalyst and where we've had a huge impact in retaining our base and driving revenue growth, it is the cross functional collaboration between marketing, sales, CS and our EPD engineering and product organization. I mean we have these at risk meetings and we have every account that is at risk tag that ties back to a certain department. So like in customer success, like there are areas that I and my team are accountable for like if someone is not getting value from Catalyst, that that is a Sydney problem with my team to solve. But there are also areas where there may be critical product features that customers need to get the value that they need from Catalyst to be able to retain and they fit our ideal customer profile. And that is a conversation we're having at our leadership team to discuss like where on the roadmap are we prioritizing this feature? So I think when we instituted this process, a Catalyst, I've seen it raise all tides like across our gross retention metrics. Like I mean 20% increase in gross retention in a time that is very challenging to retain our customer base. So I would just encourage everyone to look beyond the walls of like we're a scrappy CS team that's getting creative as hell to try and save every customer and go like how do you not shoulder that weight alone? How do you drive transparency and visibility to your cross functional partners? Because in my opinion gross retention, net revenue retention are company metrics. They're not CS metrics. And I think anytime any organization looks at their like, you know, NRR is a CS problem. It is not, it's a CS problem if CS is not verbalizing to the broader organization where the risk lies and why it lies there and what they need support from product or you know, sales or marketing to do differently to get it. But I think that that piece is like, you know, you're going to move the needle at a micro amount. If your CS is CS alone trying to get creative and scrappy to save accounts, you're going to raise all tides. When you are able to drive that visibility across the organization and put forth the right ask to your cross departmental partners and start to see meaningful changes.
