Building a Retention Function From Zero to 31% NRR Growth

A global software platform company with 200,000+ customers across 190 countries had scaled revenue without building the infrastructure to protect it. As Head of Growth & GTM Strategy, I conducted a full assessment of the business — financials, sales process, and account-level data — to identify where growth was being lost, then built the function required to fix it.

• No dedicated retention function existed; churn was absorbed as a cost of doing business rather than diagnosed and addressed.
• Sales reps handled pricing and contract objections inconsistently, with no shared commercial language between sales and finance.
• The customer lifecycle — onboarding through renewal — had never been intentionally designed; it had simply accumulated over time.
• The assessment took place during a leadership transition, requiring parallel support for sales organization stability.

Team & Structure. Built a dedicated retention function from zero to 17 people, establishing global and regional manager roles to give retention a permanent reporting line.

Sales Enablement. Developed sales documentation, playbooks, and a commercial terms dictionary to standardize how the organization discussed pricing and terms — plus a framework for tracking and resolving objections, converting individual rep knowledge into institutional process.

Data & Analytics. Applied cohort analysis and account-level modeling to replace guesswork with targeted, data-driven retention and expansion campaigns.

Customer Lifecycle. Redesigned the onboarding-to-renewal journey to reduce resource waste and improve Net Promoter Score.

Executive Advisory. Authored research on SOC2 compliance, branding, early renewal strategy, and accounting practices that informed decisions above the retention function, and supported sales organization restructuring during the leadership transition — including board and executive-level presentations.

• 31% increase in Net Revenue Retention within 9 months
• Retention function scaled from 0 to 17 employees, with global and regional management layers in place
• Standardized commercial terms and objection-handling frameworks adopted organization-wide

This is the operating model behind every engagement: a full assessment of the business, a clear diagnosis of where growth is being lost, and the function, process, and team structure to fix it — built to outlast the person who built it. Organizations scaling without the infrastructure to protect that growth is exactly the gap this approach is built to close.