Industries — B2B SaaS
You can buy your way to signups. You can't buy your way to renewals.
Subscription software businesses where acquisition (CAC, trials, demos) and retention (activation, churn, expansion) are tracked in different spreadsheets, by different people, if they're tracked at all.
Most SaaS go-to-market teams can tell you CAC to the dollar and have no equally rigorous answer for what a customer is actually worth once churn, support cost, and expansion revenue are counted. Growth spend gets approved against a number that's only half true. The fix isn't more acquisition spend or a better onboarding email — it's treating CAC and LTV as one calculation instead of two separate teams' KPIs.
Is this you?
If any of this sounds familiar, we should talk.
Founder-led or small go-to-market team, with product-market fit established but no one owning the full acquisition-to-retention funnel.
“Trial signups look healthy, but activation and first-renewal numbers tell a different story.”
“We don't know our real payback period once churn is factored in.”
“Growth spend keeps going up and net revenue retention keeps quietly slipping.”
“Nobody owns the handoff between 'closed the deal' and 'kept the customer.'”
What this looks like here
The math, translated.
A customer acquired for $500 who churns after one term is a loss once support and onboarding costs are counted. The same customer, retained and expanded into a higher tier, is the reason the unit economics work — CAC only makes sense next to LTV, and both live in the same system here.
Where it starts
The first few moves, typically.
Every engagement gets scoped to the business in front of it, but these are usually the first places to look.
A true CAC-to-LTV calculation, including support and onboarding cost, not just ad spend
A review of activation and first-renewal data to find where the funnel actually leaks
A first pass at an onboarding-risk scoring approach to flag likely churn before it happens
How the questions play out here
Same sequence, applied to this business.
Every engagement — in any industry — works through the same four questions, in the same order. Here's what that looks like specifically.
What's this company actually trying to become?
Usually: growth that compounds through retention and expansion, not growth that resets every renewal cycle.
Where's the real gap?
Almost always between trial signups and the accounts that actually activate and renew.
Where can data surface it fast?
Usage and support data across every account — not just the pipeline dashboard sales looks at.
Then judgment.
Which onboarding flows, which triggers, and which accounts actually move net revenue retention.
Mini case studies
Sample engagements in B2B SaaS.
Anonymized examples showing how engagements are structured. This section will be updated with real case studies as they're completed.
B2B SaaS
Closing the leak between trial and renewal
Challenge — Healthy trial signups, but activation and first-renewal numbers were tracked separately from acquisition spend — nobody could see the real payback period.
Approach — Built a combined acquisition-to-renewal dashboard and an AI-assisted onboarding-risk score to flag accounts likely to churn before their first renewal.
Result — First-renewal rate improved and CAC payback period shortened within two quarters.
B2B SaaS
Scoring accounts before they become a problem
Challenge — Customer success only found out an account was at risk when the cancellation email arrived — no early warning system existed.
Approach — Built an AI-assisted health score combining product usage, support ticket volume, and engagement data to flag at-risk accounts weeks before renewal.
Result — At-risk accounts were identified with enough lead time to intervene before renewal.
B2B SaaS
Turning expansion revenue into a repeatable motion
Challenge — Upsell and expansion revenue happened, but only when a rep happened to notice an account was ready — there was no defined trigger or process.
Approach — Built usage-based expansion triggers tied to specific product milestones, with a defined handoff from customer success to sales.
Result — Expansion revenue became a larger, more predictable share of net revenue retention.
Same four pillars
The approach doesn't change by industry — the application does.
Growth strategy, retention strategy, reporting and AI-assisted automation, and team and operations optimization all apply here the same way they do everywhere else.
Start with a 45-minute business review.
No pitch, no pressure — a short conversation to see if there's a real gap worth diagnosing.