How do you work out where you are losing subscription revenue?

Start with what your customer is trying to get right. Not with your pricing, and not with your team structure.

Those are the two places a leadership team looks first. The leak is usually upstream of both.

Sixty days ago I workshopped with a senior leadership team on how to improve performance. Their growth target was getting harder every year. Not because new business had stopped working, but because churn kept eating into the gains, so each year started further back than the one before.

They were confident about their ideal customer. That confidence wasn’t misplaced, which turned out to be the important part.

When a target keeps slipping, the ideal customer profile is the first thing to interrogate. We did. It held up. They’re selling to the right people and doing brilliant work for them.

That’s where a lot of teams get stuck. Ruling out the obvious cause feels like progress, then leaves you with nowhere to go. So attention drifts to the two levers that are always available. Price. And process.

Start with the SubsNoun

The SubsNoun is the thing your customer is trying to get right. The number or the outcome they check first thing in the morning. It’s their job, not your product.

Naming it changed the conversation. Their work was good. Their customers were the right ones. And nothing in what they delivered connected clearly to the thing those customers were judged on.

So there was no compelling reason to buy, to renew, or to grow. Not because the product was weak, but because the result it produced was never made explicit.

The order matters

I look at five things, in sequence, because a break in one causes the break in the next. Market position. Product efficacy. Customer results. Revenue capture. Operating capability.

Run it in order and this case reads simply. Market position is sound, the ideal customer profile holds. Product efficacy is sound, the work is good. Customer results is where it breaks, because nobody could point at what the customer got. Which makes revenue capture look broken, because renewal becomes a negotiation about price. And makes operating capability look broken, because the team is busy defending accounts instead of building.

They came in believing the problem was those last two. It’s the normal diagnosis, because those are the two that show up on a dashboard.

Fix revenue capture when the break is at customer results and you get a discount conversation with better spreadsheets.

The mechanism they’re testing

Over this quarter they’re shaping and testing one change. An experienced person from their own business sits between three parties. The customer’s subject matter expert. Their own subject matter expert. And the team who have to make sure the customer gets a result.

Connective tissue. One person whose job is that the customer succeeds, judged on the customer’s result rather than on activity.

It’s deliberately not a new product, a new price or a reorganisation. It’s a role that makes the result visible while there’s still time to do something about it.

What it looks like from the inside

There are light bulb moments. There are also “I thought we were already doing this” moments, and those are the more useful ones. They tell you the intent was there and the mechanism wasn’t.

I stay with the team for the quarter to coach them through it. Shaping something isn’t the same as running it, and the second part is where most of these die.

How to tell if this is you

If your growth target gets harder every year while new business holds up, the problem isn’t at the front end.

Ask three people what result your biggest customer got last year. If you get three different answers, or three answers about your product rather than their outcome, the break is at customer results.

Then check if anyone owns that. Not reports on it. Owns it.

Common questions

What is a SubsNoun?

The thing a customer is trying to get right. The number or outcome they check first thing in the morning, and the thing their own performance is judged on.

Why does pricing get blamed first?

Because it moves fastest and shows up on a dashboard. Discounting at renewal is visible. The missing customer result that caused it isn’t.

How long does this take to fix?

The mechanism can be shaped and tested in a quarter. Knowing if it worked takes a renewal cycle.

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How this was written

The diagnosis and the client work are mine. The words came out of several rounds with the Substribe brain, an AI project built on the method I’ve developed since 2018 across more than 50 B2B information and data brands and over 500 customer conversations. I write and voice my own experience into it, then keep going until it resonates.