About

The Retention Reckoning is published by SuccessCOACHING. A set of numbers is only as credible as the people behind it, so this page lays out who produced the research, why we are the ones to produce it, and how the figures are held to account.

About SuccessCOACHING

SuccessCOACHING is where go-to-market teams come to learn how to define, sell, and deliver value. We train and certify the customer success and post-sale teams who own the retention and expansion numbers this report is about. More than 40,000 CS professionals at over 10,000 companies have come through our programs, including teams at Apple, HP, VMware, Red Hat, and Procore.

We are the only G2 Triple Grid Leader in Customer Success training, a standing fewer than 4% of companies on the platform hold. We are a training provider for the University of San Francisco's Customer Success Certificate Program, and our CCSM certification is accredited to issue CPD continuing-education hours.

Why This Report Exists

That vantage point is the reason the report exists. We spend our days inside the gap this report measures: the distance between customer success teams that hold the line near breakeven on retention and the ones that compound through systematic expansion. For several years the story our practitioners described stopped matching the story the headline metrics told. The Retention Reckoning is the attempt to reconcile the two, using seven years of KeyBanc data rather than anecdote.

Who Produced the Research

The research was led by Todd Eby, SuccessCOACHING's founder. Todd has operated across the full commercial surface of SaaS: marketing, sales, customer success, professional services, and support. That spread is why the argument here refuses to sit inside any single function. Retention is not a customer success problem or a sales problem. It is a system, and it fails at the seams between teams.

You can reach Todd on LinkedIn. SuccessCOACHING is on LinkedIn, and its customer reviews are public on G2.

How the Research Is Produced

Every figure in the report is pinned to one named survey edition and read twice from the source PDFs before it is allowed into the certified dataset. Nothing is spliced across surveys, and nothing is rounded into a friendlier direction. The full method is documented on the Methodology page; the cross-edition restatements we found and what they revealed are catalogued on the Data Integrity & Corrections Log page.

Where the Research Goes Next

The report is the end of the analysis and the start of the application. The certified dataset behind it now parameterizes the revenue lifecycle model inside SuccessCOACHING's CSMBOK, the body of knowledge our training and tooling are built on, so the benchmarks readers see here are the same numbers that price the interventions we teach. The direction of dependence matters and only runs one way: the frameworks consume this research; the research was produced without them. Nothing in these findings was derived from, or shaped to fit, anything we sell.

Independence

The Retention Reckoning is an independent analysis, built on the KeyBanc Capital Markets and Sapphire Ventures Private SaaS Company Survey, editions 2019 through 2025. SuccessCOACHING has no affiliation with KeyBanc or Sapphire. We do have an interest in these numbers, because we train teams to improve them, and the honest way to hold that interest is to show our sources and our method in full. The data is KeyBanc's. The interpretation, and any error in it, is ours.