Haris Qureshi

Churn isn’t a Customer Success problem. It’s a Sales problem. 70%+ of churn happens because the wrong people were sold the product in the first place. Sales gets the commission. CS gets the blame. Let’s be honest—bad-fit buyers cost more than they bring: - They drain your support team - They rarely adopt - They leave quickly And worst of all? They damage your brand Sales teams are trained to be persuasive. But buyers often don’t have the tools or insight to verify if a product is actually right for them. Until it’s too late. So what can sales do to prevent churn before it starts? Here are 5 red flags you can catch during the sales process: 1. Misaligned Pain Points vs Product Strengths → If the buyer’s pain isn’t something your product is great at solving, it’s already a misfit. → Compare discovery notes to churn data. You’ll find patterns fast. 2. Overemphasis on Price over Value → If their main concern is discounts, not ROI, you’re likely not solving a real business pain. → These buyers churn when “cheaper” shows up. 3. Chaos During the Sales Process → Last-minute changes. Unclear requirements. Conflicting stakeholders. → Don’t expect post-sale clarity if pre-sale is a mess. 4. No Champion, No Executive Buy-In → If no one inside the company is excited to implement, usage will be low. → Low usage = fast churn. 5. No Success Metrics, Just FOMO → If they’re buying because “others are,” not because of a defined outcome… it’s a ticking time bomb. → Trend chasers don’t stick around. Final thought: 🚫 Not all revenue is good revenue. ✅ The best salespeople don’t close the most deals. They close the right ones. If you're saying yes to every buyer... You're not building a company—you're building a churn machine. Curious—what's your red flag during the sales process? Drop it in the comments 👇 #SalesLeadership #CustomerSuccess #Churn #SaaS #SalesStrategy #B2Bsales #OutboundSales #RevenueGrowth

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Every sales org has a pipeline: Stage 1. Stage 2. Forecast. Commit. You can recite it in your sleep. But when it comes to renewals? Crickets.... There’s no real-time view of customer risk. No weekly trendline. No forward-looking model that projects retention. Isn't that kinda bonkers? You FORECAST growth, but you DISCOVER churn...usually when it’s too late to fix. The big mistake is presuming retention is a lagging indicator, when it would be more accurate to define it as a neglected one. Think about it...most CS dashboards read like a rearview mirror: - Usage metrics. - Ticket volume. - NPS. Useful? Sure. Predictive? Nah. Because churn doesn’t start when a customer says they’re leaving. It starts months earlier when their exec sponsor stops showing up. If you can spot the risk early, you can unlock more levers: - Re-engage power. - Reset the value narrative. - Escalate to commercial. - Offer roadmap visibility. - Re-map success metrics post-reorg. But none of that works if your team can’t see it coming, which is why you need a churn forecast...just like you do for revenue. Build a churn pipeline. Treat it like sales. Some things to build into this: 1. Define churn stages. Just like deals, risk evolves: - Stage 1 (Early): No exec alignment, lagging adoption, stakeholder turnover. - Stage 2 (Mid): Value not realized, weak champion, limited engagement. - Stage 3 (Late): Renewal live, buyer pushing back, pricing/legal blockers. Assign clear criteria. Surface it in Gainsight, CZ, or Salesforce. Manage it like opportunity stages. 2. Assign prevention plays. Each stage should trigger a play: - Stage 1 = exec outreach + roadmap session. - Stage 2 = commercial review + value plan. - Stage 3 = C-level call + tailored retention offer. Codify this. Don’t let reps improvise. 3. Forecast it weekly. Revenue leaders inspect pipeline weekly. CS should do the same with churn. Ask: - How many accounts moved stages? - What’s projected retention by segment? - What % of at-risk logos have exec visibility? Also, share your churn forecast with the CFO. If the CFO sees new logo pipeline every Monday, but doesn’t see churn risk until Q4? That's no bueno. Start sending a weekly churn report with: - Total ARR at risk. - ARR by churn stage. - Stage progression. - Active recovery plays. - Forecasted retention (with confidence levels). This reduces surprises while also forcing accountability. Why? Because churn is rarely a CS failure, but it's often a product gap, pricing mismatch, or sales promise that aged poorly. When churn is forecasted, it becomes EVERYONE'S problem. Which it is. tl;dr = you don’t “discover” churn. You forecast it. You stage it. You act on it. Just like sales.

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outbound 2025 for mid-market and ent will be less of pseudo personalisation (you know the type) "I was on your site and saw that you <insert AI personalisation>…Have you considered my SaaS?' true personalisation is AE's and BDRs applying their intelligence and time to: 1- genuinely understand their prospective customers 2- spot problems they (think they) can solve 3- tailor solution to problems / goals does this mean no AI in outreach? not at all plenty of ways to save time in research, improve data quality so on but the inference and personalisation must be yours the rise of AI led 'personalisation' - if you can call it so is an opportunity for the crème de la crème to stand out in an ocean of noise all the best for revenue from cold outreach 👍

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Your team is wasting too much time on the wrong deals. When I consult with companies, the biggest mistake I see is this: AEs working deals that will never move the needle. Smaller deals: - Take just as long, if not longer, to close - Are more likely to churn - Drain your team’s time and energy Here’s a quick exercise: Take the lowest 20% of your closed-won deals and estimate how much time your team spent on them. Now ask yourself, was it worth it? The reality is, if you let your AEs work these deals, they will. The fix? - Don't let them work them. Keep your best reps focused on deals that matter - Have a junior rep handle them if you really need to without it being a distraction for everyone else. Your top reps should be thinking about and closing revenue that moves the business forward. Anything else is just noise.

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Here's what 10 years in Customer Success and Sales taught me 👇 Sales drives revenue, but customer success and experience compound it. Acquiring new customers is hard and expensive. Not investing in retaining and growing them is the equivalent of pouring water into a sieve. This mistake usually comes from the top. When executives don’t prioritise quality of customer experience, it shows up everywhere in the organisation. But it doesn't show immediately - it's a silent killer. At first you think everything is going great and your business is growing at lightning speed - feels like you're untouchable. But gradually you see it in declining CSAT and negative NPS scores, escalations increase, product and field teams become frustrated with each other, attrition starts to creep up, renewal rates drop and before you know it you need a new Head of CX to turn things around on a mission impossible. The worst part? You don't even know where this came from. Your CX leaders and people on the front lines knew it, but they either didn't have the right tools to articulate it or you didn't listen. This applies across all management levels. The best part? It doesn't have to be like that ☝ American Express, Airbnb, Amazon, Spotify are category leaders with a stellar reputation for the respect they show to their customers; my personal experience confirms this. Deel, Welcome Pickups, Blueground, Fyxer AI, Ziina زينة, Djamo are also examples of companies with incredible reputation for their customer experience focus; they also happen to be our customers. One common thread they all have is CxOs who are personally invested in customer experience. CEOs, COOs, CCOs, they all care about customer issues; they jump into customer chats and even respond directly to issues. They make sure every question is reviewed and resolved and that customers don't anguish in escalation hell. That level of ownership sets the tone for the entire company. But it’s not only top-down. CX leaders have a responsibility to manage up. They need to bring visibility to the recurring issues that executives might not see: the silent churn, the small process gaps, the “death by a thousand paper cuts” that slowly erode customer trust. That’s why we’re building Intryc (YC S24) - to give every CX leader the tools they need to surface those patterns quickly, filter the noise, and show leadership the ten issues that actually matter. 👉 This builds credibility and trust in the organisation. 👉 It also creates a virtuous cycle. Teams improve performance faster, employee morale increases, and customer loyalty grows; all at once. The best companies don’t just talk about being customer-obsessed. Their leaders live it, and their CX teams push it forward with data and clarity. For those not familiar with Intryc (YC S24); we're building the world's most complete CX Quality and Training platform for category-defining companies who give a damn about their customers ❤️‍🔥

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Revenue operators are not losing their lunch to GTM engineers. Context ⬇️ Last week Pavilion posted an article about GTM engineers eating the lunch of RevOps and it contained some blatantly false statistics (including a few about RevOps Co-op) But there weren't any sources cited. So with the help of Rome Thorndike, VP of Growth at Firmograph, we analyzed the findings to see if we could back up the claims in the article with actual data. So what did our findings tell us? The short answer? No, GTM Engineering is not eating the lunch of revenue operators. Here are the different areas we dove into from the Pavilion article: Claim 1️⃣ : GTM Engineering Roles Are Eating Up Headcount Budget We pulled a list of 725 B2B AI & SaaS companies and only 2 of them are hiring GTM Engineers right now. Meanwhile, 43 of those companies are hiring RevOps. Claim 2️⃣ : RevOps Titles Dropped by 1K in North America Last Year This could very well be true, but we couldn't find data to support it. What we do know is macroeconomic trends hit everyone, not just RevOps. They are navigating the same headwinds as other white-collar workers. Claim 3️⃣: LinkedIn Job Ads Fell 19% from May 2024 to May 2025 We looked at the LinkedIn July Workforce Report, specifically at industries that hire a lot of revenue operators, and saw that hiring in these RevOps-heavy industries is down 9% - 17% over the same time period. So if RevOps-heavy industries are hiring less, it's no surprise that RevOps roles are also down. This isn’t a RevOps crisis . . . it’s a market reality. Claim 4️⃣: Open RevOps Roles On Indeed “Plunged” 22% YoY Context still matters. If the rest of the job market is doing well, and only RevOps is declining, then job platforms like Indeed should be doing just fine, right? Wrong. Once you look at more data, it becomes clear that any RevOps drop was part of a broader trend of declining white-collar work.‍ Claim 5️⃣: the RevOps Co-op Community Stayed Flat at Roughly 18,000 We added 3.3k members in the last 365 days . . . but this is private data, so lets consider some public data, shall we? We gained 6.8K LinkedIn followers over the past year, a 40% YoY increase. We also had 400+ people add their membership to their LinkedIn profile over the last year, that's a 29% increase. Any of those things sound "flat" to you? 🤔 Here's the thing. GTM engineering is a part of revenue operations. And I don't like publicly fighting with other companies or people on LinkedIn. But when you publish false statistics without citing any sources to support an opinion you have about an entire profession (revenue operations) and an entire community of those people (RevOps Co-op), well, I'm gonna find that offensive. And if you want to see all of our sources fully cited with links and screenshots, then check out our full blog post on the ROC website (link below in the you know where). Happy Friday y'all ✌🏻 #revops #revenueoperations

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A CRO told me this after a customer call: “All I need is my CRM, my call recorder, a sales engagement platform… and Pocus.” That’s it. In a world of bloated sales stacks, this felt like a reset. The market is moving from unbundling → to rebundling — around fewer, smarter tools. There are too many tools that dump data on reps and call it insight. It’s like throwing a phone book at someone and saying, “Good luck.” Pocus flips that on its head. We don’t overwhelm reps with signals — we surface what actually matters. Who to reach out to. Why now. And what to say. Fewer tools. More impact. That’s the new playbook Which tool would you add?

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Sales leaders used to build kingdoms. Now they are being asked to build profit machines and the tension is real. The Kingdom Era (2010-2021): Success meant more headcount, bigger budgets, owning more functions. If you had your own sales ops people, your own enablement team, and your own BDRs, you increased your earnings and job stability. The bigger the org chart, the more important you felt, and the more doors opened up for you to lead the next tech giant. The Efficiency Era (now): Revenue per employee explains the health of the engine. Investments in RevOps to automate manual tasks are championed over hiring 10 additional BDRs and sellers. A wide-open-seller's calendar is no longer viewed as "that's how sales is sometimes" but rather as a flag that something in the revenue engine might need further scrutiny. The more efficient revenue engine you can create and manage, the more prestige you receive in 2025. Kingdom builders asked: "How many people report to me?" Profit builders ask: "How much revenue per person are we generating?" I'm viewing this tension in real time selling FlexDoc. Many sales leaders still aren't being asked to grow revenue profitably. Efficiency gains are almost viewed as threatening because they could lead to the kingdom shrinking. But the executives at that company? They all have the burn rate memorized. They view kingdoms as expensive and slow moving. Shoutout to the sales leader I spoke with this morning on sharing the term "building kingdoms" as inspiration for this post.

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Quota carrying Partner Managers rely heavily on Account Mapping to generate pipeline, but so few are doing it well 🎯 IMO the #1 mistake PMs make is NOT building/adhering to a bonafide step-by-step SOP specific to account mapping: Example Steps Could Include 👇 0️⃣ Make sure the partner is actually WORTH doing this with in first place (need to start here) 1️⃣ Make sure both sides are sharing all the right info (e.g., which AEs/CSMs are associated per account, key prospect contacts, etc) 2️⃣ Use a data driven approach to PIN POINT specific accounts worth engaging with a partner (this is done correctly by <10% of folks) 3️⃣ Map the best path to engagement PER account (e.g., best to go through our Account Mgr for Accounts 1-5; best to go through our ENT Sales Team for Accounts 6-10, etc) 4️⃣ Map the "story", the messaging, the "why should these customers or their acct owners give a s__t to help you/the partner get engaged? Develop exceptional email copy/talk tracks to maximize buy-in on first swing 5️⃣ Direct engagement with target accounts (e.g., enabling customer-facing reps to engage seamlessly) with finesse 6️⃣ Track, measure and report back on leading (contacted accounts, +ve replies, meetings booked) and lagging (pipe generated/closed, etc) indicators to participating stakeholders to drive collaboration & faster pivoting This Thursday, I am joining Kiflo to cover: 🛑 Why most account mapping fails (and how to fix it) 🤝 How to actually get sales to care & co-sell with you 📊 The only account mapping KPIs that really matter 📖 What a best-in-class account mapping playbook looks like If account mapping hasn’t driven revenue for you, that's OK, just make sure you show up Thursday 😎 #Partnerships #Ecosystems #AccountMapping

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