Retention Manager

Role Overview

Churn Risk and Health Intelligence

• Maintain a standardized customer risk scoring framework using health signals, product usage, support patterns, sentiment, and competitive exposure.
• Identify early risk indicators, including discount cliffs, adoption gaps, under-deployed licenses, and sponsor turnover.
• Partner with Renewal Operations and the Data team to automate risk workflows in Salesforce.
• Collaborate with Competitive Intelligence to map competitive displacement trends and update counter strategies.

Cross-Functional Risk Orchestration

• Lead weekly renewal risk reviews and war rooms with Renewals, customer success, customer engagement, and Sales teams.
• Build account-level mitigation plans covering adoption interventions, executive alignment, value reinforcement, and commercial flexibility.
• Partner with Pricing and Packaging and Deal Desk to design controlled commercial offers.
• Escalate systemic product, billing, or support issues and track resolution.

Renewal Objection Handling

• Provide Renewals teams with guidance, playbooks, and strategic support for critical renewal objections.
• Diagnose downsell and downgrade risks, recommend right-sizing strategies, and deliver value-based narratives to reinforce ROI.
• Address competitive pricing challenges and coach teams on TCO and switching-cost comparisons.
• Provide ROI models, justification materials, payment-flexibility options, pricing guardrails, and negotiation strategies.

Retention Programs

• Launch proactive churn-prevention programs, including early renewal health checks, competitive threat campaigns, and discount cliff mitigation.
• Develop and maintain risk playbooks for consistent execution.
• Partner with Enablement to deliver training on objection handling and retention strategies.

Insights and Reporting

• Deliver monthly churn insights covering root causes, save rates, objection trends, and program impact.
• Own cohort analyses, risk heatmaps, and retention dashboards.
• Provide actionable recommendations to Product, Pricing, Support, and Leadership teams.
• Support renewal forecast accuracy through risk scoring and save probability modeling.

Process, Tooling, and Enablement

• Improve CRM and customer success tool workflows to increase visibility into churn risk and save motions.
• Standardize processes for risk identification, objection handling, escalations, and mitigation service levels.
• Build and maintain a knowledge base of objection-handling scripts, competitive counters, and case studies.
• Deliver enablement sessions to strengthen Renewals capabilities in handling commercial objections.

Required Qualifications

• At least 8 years of experience in Renewals, Customer Success, Account Management, or Customer Operations.
• Strong analytical and commercial acumen with experience handling pricing, TCO, ROI, and competitive objections.
• Ability to influence cross-functional teams and lead risk discussions with executive stakeholders.
• Experience with Salesforce, Gainsight or other customer success platforms, and BI tools such as Tableau, Power BI, or Looker.
• Strong communication, negotiation, and conflict-resolution skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in competitive intelligence, pricing strategy, or deal desk functions is preferred.
• Experience running war rooms or escalation workflows is preferred.
• A background in program management or enablement is preferred.
• Strong understanding of SaaS economics, including GRR, NRR, churn, discount impact, and unit economics, is preferred.

Key Performance Indicators