Most founders treat customer success like a Calendly link and a 30/60/90 email drip. Emma reaches out at day 30. Day 60. Day 90. "Hey, looks like you haven't logged in, can I help?"
That's not a leading indicator. That's watching your patient flatline on the monitor.
A founder I coach just lived this. He sold a $22,000 deal to a big customer last summer. They refused to do a kickoff orientation because, SURPRISE!, they were too busy.
They eventually went to the wrong web site URL, then couldn't figure out how to set up their profile. Never actually got anything going. He can barely get them on the phone now. They're going to churn.
Meanwhile his best customer pays him to do a quarterly call where they walk through new features and the customer tells him what to build next. That customer will never leave.
The difference wasn't the product. The difference was whether someone on his team sat down in a room with the customer in week one.
Stop offering "onboarding" as a free option buyers can decline. Sell a paid, on-site setup day. Charge $2,500. Send someone out. At the end of the day, they'll have their profiles built, their documents loaded, and they've done real, meaningful work on the tool.
Don't call it training. Nobody buys training. Call it co-design. Call it operator services. Call it whatever your buyer already pays consultants $20,000 to do.
And price it at break-even. This is not where you make money. Save profitable margins for when you're a profitable business. Right now, $2,500 is a break-even investment in making sure that a year from now they expand instead of churn.
Customer churn is the trailing indicator. Buyers spending a day in a room with you at purchase is the leading indicator.
Put someone in the room.