Customer Retention Manager

About the role

The Customer Retention Manager is responsible for reducing churn, improving customer health, and protecting recurring revenue through early risk detection, cross-functional mitigation, and scalable retention programs. The role partners closely with Renewals, Customer Success, Customer Engagement, Competitive Intelligence, and Pricing & Packaging to orchestrate coordinated customer-save strategies.

This role also provides renewal objection handling expertise, enabling teams to navigate downsells, downgrades, competitive threats, pricing pushback, TCO/ROI concerns, and budget constraints. The ideal candidate excels at influencing cross-functional teams, handling commercial risk, and translating customer insights into save actions.

What you’ll do

1. Churn Risk Identification & Health Intelligence

• Maintain a standardized customer risk scoring framework leveraging health signals, product usage, support patterns, sentiment, and competitive exposure.
• Identify early risk indicators (e.g., discount cliffs, adoption gaps, under-deployed licenses, sponsor turnover).
• Partner with Renewal Ops, Data team to automate risk workflows in Salesforce
• Collaborate with Competitive Intelligence to map competitive displacement trends and update counter strategies.

2. Cross-Functional Risk Orchestration (Renewals, CS, CI, Pricing)

• Lead weekly renewal risk reviews/war rooms with Renewals, CSMs/CEMs, and Sales to align on mitigation actions.
• Build account-level mitigation plans that include adoption interventions, executive alignment, value reinforcement, and commercial flexibility.
• Partner with Pricing & Packaging and Deal Desk to design controlled commercial offers (e.g., term/ramp, New Product Introductions, New SKU Impact, Product Bundling etc).
• Escalate systemic product, billing, or support issues and track resolution.

3. Renewal Objection Handling

• Serve as the subject-matter expert for Renewals by providing guidance, playbooks, and strategic support to overcome critical renewal objections.
• Diagnose downsell and downgrade risks, recommend right-sizing strategies, and deliver value-based narratives to reinforce ROI and prevent unnecessary revenue loss.
• Partner with Competitive Intelligence to address competitive pricing challenges, coach teams on TCO and switching-cost comparisons, and collaborate with Pricing on controlled incentive structures.
• Provide Renewals reps with ROI models, justification materials, payment-flexibility options, pricing guardrails, and negotiation strategies to resolve budget and pricing objections while protecting retention revenue.

4. Preemptive Retention Programs

• Launch and manage proactive churn-prevention programs, such as:
• Early renewal health checks
• Competitive threat campaigns
• Discount cliff mitigation
• Develop and maintain risk playbooks for teams to execute consistently.
• Partner with Enablement to deliver training on objection handling and retention strategies.

5. Insights, Reporting & Executive Readouts

• Deliver monthly churn insights including root causes, save rates, objection trends, and program impact.
• Own cohort analyses, risk heatmaps, and retention dashboards.
• Provide actionable recommendations to Product, Pricing, Support, and Leadership teams.
• Support Renewal forecast accuracy through risk scoring and save probability modeling.

6. Process, Tooling & Enablement

• Improve CRM/CS tool workflows to enhance visibility into churn risk and save motions.
• Standardize processes for risk identification, objection handling, escalations, and mitigation SLAs.
• Build and maintain a knowledge base of objection-handling scripts, competitive counters, and case studies.
• Deliver enablement sessions to strengthen Renewals capabilities in handling commercial objections.

Experience you’ll need

• 8+ years in Renewals, Customer Success, Account Management, or Customer Operations (SaaS preferred).
• Strong analytical and commercial acumen with experience handling pricing, TCO, ROI, and competitive objections.
• Ability to influence cross-functional teams and lead risk discussions with executive stakeholders.
• Experience with Salesforce, Gainsight/CS platforms, and BI tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Looker.
• Strong communication, negotiation, and conflict-resolution skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in competitive intelligence, pricing strategy, or deal desk functions.
• Experience running war rooms or escalation workflows.
• Background in program management or enablement.
• Strong understanding of SaaS economics: GRR, NRR, churn, discount impact, unit economics.

Key Metrics (KPIs)

• Gross Renewal Rate(GRR)
• Net Renewal Rate (NRR)
• Revenue and logo churn rates
• Save rate on at-risk renewals
• Early risk detection rate
• Renewal forecast accuracy
• Adoption/health score improvement
• Discount hygiene and cost-to-save efficiency
• Time-to-mitigation for escalated risks