Earlier this month, my colleagues Matt Selheimer, Srividya Sridharan, and Katy Tynan advised B2B leaders on how to weather market volatility and navigate current economic storms (subscription required). One of six actions they recommend is using customer insights to improve understanding and empathy in communications and reduce high-friction processes. This is especially important when it comes to retaining and growing customers.

While deeper understanding is the first step, retention should be the desired result. B2B teams that fail to prioritize, resource, and measure the impact of postsale customer engagement risk negative repercussions on customer retention, loyalty, growth, and advocacy. The chart above, which I borrowed from Craig Moore’s research, shows how failing to retain customer revenue puts more pressure on frontline teams to grow revenue — tough to do when customers are slow-walking purchases.

Five Ways To Focus On Retaining And Growing B2B Customers During Volatile Times

Our data shows that current customers, through renewal and expansion, account for 61% of B2B revenue, higher for established companies and lower for companies still in new-account growth mode. With poor retention potentially putting this revenue at risk, it’s time to (re-)prioritize customer engagement with five key actions and investments:

  • Analyze your “best” customers. Review the journeys of customers who succeed to better understand why they do better than others and why they value working with you. Use this insight to improve prospect prioritization and redirect customers with lower health scores back on the path to measurable results. This focus will help drive greater cost optimization and foster better organizational discipline.
  • Use insights to mindfully govern customer communications and interactions. Prioritize listening with empathy and pay more attention to signals that provide insight into customer interests, intentions, and context. Custom large language models and predictive AI can boost insight gathering and analysis results.
  • Invest in customer resources that support retention and growth. Building an environment where customers attain value and grow requires focusing on what customers need — and what companies should do to produce desired outcomes. Our research shows how B2B companies that consolidate resources to focus on and prioritize postsale interactions see a full return on that investment.
  • Build relevant, personalized digital experiences for customers. Scaling postsale engagement requires some straightforward investments that can double returns in three years. These include giving customers self-directed and digital means to solve problems, networking to learn best practices, becoming more proficient, and having unique, differentiated experiences that create meaningful value.
  • Leverage AI to increase team efficiency and customer relevance. Postsale teams gather, use, and exchange large amounts of verbal communication, correspondence, creative copy, presentations, and other forms of unstructured natural language — making them ideal grounds for using predictive and generative AI to boost performance. Beyond increasing internal efficiencies and consistency, AI-backed practices can help deliver more personalized and relevant customer engagement that builds trust and loyalty while helping customers improve time-to-value.

If customer retention is high on your priority list for 2025, clients can schedule a guidance session if you’d like to walk through your plans or concerns with me to learn how to further these actions and investments for your team. If customer retention is not high on your list, set up some time to learn why it should be!