Case study · Churn reactivation · 2023-2025
How I defeated a seasonal-churn culture, reactivated 44% of churned customers, and stabilized 1,200 accounts at 98% retention.
I joined aboutGOLF as Director of Customer Success and Support with a four-CSM team covering 1,200 subscription customers. The team was burnt out, the renewal pipeline was manual, and everyone had quietly accepted that residential customers churned every summer when they went outside to play. This is how I rebuilt the operating model, ran the reactivation plays, and changed the company's story about its own business.
14-slide narrative Problem → Approach → Execution → Outcome Pre-Cloudflare · Director of CS · 2023-2025
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01 Problem · Where it started
4 CSMs. 1,200 customers. A team running on fumes.
I walked in as Director of Customer Success and Support at aboutGOLF. The CS team was four CSMs covering 1,200 active subscription customers. The team was burnt out. Highly reactive. Every quote was a manual QuickBooks entry. Every renewal was a fire drill. The math was off and the people were tired.
4 CSMs · 1,200 active subscription customers · manual renewal pipeline · reactive posture
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02 Problem · The seasonal churn culture
Residential customers canceled every summer. The team had accepted this as normal.
The biggest threat wasn't operational. It was cultural. aboutGOLF's residential customers used the product through winter and canceled their subscriptions in the summer, when they were outside playing real golf. Cash flow took a hit every year. Renewals took a hit every year. And everyone, internally, had stopped fighting it. Seasonal churn had been around long enough that it was treated as the weather, not a problem to solve.
Summer cancellations · cash flow instability · normalized as inevitable
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03 Problem · No data, no segmentation, no playbook
Salesforce was a mess. Nobody knew which customer was which.
Before I could change anything, I needed to know what I was looking at. The Salesforce instance hadn't been scrubbed in any meaningful way. Residential, SMB, mid-market, and enterprise customers were all stacked into the same workflows. No segmentation, no playbooks, no churn drivers tracked. The team was running blind, which is part of why everything felt manual and reactive. You can't be proactive about data you don't have.
1,200 records · no clean segmentation · no churn-driver tracking
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04 Approach · First move
Scrubbed all 1,200 Salesforce records by hand. With the team, not at them.
Look, the first move was the unsexy one. I sat down and manually scrubbed every one of the 1,200 customer records in Salesforce. Categorized them into Residential, SMB, mid-market, and enterprise. I did it WITH the team, not at them. Sitting next to a tired CSM and doing the same grunt work they'd been doing alone does two things. It builds trust. And it tells you everything you need to know about how broken the upstream data is. By the time we were done, I understood the shape of the book and the team knew I wasn't going to dump strategy on them from a corner office.
Manual data hygiene · 4 segments · leadership from the front · trust built through grunt work
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05 Approach · Identifying the real churn risk
Residential was the bleed point. Targeted there first.
Once the data was clean, the answer was obvious. Residential was where the seasonal churn lived. SMB, mid-market, and enterprise customers had different patterns and different risks. Treating them as one pile of 1,200 had been hiding the actual problem. Once Residential was its own cohort, the seasonal-churn signal sharpened, and so did the move. Don't try to solve everything for everyone. Solve the right problem for the right segment.
Segmentation as a diagnostic · Residential = primary churn risk · focused intervention
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06 Approach · Kill, Keep, Improve
Audited onboarding through a 3-bucket lens. Because 70% of renewal is decided in onboarding.
Industry research is consistent on this: about 70% of whether a customer renews is decided in the first 90 days of onboarding. So onboarding was the place to operate. I ran the entire onboarding flow through a Kill, Keep, Improve framework. What's dead weight that costs us time and adds nothing? Kill it. What's actually working? Keep it, document it, replicate it. What's almost-right but friction-heavy? Improve it. The exercise itself was the value. Most teams have never been asked to look at their own process this way.
70% rule · Kill / Keep / Improve audit · onboarding as the renewal lever
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07 Approach · Reframing the company as a 12-month SaaS business
The cultural shift was the hardest part. And the most important.
Defeating seasonal churn wasn't a tactical move. It was a story I had to tell the whole company, over and over. aboutGOLF wasn't a winter-products business that lost half its customers in June. aboutGOLF was a 12-month SaaS business that happened to peak in winter. The off-season wasn't a time to mourn lost subscriptions. It was the time to build playbooks WITH the customer, help them strategize for their next peak, and keep the relationship warm. Once that reframe lived in every conversation, the rest of the work had air to breathe.
Seasonal product → 12-month SaaS · off-season = relationship investment time · cultural reframe
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08 Approach · Cross-functional buy-in
Brought the journey data to the Director of Finance. Got the operating model funded.
None of this works without the cheque-signers on board. I gathered the customer-journey data the team had been generating from the cleanup, built a narrative around it, and walked it to the Director of Finance specifically. Not pitching. Showing. 'Here is what the book looks like now that we can see it. Here is what we propose to do about it. Here is what it pays back.' Finance buy-in unlocked the automation budget. Automation budget freed the team. Free team meant we could finally do strategic work.
Data-led narrative · Finance as the first ally · cross-functional alignment unlocks budget
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09 Execution · Automating the renewal pipeline
Killed the manual QuickBooks quotes. Replaced with automated payment collection.
The most expensive thing the CSMs were doing was the dumbest. Every renewal meant generating a QuickBooks quote by hand, chasing the customer, processing the payment, reconciling the entry. Pure clerical work eating CSM hours. Automated the whole pipeline: subscription billing, automated reminders, automated payment collection, automated reconciliation. The CSMs got their week back. The customers got a cleaner experience. The Director of Finance got cleaner books.
Manual quote → automated billing · weekly hours recovered per CSM · cleaner customer UX
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10 Execution · Proactive churn analysis
Mandated calls with churned customers. Tracked the actual drivers.
We used Salesforce automation to fire churn surveys at every cancellation, and I mandated that someone on the team get on a call with every churned customer within a defined window. We tracked drivers by logo, by revenue, by pricing, by product. Worked off sample sizes of 30-50 customers at a time so we could act fast instead of waiting for statistical certainty. Most churn analysis happens too late and too slow. We made it tight enough that we could turn intelligence into a playbook change inside a quarter.
Salesforce-driven surveys · mandatory churn calls · 30-50 customer sample · quarterly playbook updates
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11 Execution · Targeted reactivation plays
Churned customers still had the hardware. We had a way back in.
Here's the thing about aboutGOLF that the seasonal-churn culture had missed. The customer still had the physical golf simulator in their house. They hadn't returned the product, just canceled the software subscription. That's not a dead customer. That's a paused customer. We built structured reactivation incentives for the cohort, walked the data, made the math obvious, and let the cleanup of Salesforce do the heavy lifting on who to target first. The reactivation rate was the surprise. The opportunity had been there the whole time. Nobody had built the play.
Paused, not dead · structured incentives · segmentation made the targeting possible
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12 Outcome · The numbers
98% renewal across 1,200 accounts. 44% of churned customers reactivated.
98% renewal rate across the full 1,200 account book. 44% of churned customers won back through the reactivation plays. That second number recovered roughly $400K of ARR that the seasonal-churn culture had been writing off as a fact of life. Operationally, one CSM could now manage 550 residential customers effectively, because the automation had stripped out the manual work and the segmentation had stripped out the wasted attention.
98% renewal · 44% reactivation · ~$400K recovered ARR · 1 CSM managing 550 customers
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13 Outcome · What changed culturally
Seasonal churn stopped being a fact of life. It started being a problem we solved.
The number the spreadsheet won't show you is the cultural one. The team stopped accepting seasonal churn as the weather. Finance stopped budgeting around the assumption. Sales started selling the 12-month value story instead of the winter-peak story. That's the outcome that compounds. Once a team has seen a problem that 'everyone knew was unsolvable' actually get solved, the next supposedly-unsolvable problem looks different.
Culture shift · seasonal → annual · the compound dividend of solving the unsolvable
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14 Takeaways · What another CS leader could use
Lead from the front. Segment first. Reframe the culture before you optimize the tactics.
Three lessons. First, lead from the front. When the work is grunt-tier data hygiene, you sit next to the team and do it with them. You learn the data. They learn you're real. Second, segment before you strategize. Treating a mixed book as one pile hides the actual problem. Third, the cultural reframe is the highest-leverage move you'll make. Tactics work or don't work inside the story the company tells itself. If the story is 'seasonal churn is normal,' the tactics will be defensive. If the story is '12-month SaaS,' the tactics will be expansive. Change the story first.
Three lessons · Lead from the front · Segment first · Reframe the culture before the tactics