The most important customer retention metric you might not (yet) be tracking

I’m excited to see more B2B marketing teams expanding their focus beyond primarily net-new customer acquisition, and starting to impact (and measure) marketing-influenced customer lifetime value.  Most often this is measured based on renewals, repeat purchases, upgrades/upsells and more.
These financial metrics are critical, but the metric and action the most often leads to these financial customer success metrics is adoption.
If your new customer is excited about the purchase but fails to begin actively using your product or service, you’re in trouble.  If they start strong but quickly fade, you’re also in trouble.
Adoption isn’t about using the whole product either.  You can create immense stickiness with just a handful, sometimes even just one or two, features that really matter.
We worked with a company years ago that had built a new customer onboarding process that systematically went through every. Single. Feature.  It was thorough but exhausting.  Intimidating even.
So we went into the