Yes. Below we’re going to post about a customer that churned. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows in the business world, and we believe there’s much to learn from our missteps and failures. You deserve the truth.

On Feb. 27, 2022, we signed Strive, which offers employee experience technology. They were our 7th “Design Partner” (early customer) and approached us seeking a solution to increase their top-of-the-funnel conversions. Hopefully, they’d get more appointments and convert site visitors into clients. Six months into their contract, the results were less than expected. Despite promising conversions from other customers, our collaboration yielded just one meeting, which did not convert into a sale. We decided to interview the Strive team to understand why. We spoke with Strive’s CEO, Zach (our executive sponsor) and their Director of Marketing, Rachel (our champion) to get feedback.

Warmly’s CSM set up Strive’s account in about 30 minutes, focusing on being a lightweight and an easy-to-use tool. But this was likely too fast. Strive’s CEO told us:

• “I think it probably would have been super helpful and given the team a ton of confidence if Warmly was in the driver's seat [from the beginning]. If we were able to get a demo booked or basically get us to a closed deal early then Warmly we’d be gravy the rest of the year. We needed to get a win early to get confidence.” — Zach Beegal, CEO of Strive

🔮 Warmly Learning: Our customers need to get success, fast! And they need our help to do it. Now our CSM team has an internal metric they track we call TTFW, or Time To First Win. With TTFW the CSM team is focused on their ability to work with customers until they’re getting value and using Warmly every day.

Processing millions of sessions for our customers turned out to be harder than we thought. Strive’s team experienced loading problems and had difficulty viewing visitor activity on the platform. The slowness made for a poor user experience which caused frustration and in turn, deterred their team from wanting to use it every day to nab leads.

🔮 Warmly Learning: Real-time engagement needs excellent speed and scalability. We then doubled down on making our platform way faster (10x faster actually).

When Strive told us that they were not getting use of the platform a key reason was that they were spending a lot of time trying to Warm Call the high intent visitors who came to their site. It was a lot of effort so we tried to help by literally putting “a man on the inside” and had one of our SDRs fill in for them to try it out for them too. Strive found our team’s dedication impressive and appreciated the effort put into making the partnership work - and while the connection rates went up, we couldn’t do that forever (the cost wasn’t there). We needed to figure out how to enable our customers to best leverage their human SDRs in just the right moment.

🔮 Warmly Learning: Our customers need a level of enablement so they can learn a new motion and we can ensure it fits into their daily workflow. From there we decided to add AI and automation so we could actually just run the platform for customers without customers doing any work.

Strive, Design Partner #7 of Warmly, churned. And we don’t blame them for it! Warmly believes in an excellent customer experience, and even though Strive still had six months left on their annual contract, we gave them a refund. We didn’t feel right taking their money when they weren’t excited to use it. Instead, we asked them to do this anti-case study.

🔮 Warmly Learning: Keep your customers, even those who eventually leave, on good terms.

Yes, we hope so! While our collaboration with their company back in 2022 may not have produced the anticipated outcomes, the efficacy of our product today, given our learnings, should not be in question. Plus the churn was also more a matter of fit within their specific operational environment. Zach, Strive’s CEO, still thinks our product could prove beneficial for other organizations especially because of our dedication to our customers.

• “I had high expectations. Your sales pitch was very good, and I really liked working with your CEO Max. I do have to give you guys credit for the partnership mentality you had when things were starting to go south. Getting your COO involved, running email campaigns, and doing all of that for free. You did give it a good effort, so I can't say you didn't do that. It was going downward, and I was expecting you to cut bait quicker, but you gave it a real try, and I appreciate that.” — Zach Beegal

Before considering working with us, think about whether you would be a good fit; At Warmly, we specifically cater to businesses prioritizing warm customer engagement alongside AI and automation. If you make the choice to work with us, we promise to provide insightful metrics, an increase in pipeline and booked meetings. With Warmly, you're not just purchasing a product though — you're gaining a devoted partner committed to your success.