Churn rate
Churn rate is the share of customers, or of recurring revenue, lost over a defined period. Logo churn counts accounts that left; revenue churn counts the money that left. The two can move in opposite directions, so a churn figure quoted without saying which one it is, over what window, and for which cohort is not a measurement.
How it is calculated
Customers lost in the period divided by customers at the start of the period, for logo churn. For revenue churn, recurring revenue lost divided by recurring revenue at the start. Net revenue churn subtracts expansion from existing customers, and can be negative when expansion exceeds losses.
Why the scope matters
Monthly and annual churn are not interchangeable, and a blended rate across segments hides the segment that is actually leaving. Always state the cohort, the window and whether expansion is included.
Why it is a leading-indicator problem
By the time churn appears in the number, the decision was made weeks or months earlier. The useful work is upstream — engagement decay, champion departures and narrowing usage all precede the cancellation.
How do you calculate monthly churn with real numbers?
Pick the cohort and the window first. Say you start March with 200 paying customers and 8 of them cancel during March. Logo churn for March is 8 divided by 200, or 4%. New customers who joined during March are left out of both numbers, because they were not in the starting group.
Revenue churn uses money instead of counts. If those 200 customers paid Rs 10 lakh a month in total and the 8 who left paid Rs 60,000 between them, revenue churn is 6%, higher than logo churn because the customers who left were larger than average. The free MRR and ARR calculator handles the arithmetic.
Involuntary churn is worth separating out. A share of cancellations in subscription businesses come from failed card payments rather than decisions to leave, and those can often be recovered with payment retries and reminders. Counting them with voluntary churn hides a problem that billing settings can fix, and makes customer success look responsible for losses it never had a chance to prevent.
Why can a monthly churn figure mislead you about a year?
Because monthly churn compounds. A 3% monthly logo churn does not mean 36% a year. Of 100 customers, 97 remain after one month, then 97% of those after the second, and so on; after twelve months about 69 remain, which is roughly 31% annual churn. The gap grows as the monthly figure grows.
Averages across cohorts also hide shape. Many businesses lose most of the customers who will ever leave in the first few months, then very few after that. A single blended monthly number overstates churn among long-standing customers and understates it among new ones.
What does a churn interview uncover that the data cannot?
The real reason, which is often different from the one picked in a cancellation form. "Too expensive" frequently means the customer never got enough value to justify the price, which points at onboarding rather than pricing. A 15-minute conversation with five or six recently churned customers each quarter tends to surface patterns the dashboard cannot show.
Record the reasons in a fixed set of categories so they can be counted over time, and route product-related reasons to whoever owns the roadmap. Customer retention strategies covers what to do with what you learn.
Where does churn show up first in day-to-day activity?
In silence. Accounts that stop replying, skip scheduled check-ins or stop logging in usually do so well before they cancel. Autocloz keeps every conversation with an account on one timeline across its five channels, so an account that has gone quiet is visible as a list. It does not model subscription billing, so the churn calculation itself belongs in your billing system; the customer retention rate entry covers the complementary figure.
How Autocloz handles it
Autocloz keeps every conversation with an account on one timeline across email, calling, LinkedIn, SMS and WhatsApp, so a gone-quiet view reflects real activity rather than who has been diligent about logging it — which is what makes early churn signals visible at all.
FAQ
What is the difference between logo churn and revenue churn?
Logo churn counts accounts lost and tells you whether the product fits the market you sold to. Revenue churn counts money lost and, when net of expansion, tells you whether the accounts you kept are growing. A business can lose many logos and still grow revenue, or keep every logo while every account shrinks.
What predicts churn earliest?
In B2B, a champion changing role or leaving is the strongest early signal, followed by engagement decay, narrowing usage across your product, and procurement-style questions arriving well before renewal.
Related terms
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is software that stores and organizes your contacts, companies, deals and interactions in one place, so a team can manage relationships and a sales pipeline. Modern CRMs also automate follow-up, reporting and, increasingly, AI-assisted outreach.
Lead enrichment is the process of automatically adding missing data to a lead or company record — job title, company size, industry, verified email, phone, LinkedIn, technographics — from third-party data sources, so reps can segment, personalize and prioritize without manual research.
An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a description of the company that gets the most value from your product and is easiest to win and retain — defined by firmographics like industry, company size, revenue, geography and technology stack. It targets accounts (the company), distinct from a buyer persona, which describes the individual within the account.
Lead scoring is the practice of assigning a numeric value to each lead based on how well they fit your ideal customer profile (demographic/firmographic fit) and how engaged they are (behavioral signals like email opens, site visits, demo requests). The score ranks leads so sales works the hottest ones first.