Building a business is tough enough without watching your best customers walk away. Companies spend fortunes bringing new clients through the door, then somehow forget that keeping them happy is where the real money gets made. Beth Thorson knows this problem better than most people. After three decades of building go-to-market teams and scaling revenue from zero to hundreds of millions, she’s seen plenty of businesses make the same costly mistakes.
Here’s what most business leaders won’t admit: they’re terrible at keeping customers. They get so caught up in the next big sale that existing clients start feeling ignored. Thorson puts it bluntly: “Retention isn’t a result, it’s actually a responsibility. If you’re not earning it daily, you’re losing it quietly.” That phrase hits hard because it’s true. Customer loss doesn’t happen overnight with angry phone calls and dramatic exits. Most of the time, clients just quietly stop renewing contracts or find reasons to work with someone else. By the time you notice the pattern, you’ve already lost months of revenue and referrals. Thorson learned this lesson while leading teams at companies such as C.H. Robinson and Flexport, where keeping clients happy meant the difference between hitting growth targets and missing them completely.
Managing Risk in the First 90 Days
Want to know when most customer relationships go wrong? It’s not six months down the line when problems pile up. The damage happens in those first 90 days after someone signs a contract. “Client retention starts before that contract is signed, and the first 90 days are your greatest risk,” Thorson explains. Most companies treat new customer onboarding as filling out paperwork. They hand people off to junior team members with checklists and hope everything works out. But that approach kills relationships before they get started. “Too many companies treat onboarding as a checklist, but in high-growth environments, this is where trust is actually built or lost,” she says. The solution sounds simple but requires real commitment. Thorson’s team at Flexport figured out they needed to treat onboarding as if they were still selling. “Build a process that is frictionless, value-driven, and anchored in outcomes. At Flexport, we scaled by treating onboarding as a sales motion. Clear expectations, fast wins, and tight alignment with the client’s goals.” When new customers see immediate value instead of just promises, they stick around longer.
Becoming Essential to Client Success
Getting customers to renew their contracts is one thing. Making them dependent on your service is something completely different. The companies that don’t worry about retention are the ones their clients can’t imagine living without. Thorson calls this becoming operationally critical, and it’s harder than most people think. “Retention skyrockets when your platform becomes embedded in your client’s daily workflow,” she points out. This isn’t about adding fancy features that look good in presentations. It’s about solving problems people face every single day at work. When switching to a competitor means retraining staff and rebuilding workflows, customers tend to stay put. The key is moving beyond just delivering what you promised in the original contract. “Whether you’re in SaaS, logistics tech, or enterprise services, your job is to move from vendor to partner. Show up with insights, measure business outcomes, and find ways to make your solution a need, not a nice-to-have,” Thorson explains. Partners get consulted on big decisions. Vendors get replaced when budgets get tight.
Growth creates problems nobody expects. What worked perfectly with 50 customers falls apart completely at 500. Thorson has watched plenty of companies lose customers not because their product got worse, but because their systems couldn’t handle success. “High growth often exposes weak processes. If your go-to-market engine doesn’t adapt as you scale, retention will suffer.” The answer isn’t hiring more people to manually handle every customer relationship. That gets expensive fast and doesn’t solve the underlying problem. These days, Thorson helps tech companies build systems that work at scale. “That’s why I help companies build repeatable, scalable systems so every customer touchpoint, from sales to support, reinforces value.”
The smartest companies use data to spot problems before customers start complaining. “Use data to anticipate risk, align success, sales, and product, and then turn that feedback into fuel. Retention is not a department, it’s a culture,” she says. When keeping customers becomes part of how everyone thinks about their job, the retention problem starts solving itself.
Connect with Beth Thorson on LinkedIn or her website to learn more about building retention-first growth.
