2025 - The Year of the Quarter

Happy 2025!

As the tech landscape continues to drive evolution and innovation at breakneck speeds, I would like to crown 2025 “The Year of the Quarter.” More than ever I am hearing about the importance of each company’s fiscal quarters, with specific strategies that hone in on scrutinizing quarterly outcomes. While bringing in new customers still matters, the big shift already underway in ‘25 is holding onto and growing the customers you already have. With a background in both net-new sales and customer success, I can attest that when you need a last minute deal, the renewal/expansion motion was one that I was much more confident in. Now with the power of Magnify’s AI, I am seeing our customers zoom in on their quarter to find additional revenue to deliver immediate success and long-term loyalty.

Today’s executives and investors look at Net Dollar Retention (NDR) as the leading indicator of a company’s health. NDR measures both renewals, known as Gross Retention Rate (GRR) and expansions from existing clients. Delivering a strong NDR shows that your customers aren’t just sticking around, they’re spending more - and likely getting more value from your solution year-after-year. It's common in B2B sales to have net-new business take years to sign on the dotted line, while the majority of a company’s ARR will be generated from existing customers. It's amazing, especially when we consider that the majority of spending to grow revenue has been on the marketing and sales stack with renewals and success often tagging-along with selected solutions. I believe it’s time that in ‘25 we start to give retention and renewals the tools needed to drive new levels of performance.

While marketing and sales have seen the likes of Marketo/Salesforce/Pardot, Gong, Outreach, and many more innovating in areas like Account-Based Marketing (ABM), Marketing Automation, Sales Automation, Sales Coaching and more; post-sales has been left primarily to its own devices, since the creation of the Customer Success Platform. Throughout B2B post-sales we’ve yet to come to the equivalent term to Marketing Automation when speaking about a customer’s post-sales journey. I predict that ‘25 will see the rise of Customer Growth Automation, thanks to the continued application of AI. For the first time in a company’s history they will be able to compile and crunch data from across their production systems to pinpoint the best opportunities for expansion while highlighting the accounts most likely to churn. But simply highlighting these may not be enough, as success teams have been on the chopping block in recent quarters, companies need a digital-first, one-to-many approach to managing their accounts while still providing a personalized touch.

With more companies pivoting based on the previous quarters outputs, predicting revenue becomes mission critical. Traditional success and revenue forecasts leveraging Green, Yellow, Red health scores often miss the true question that matters most to executives. What will my revenue be at the end of this quarter, and next quarter? At Magnify we’ve found that we are able to answer these questions with over 90% accuracy. Providing this clarity allows organizations to break-down silos across sales, customer success, support, finance and product teams to improve renewal numbers while driving down churn across the entire customer base.

Churn is the ghoul we all try to avoid meeting, especially in “The Year of the Quarter,” if too many customers walk-away your new sales may not matter all that much. I often hear the word “scale” attached to accounts that do not have much oversight, with one company lamenting that their revenue-renewal teams hit quota, but their scale customers accounted for the company missing the overall number. While a QBR may not be on the books for every account, AI and automation tools can help you identify which customers are failing to adopt key features, have slipping usage, and other tell-tale signs of distress. Then assist you in launching campaigns at scale to address these issues. Magnify is applying a post-sales automation mindset to our customers’ “scale” business, allowing them to run complex campaigns across their existing tech spend, to target users on an individual basis to drive healthier account metrics. This same approach can also be leveraged to continue to grow your healthiest accounts - to push them to new spending tiers and position your revenue teams to exceed their targets.

I am not calling ‘25 “The Year of the Quarter” as a catchy marketing slogan, it’s a reflection of the conversations I’ve been having since joining Magnify. Expectations are shifting faster in B2B tech than ever before. If you want your success and revenue engines to thrive, start paying attention to the right metrics while applying the same tooling and insights we’ve come to expect from Sales and Marketing.

The bottom line?

Every quarter counts - starting with this one. Start putting scalable systems in place that allow proactive management of 100% of your accounts while leaving behind less indicative measures like Red, Yellow, Green health scores. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions about Magnify, we’re creating a new category - and it’d be great to have you along for the ride.