Predicting Customer Churn and Using Salesforce To Protect Revenue

Is your customer base starting to feel like a leaky bucket? 

SaaS companies are experiencing a churn crisis that’s no longer a small customer success problem; it’s something that needs to be addressed at all levels. The average SaaS churn rate has climbed to 6.4%, up from 5.6% in 2023. Most teams aren’t realising that their accounts are at risk until renewal time, when a polite “Sorry, we’re moving on” email lands in their inbox and the panic for new business begins. 

We know that structure helps. For example, LinkedIn Business’s Data Science team built an “Account Prioritizer” in their CRM that flags the accounts most likely to churn. In a controlled A/B test, simply shifting outreach to those flagged accounts increasaed renewals by 8.08%. This shows us the power of focusing on the right risk signals early, the problem is actually implementing a consistent system to do this. 

In the sections ahead, you’ll learn five signals that can help predict when clients are about to churn and how you can use your Salesforce org to bring consistent structure to your renewal process. 

Ready to protect your revenue? Let’s take a look.

Detect Customer Churn Early: 5 Warning Signs

Before that “we’re moving on” email ever lands in your inbox, your data is already whispering that an account is in danger. Spotting those early whispers, your top churn risk indicators, gives you the chance to intervene calmly and prevent churn before renewal. 

Some common ones include:

1. Feature Usage 

When a customer signed up for your product, they might have favoured a particular feature. When usage of those features slowly drifts downward, it’s their way of saying “I’m not getting as much value anymore.” OpenView Partners found that customers who ultimately churn for product-fit reasons tend to taper off on advanced features weeks before they cancel, rather than quitting cold turkey, they simply stop clicking. 

Imagine your main user used to run three custom reports every week, now they run one. That fall-off is your signal. 

2. Login Frequency 

You don’t need a fancy metric, just watch how often people log in. In many B2B tools, a dip in weekly active users (WAU) is one of the simplest leading indicators of potential churn. Product professionals agree that if people aren’t coming back, they’re losing interest and lost interest is a fast track to cancelling a subscription. The PM Repo explains that Weekly Active User counts give a strong signal without the volatility of Daily Active Users. Perfect for B2B and recurring-use products. 

If your average user logged in three times a week for months, then suddenly skips two weeks, and starts logging in once per week, this could be a warning sign of churn.

3. Rising Support Tickets

When support tickets jump, it isn’t a sign of engagement, it’s friction increasing. High ticket volumes strain your team, slow response times, and directly fuel customer churn. When your support ticket volume soars, you’ll face significant revenue losses from delayed customer responses, which can cost your business $1.60 per minute per ticket. In B2B SaaS, if an account’s monthly tickets climb from one to five, each ticket represents a moment of frustration that edges users closer to the exit. You should be monitoring trends in support tickets so you can act accordingly, this also helps to prevent support team burnout. 

4. Stalled Expansion & Seat Downgrades

Happy customers grow. ChurnZero notes that expansion revenue (upsells, extra seats, add-ons) is a powerful guardrail against churn. Teams focusing on expansion see noticeably lower attrition. If an account adds zero seats, features, or licenses for multiple years running, it could mean they’ve plateaued and may soon head for the exit. Although you do have to be balanced here, use your initiative and don’t try to force an up-sell.

5. Net Promoter Score (NPS) Dips

NPS correlates tightly with churn. UserMotion’s 2024 benchmark shows B2B SaaS companies that maintain an NPS of 50 or higher experience 20% lower churn rates compared to those with an NPS below 30. So, a big change in your NPS can foreshadow customers quietly reconsidering their renewal.

If your NPS drops, it’s real dissatisfaction brewing. 

This is far from an exact science, and assuming customers are going to act rationally is… brave! There are hundreds of reasons they may cancel subscription that are out of your control, but what you should be doing is treating renewals with the same respect as new business.

Now we’ve explored a few metrics to help you predict at-risk accounts, let’s take a look at how you can do your part to ensure they renew.

Using Salesforce To Protect Revenue 

Those signals are only useful if they drive behavior. Next, we’ll show how to change your renewal behaviours using our native Salesforce app, Plan2Renew.

We established earlier the difference that structure can make to your renewal rates. Plan2Renew is built to bring structured, repeatable renewal plans into your Salesforce environment. In the next section, we’ll show you exactly how you can use it to protect your revenue. 

Require Evidence For Renewal Questions

Inside the PLAN tab on the renewal opportunity, P2R gives you a fully customisable question set across four areas:

• Service & Performance
• Relationships
• Decision
• Value & Risk

For each question you set a status:

• Green = satisfied
• Amber = in progress 
• Red = cannot satisfy 
• Purple = manager wants a reassessment.

Then you must add evidence in the box below: your notes from the last review, screenshots, links, or attached files (deck, summary, customer doc). The Coaching panel on the right shows what good looks like and why the question matters, so team members aren’t guessing and managers don’t have to rewrite answers later.

This brings the knowledge into one place, in a useful format available to all approved users. Renewal risk is visible, and with proof attached it stops being about feelings, and starts being based on facts. 

Collaborate Inside Salesforce

Every question has its own mini workspace:

• Question Chat to add guidance or challenge the assessment (“Please confirm this with champion”).
• Assign Activities (email, meeting, task) tied to that question, so follow‑ups sit with the context and don’t drift into Slack or an email thread.

A Real‑Time Renewal Risk Score

Your coaching is faster, but also becomes much more intentional. Tasks are much more likely to be completed, and a clean audit trail on the renewal allows you to see what you said, what you did, and when.

On the right you’ll see the colour‑coded risk dial. It’s calculated from three things:

1. How far through the plan you are (have we answered the questions?)
   
2. Where we are in the sales/renewal stage
   
3. The custom weights behind each question (not all risks are equal; your admin can tune these)
   

You’re left with a single plan risk score that means the same thing to all departments. You know that when a renewal is marked safe, it’s genuine. You can explain why a renewal is red in one sentence (“Decision clarity and value alignment are unsatisfied”).

4) Assign The Relevant Tasks Inside Salesforce

When a question is Red or Amber, you can assign activities from that question, they may look like:

• Value review with the champion 
• Enablement on an under‑used feature
• Follow up on support tickets
• Intro to adjacent team

Because the activities are created on the renewal and against the specific question, owners and dates are obvious. On the next review, you can see clear progress. This helps to bring accountability into your renewal process, without team members feeling micro-managed. 

How Does This Protect Your Revenue?

Let’s look at exactly what will change by bringing structured renewal plans into Salesforce.

• You see risk earlier. Issues surface faster, so you fix them with a call or a quick enablement session, not a last‑minute discount.
• Safe actually means safe. One shared risk score means “green” means the same thing to sales, CS, and leadership. Fewer surprise slips; steadier forecasts.
• Work faster and easier. Follow‑ups sit on the renewal with an owner and a date. Less “who’s doing what?”; more “done.”
• Customer conversations improve. You walk in with proof of value and a short plan for any gaps. That keeps the renewal about outcomes, instead of price.
• Reviews get shorter and sharper. You start with the flagged risk, confirm the necessary actions, and move on. Meetings are much more intentional.
• Patterns become obvious. Across renewals you spot the repeat failure points (e.g., decision clarity, value alignment) and fix them long term.
• Churn pressure eases. Earlier saves, fewer escalations, and less discounting add up to higher renewal rates and a calmer end of quarter. 

Stop Treating Renewals Like A Gamble

The warning signs are already in your data, and you should be acting on them early enough to make a difference.

That’s what Plan2Renew gives you inside Salesforce: a way to turn those signals into proof on the renewal, one risk score everyone trusts, and accountability over your recurring revenue. Why not give it a go? Start your free trial of Plan2Renew today and start to protect your revenue.