I've been thinking about this and I'm curious what others call it, especially in B2B SaaS.
We have a churn goal this year, and I realized my mental model of "churn" might be different from some of my teammates'.
In my head, churn meant customers who'd been with us for a few months, were live, paying, actively using the product, and then left. The kind of churn where you start asking hard questions about support quality, product gaps, and relationship management.
Others were also counting customers who never really got off the ground. They left during implementation, churned before their first invoice, or shortly thereafter. That raises very different questions: was there a mismatch between the marketing message and reality? An expectation-setting issue in sales? A miss in how the product was configured for their needs?
These feel like fundamentally different problems, with different root causes and different owners. One is a retention problem. The other is an onboarding or activation problem, or possibly a sales-fit problem.
But I'm not sure we have clean, shared industry language for this. "Early churn" vs. "mature churn"? "Onboarding churn" vs. "retention churn"?
Curious how others handle this. Do you have standard definitions, or does every company just draw its own line? Or does everything get lumped into one big "churn" bucket?
What do you call these in your org?