Marketing’s New Scoreboard: Net Revenue Retention

Most CMOs still measure success by pipeline, leads, and brand reach. That worked when budgets were growing and new logo wins came easily. But those days are gone.

With customer acquisition slowing and spending under pressure, growth now depends on something much harder to fake: how deeply customers adopt and expand the solutions they already have.

In short, Net Revenue Retention (NRR) has become marketing’s new scoreboard.

The Shift Every Marketing Leader Needs to See

SBI’s research with QuadSci looked at 9,100 SaaS accounts and more than 160 billion telemetry data points. The picture that emerged is striking.

Since early 2023, average NRR across SaaS companies has dropped from 110 percent to 107 percent, and nearly 60 percent of firms are seeing lower retention than two years ago.

That’s not a minor correction. It’s a fundamental change in how growth happens.
The challenge isn’t just generating demand anymore — it’s generating customer momentum.

So the question becomes: how can marketing influence what happens after the sale? How can we spot which customers are thriving, stalling, or slipping before the numbers show it?

What the Data Tells Us

The study confirmed what many marketing and customer leaders have long suspected: usage drives revenue.

How often and how consistently customers use your product explains 80 percent of renewal and expansion decisions. That makes it more predictive than price, service quality, or contract structure combined.

For marketers, that’s both validation and a wake-up call. It means everything we do — onboarding programs, nurture campaigns, product education, advocacy — matters more than ever. But it also exposes the blind spot most GTM teams live with every day: we still struggle to tell which engagement signals actually predict growth.

The Problem With Our Dashboards

Most of us already track product usage and engagement. We watch the dashboards, the journey metrics, the campaign lift reports. But those data points often move up and down with no clear explanation.

Usage spikes one month, dips the next. Sometimes it’s just a seasonal lull; sometimes it’s the first hint of churn. Without context, we can’t tell the difference.

That volatility leads to missteps everywhere. Marketing spends to re-engage customers who are still healthy. Success managers chase accounts that already checked out. Expansion signals hide in the noise.

The result is the same: fragmented effort, wasted money, and growth that feels unpredictable.

Where the Real Signal Lives

The breakthrough came when we combined two views of usage: how much customers use the product and how consistently they use it over time.

When those two dimensions are analyzed together, the noise disappears.
What once looked like random behavior starts to form a clear pattern.

Customers naturally fall into six behavioral groups, or cohorts, that reveal who is most likely to renew, who is ready to expand, and who needs a nudge before it’s too late.

These patterns divide into two “zones”:

The Zone of Expansion (High NRR)

• Power Users — deeply integrated customers who are perfect for advocacy and referral programs.
• Enthusiastic Adopters — high engagement but still building habits; target with enablement and storytelling.
• Converts — steady users trending toward renewal; prime for cross-sell and upsell.

The Zone of Contraction (Low NRR)

• Explorers — new users testing value; accelerate onboarding and quick wins.
• Strugglers — inconsistent usage showing friction; re-engage with clear value reinforcement.
• Disconnected — dormant accounts with high churn risk; decide whether to recover or reallocate effort.

What This Means for Marketing

Cohorts replace static segmentation with dynamic insight. They shift marketing from reacting to predicting.

Teams using this approach can see movement between cohorts in real time. When an account starts to slip, marketing can step in early with tailored education, proof points, or product nudges. When usage stabilizes, campaigns can shift from recovery to advocacy.

Companies applying this model have already reported an average five-point lift in NRR, driven entirely by smarter alignment between marketing, success, and sales.

The takeaway is simple. Growth is no longer defined by how many customers you win. It’s defined by how effectively those customers grow with you.

From Awareness to Adoption

This is where marketing earns its seat at the growth table. When we connect our campaigns to usage behavior, not just persona or funnel stage, we help turn engagement into revenue.

NRR isn’t just a financial metric; it’s the clearest reflection of whether our storytelling translates into real, sustained value for customers.

If you want to see how your company compares, download Engineering SaaS Account Growth: From Guesswork to Predictable Growth.