10 Home Truths about B2B Subscriptions and Memberships

A home truth is an uncomfortable fact someone needed to hear but wasn’t being told. Not an opinion. Not a perspective. A thing that is true, that you may have been avoiding, that someone who cares enough to be straight with you will say out loud.

I’ve been inside subscription and membership businesses since 2001, and running Substribe since 2018. These are the ten things I see often enough to notice the pattern. Some of them will make you feel good. A few of them may sting. One or two might explain something that’s been bothering you for months.

You know your subscription business, but can you trace results back to initiatives you’ve been running? I want to help you see what to double down on, and what to learn from.

1. You don’t treat churn, it is a symptom

Treating the symptom is why it keeps coming back.

You probably don’t have a churn problem. Churn appears downstream and the cause is upstream. To diagnose it, you need to start at the beginning and check each element in your subscription system.

This week:

• Pull your last five churned accounts and identify where the problem started – market drift, product gap, or value that was never visible to the right people.
• Check when you last validated who your best-fit customer actually is, and why. Avoid settling for knowing who your most recent customer is (or who happens to pay the most at the moment).
• Think of the different ways your customers show up – events, webinars, newsletters, discussions with your product people – and create an informed view about what they do, when and think about why.

2. Your retention number is always flattering you

A healthy headline can hide a deteriorating book.

Looking at the money your existing base spends at renewal (GRR) gives you an initial health stat, but like cholesterol, there are good and bad factors to analyse. Proactive erosion – product drift, value gaps, wrong fit customers – is fixable. Reactive erosion – market shift, competitive displacement – needs a different response. Treating them as one number is how companies spend twelve months fixing the wrong thing.

This week:

• Split your churned revenue into customers who left because of something you could have fixed, and customers who left because of something outside your control. Be careful to check your “uncontrolled churn” – who is defining this?
• Look at your newest cohorts separately – are they renewing at the same rate as accounts that have been with you three years or more?
• Identify how much of your retained revenue comes from customers you’d deliberately choose to win again today

3. NPS is not a useful B2B subscription metric

Advocacy and dependency are not the same thing.

NPS measures whether a customer would recommend you. It doesn’t measure whether they’d be worse off without you. In a subscription business, where you must seek to be the difference between your customer making good and inferior decisions, ask how the absence of your solution would impact your customer. This is the question that better predicts renewal.

This week:

• Define who your top ten accounts are, and ask what decision they made last month that your product directly influenced
• Find out if your most vocal advocates are actually your most secure renewals, or just your most enthusiastic ones
• Delay the delivery of the product you believe to be the most critical. If you’re hit up by “Where the hell is the ….” you just got the real insight.

4. Adding technology before defining success is always expensive guesswork

The technology (or those who peddle it) shouldn’t define what good looks like. You do. By knowing your business and your customers better than anyone.

Customer success platforms are only as useful as the outcomes you’ve agreed to measure. Without that, you’re automating activity, not protecting value. Content platforms that reinforce the strained link between product and go to market, will build bigger silos.

This week:

• Write down what a successful customer looks like at month one, three, month twelve, and month twenty-four – if your team can’t agree, that’s the problem, not the technology.
• Check if your current health scores measure what customers do, or what they achieve. If it’s digital content, ignore the consumption of your stuff, and look at what it helped your customer do.
• Imagine you had no technology. Strip it all right back. No usage stats. No demos. What would you say to your customer about why they should invest their budget to buy all the relevant products you made for people like them. Take that insight and inform your tech decisions.

5. Product features should be measured by protecting or growing the base

If a feature doesn’t show up in your revenue retention, then it’s a cost, not an investment.

In a subscription business, every product decision either strengthens the case for renewal and expansion, or it doesn’t. Usage data tells you what customers do. Revenue retention tells you what they value enough to pay for again.

This week:

• Find out which features your renewing accounts use that your churned accounts didn’t – that’s your retention architecture. Cross reference it with sentiment and signs of outcomes.
• Check if your product roadmap is weighted towards features that drive stickiness in your best accounts or features that win new ones.
• Ask when your product team last connected a specific release to a measurable change in renewal rate or expansion revenue or customer result.

6. Growth without understanding your base is risk, not ambition

Unless you are the type who is gambling they can sell a business and know for sure they’ll be out of Dodge City in less than 12 months, then new revenue built on an unstable base doesn’t pay off. The revenue doesn’t compound. It corrects.

Every growth conversation should start with the composition of the current book. Who’s renewing, who isn’t, and why. Companies choosing to skip this find out the hard way – usually twelve to eighteen months after the investment in GTM lands.

This week:

• Work out what percentage of your ARR comes from customers who match your best-fit profile, not your aspirational one.
• Check if your sales team knows which customer profiles to avoid, not just which to target. There is power in disqualifying prospects.
• Ask whether your new logo acquisition strategy is shaped by your strategy and what your best renewals have in common.

7. Most subscription pricing problems are positioning problems

What if you’re not overpriced, you’re misaligned. How can you know if the price is wrong if you don’t help the customer see where the value lands.

This week:

• Ask three of your best accounts to describe the value they get in the language of their own business objectives.
• Find out if your pricing reflects how value distributes across your customer’s organisation, and where you need to intervene to allow value to flow.
• Look at discounts and check what your teams asked for in return – was the exchange worth it for your company?

8. Bringing in a go-to-market expert before you understand your subscription system is a costly sequence error

It’s like being told you can use water from a tap, and never thinking about how it works. Until you need to know. Sometimes the pipes are there, under the floor, but nobody sealed the joints. You get enough water to drink, but not enough pressure to run the hose. When you go back to check why, you find it’s been leaking slowly into the foundations the whole time. One or two annual cycles later, the deterioration isn’t in the numbers you were watching. It’s underneath them, and your foundations have crumbled.

This week:

• Establish if your revenue challenge is a product problem or a commercial one – they require different fixes and the wrong sequence is expensive
• Check if your GTM strategy has been tested against your renewal economics, including underlying churn and ratio of ICP in pipelines, not just your new business targets
• Be honest: are you optimising the top of the funnel while the base is quietly eroding beneath it?

9. Your accounts teach you where value builds and when and why it leaks.

The signal is already in your book. Not in market research. Not in a competitor analysis. In the accounts that renew at full price without negotiating, expand without being asked, and send colleagues your way unprompted. Until they go quiet. When they outgrow your solution.

This week:

• Sit down with your top ten accounts solely to understand what value means to them in their language – not a survey, or a sales pitch, but a conversation
• Find out what your best renewals have in common that your at-risk accounts don’t.
• Check what you’re learning from your best customers is shaping how you sell to new ones. If new targets are resistant, you have an early warning indicator for your installed base.

10. Consultants and Advisory firms delegate

I don’t hire people to coordinate activities or delegate thinking across my specialist firm. It’s just me. Enhanced by AI but always in the loop. Since 2018, 500+ customer conversations. One system, created to diagnose where to intervene and how to do it.

With the Substribe network, I think about how to get ahead of underlying churn and create growth loops. By the time churn shows up on a dashboard, you’ve already lost eighteen months. The pattern builds quietly – market drift, product gap, value that nobody’s tracking – and surfaces as a number that looks manageable…until it isn’t.

This week:

• Ask if you know if your recurring revenue challenge is structural or symptomatic
• Remind yourself when someone last looked at your subscription business from the outside and told you something you found difficult to hear
• Ask yourself: are you getting independent perspective, or confirmation of what you already believe?

Substribe designed the system thinking for subscriptions, to avoid treating symptoms. If any of the home truths and questions make you feel uncomfortable, we should be having a conversation.

andy@substribe.co