Over the last decade, in training sessions, articles, research briefings, and more than a few one-on-one conversations, I’ve repeated the same basic assertion about how Sales Operations functions need to take the lead on “defection detection”…or “churn prevention” as some refer to it. And I’m not talking about just doing a bit of analysis, building a dashboard, and calling it a day.
No, my position is that Sales Ops must OWN defection detection.
We must own it in the sense of building the end-to-end capability…operationalizing it… maintaining it…optimizing it…and ultimately being accountable for whether the process is working and having a positive impact on performance and results.
Truth be told, some practitioners really push back on the idea of Sales Ops leading the charge here. Their arguments and objections tend to fall into a handful of fairly predictable buckets…
“Salespeople are closest to their customers. They have the connections and relationships. Sales reps are wired to sense when something is wrong or going sideways.”
“Sales reps have more incentive than anyone else to keep ahead of churn because their compensation depends on it. If their customers churn out or defect, that’s money out their pocket.”
“Sales Ops has way too much stuff on our plate already. We’re barely keeping up with the day-to-day right now. When would we find the time to develop, build, and manage a whole new capability?”
And to all of these, I say…very respectfully…Bravo Sierra.
Yes, salespeople are close to their customers. They hear things. They sense things. They get signals that will never show up in a CRM field. And that’s valuable and necessary. But it’s nowhere close to being sufficient.
Because in commercial markets, defection rarely happens with a stream of expletives and a door slam. It’s more like a drift or a fade out. It’s a gradual change in buying patterns, product mix, cadence, and engagement that unfolds quietly over time. Churn is a cumulative process that can hide in seemingly normal variability…until it’s too late to fix all of the damage.
That said, the early signals are there in the data…
Mix shifts toward low-margin cherry-picking. Spending changes that don’t line up with segment peers. Gradual declines that don’t jump out of the reports. Subtle changes in cadence, frequency, response, and consumption. And no individual salesperson could possibly identify all of those subtle patterns across dozens or hundreds of different accounts and segments.
But Sales Ops? We can build a capability to make it all happen at scale.
Which leads us to the incentive argument…
I’ll stipulate that it’s definitely in sales reps’ financial interest to stay ahead of potential defections and churn. But as I’ve just established, they can’t. The nature of the problem requires a systemic solution that is simply beyond individual sales reps’ capabilities and capacities, no matter how incentivized they may be.
But the good news is that once we’ve developed a scalable and systemic defection detection capability, sales reps are highly motivated and incentivized to act on the signals we identify and surface.
As for the argument that Sales Ops is just too busy to tackle this…
For all but the newest companies, improving retention and customer lifetime values by staving off defection, attrition, and churn is one of the most financially-impactful things you can do in business.
And in certain market sectors, where the pool of potential buyers is not growing significantly over time, reducing defection and improving retention is more than just a financial concern…it’s an existential issue.
This is exactly the kind of extremely valuable and mission-critical work that defines a serious, strategic Sales Ops function. So I’d be very interested to hear what other work on the plate could be so much more valuable that it justifies putting defection detection on the “maybe someday” list.
And finally, some clarification about ownership…
When I talk about ownership, I’m not saying that Sales Ops will personally save every account that’s showing signs of being at-risk. I’m saying that Sales Ops will build the early warning system. Sales Ops will define the signals, test the models, tune the thresholds, surface the priority risks to the right people at the right time, and close the loop by measuring how the findings are ultimately resolved.
Salespeople investigate. Salespeople engage. Salespeople intervene.
But Sales Ops must own the machine that makes the organization ever more capable of spotting the early signs of defection, attrition, and churn at scale. Without that ownership at a systemic level, defection detection becomes everyone’s job…and therefore no one’s job.
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