NRR & Big Enterprise Customers

Boosting Net Revenue Retention (NRR) when your customers are large enterprises is a difficult proposition. It's not just about building a great product or providing top-tier service. Enterprise customers have complex and ever changing needs. They have multiple stakeholders. It’s why it often feels like the goal posts are constantly moving and why it feels almost impossible to truly understand what they want.

At my last company, we had a very large enterprise customer who we felt was unreasonable. They kept asking us for more features. They were never happy no matter how much we bent over backwards. This was tough on our team. We had a ton of competing priorities, many other customers, and it felt like every day we had a “critical request” that if we didn’t prioritize they were going to churn.

The problem for us was that we didn’t truly understand the customer. We focused on their requests, rather than their motivations. What we should have done, was figured out who was making the asks, why they were requesting the functionality, and what they were trying to accomplish. We had a lot of people on the account, but we did not do a great job truly understanding them.

As a result, we kept asking our internal teams to build things that didn’t truly get to the needs of the customer. And since these features didn't really solve the underlying issue, they kept asking for more stuff.

Internally, this meant that other teams stopped listening to the customer team when they came with another critical request. The world cannot be on fire every single day.

This was not unique to this one customer or even to us. Every SaaS company selling into enterprises deals with a version of this problem. If they don’t do a good job navigating a customer’s complex and ever changing needs, or understand a customer’s dynamic set of competing priorities and multiple stakeholders, they will never be able to competently deliver the product and experiences needed to retain and expand the account.

Companies focusing on driving NRR have two intertwined challenges. They need to decode and influence the ever-evolving demands of their enterprise customers. Then they must juggle limited resources and a myriad of competing priorities to deliver what their customers truly need.

This means that at the core of driving NRR is a profound understanding of the customers.

This customer understanding equips us to prioritize effectively. When we know what truly matters to our customers, we can convey this to our teams with conviction. This clarity helps in rallying internal resources around initiatives that directly influence NRR. It's about being selective and fighting for initiatives that offer the most significant return, rather than scattering efforts thinly across less impactful areas.