Spreadsheets can’t explain churn — but your customers can

Most leaders try to solve retention and churn by diving deeper into the data. But numbers alone won’t give you the answers. You must get out of the office and into conversations with your customers to find the true drivers.

I remember staring at the spreadsheet for what felt like hours. An eight-figure tech company had hired me to fix their customer retention and delinquent accounts problem. I had gathered everything: churn rates, delinquency curves, cohort analyses — all the metrics executives love to pore over. But I still had no answers. Something was missing.

I wished the numbers could talk and explain what was going wrong. Then it hit me: those numbers represented people. Numbers can hint at stories, but they can’t explain them. People can.

I left the spreadsheet behind and went on-site to see the software in action, interviewing customers from front-line users to finance executives. Those conversations unlocked the pattern in the numbers. What once looked random became signals that could predict behavior. The retention problem wasn’t random churn — it was predictable, explainable, solvable.

Within 12 weeks, the client saw a 14.6% increase in customer retention and a 53% drop in delinquent accounts. Not because we “optimized the numbers,” but because we connected the numbers to the people behind them.

That’s when I realized I’d been doing data all wrong.

Dig deeper: From guesswork to growth: How to build a customer-centric marketing strategy

The Eisenhower lesson

Dwight Eisenhower once said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is priceless.”

He meant that when the bullets start flying, the first thing to go is the plan. Situations change, assumptions crumble and you must adapt in real time. But the planning still matters. The thinking, the patterns you spotted, the scenarios you mapped — all of it equips you to adapt intelligently when things shift.

Data has the same problem. It shows you what was true at a single point in time. Numbers make the snapshot measurable, but they’re frozen in the past. The people who win don’t only measure the data. They can explain it — connecting numbers to stories, drawing insight across moments, people and perspectives.

A lesson from an Aspen

The largest organism on Earth isn’t a blue whale or a redwood. It’s an aspen grove in Utah. What looks like thousands of trees is one organism, linked by a shared root system.

Insight works the same way. Individual data points or customer interviews may seem separate, but the real patterns emerge when you connect them.

Most teams skip this work. Instead of tracing the roots, they chase shortcuts — hoping AI will connect the dots for them.

The AI illusion

Over the past few years, I’ve seen people advertise generative AI as a way to create your ICP and do all your research. On the surface, it makes sense. GPT and other LLMs train on tens of billions of words — your customers’ motivations must be in there somewhere, right?

In reality, they’re not. Even if that information existed in the model, you’d still face hallucinations: invented links, fabricated answers or responses that echo back what you want to hear. That’s a fragile foundation for strategy.

At best, AI can identify patterns. What it can’t do is define causality. It doesn’t know why someone made the tradeoffs they did. It only knows which word is statistically most likely to come next.

Dig deeper: How to augment market research and glean customer insights with AI

5 principles for better customer conversations

If you want real insight, you have to leave the office. Talk to your customers. Listen, probe and connect the dots yourself. Jobs Theory thought leader Bob Moesta offers five principles to keep your conversations productive.

1. Stay humble

Personal development pioneer Werner Erhard once said, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Yet people often assume they do. It’s one of the flaws built into our education system.

And in business, those assumptions are a quick way to lose a deal. Customers buy for reasons that don’t immediately reveal themselves. Real purchase motivations come from structured investigation, not gut instinct.

2. Find causality — nothing is random

There’s no such thing as a coincidence in a purchase. Even the smallest decision is triggered by circumstances in a customer’s world. They don’t just happen. 

If you uncover those circumstances, you can show prospective buyers how things line up in their own lives — making purchase behavior far more likely.

Dig deeper: Why forced choices reveal more customer insights than ratings

3. Identify tradeoffs: What do they sacrifice?

A college professor once told me, “There is no such thing as non-consumption.” At the time, I thought he was wrong. But he wasn’t. 

Customers who don’t buy your product still consume something else to solve their problem. They’ve weighed their options — speed vs. quality, budget vs. capability, flexibility vs. control. Your job in marketing is to frame and manage those tradeoffs so customers can confidently move forward.

4. Recognize disconnection

Buyers often oversimplify their choices. They’ll say a purchase was random or impulsive. It was neither. Most decisions are the culmination of months or years of accumulated friction. Your job is to trace that hidden timeline — when they first noticed the friction and what events built up to the moment they finally bought.

5. Everybody lies

This may sound cynical, but the deception isn’t intentional. Everyone tells themselves rational stories that mask the real causes behind their decisions. To uncover what truly drives behavior, you have to dig deeper. Validate actions, not just words. Go past the surface layer to reach the roots of decision-making.

Remember when Eisenhower said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is priceless”? He wasn’t dismissing planning. He meant that the act — gathering data, connecting dots, and surfacing hidden assumptions — prepares you to adapt and succeed. 

The same applies here: get out of the office, talk to your customers and connect the dots. That’s how you uncover the real story — and create something priceless.

Dig deeper: How customer analytics closes the gaps in performance measurement