You open LinkedIn and come across a post from your champion: "Delighted to announce I'm joining [company]". You hit like, nervously. This was the person who defended your tool in meetings, pushed for the renewal and opened the right doors internally. Their departure isn't just a change of contact: it's the strongest churn signal you'll see all year. Here's how to turn this risky moment into an opportunity.
A champion leaving is no small matter, and the numbers back that up. An analysis by software company Sturdy, presented by its CEO Joel Passen at the BIG RYG conference, shows that when a key contact change isn't managed, the account has a 51% chance of churning within 12 months. And when it's an executive who leaves, on average 65% of accounts don't renew within the year. Add to that the fact that, according to UserGems, an average of 20% of people change jobs every year, a figure that's rising. In other words, the question isn't whether one of your champions will leave, but when. Here's how to respond.
Why losing a champion hurts so much
A champion isn't just a happy user. It's the person who carried your solution internally, convinced leadership to sign and put things in perspective when Finance looked a little too closely at the budget line. When they go, you're not losing a relationship, you're losing your foundations.
And what makes the moment so stressful isn't so much the departure itself as the uncertainty over who's going to take over. It might be someone lukewarm about your product. It could be worse: someone with a history with a competitor, or who simply doesn't see why your tool costs what it costs. That's where the danger lies.
But there's reason to be (a little) reassured. Most churn signals are lagging indicators: by the time you see usage dropping or NPS falling, the problem is already under way. A champion leaving, on the other hand, is a leading indicator. You know exactly when it happens, and you still have time to act. As long as you don't let it slip by.
Where is the customer in their lifecycle?
Before diving in, take three minutes to place the account. A customer who's just signed is nothing like a mature customer. A customer three weeks from renewal is nothing like one in a calm period of steady usage.
That position determines two things: how much time you have to rebuild a relationship, and the resources you'll need to put in. A champion leaving a month before the contract end date is an absolute emergency. The same departure six months before renewal is a serious but manageable project. Don't treat the two the same way.
Look at adoption maturity too. If your product is deeply embedded in the daily processes of several teams, the departure of one person, even a key one, will be easier to absorb. If it relied 90% on one individual, you're in a minefield.
How did you find out?
How the news reaches you changes everything.
- First scenario, the most comfortable: your champion tells you themselves. Ideally in advance, with an introduction to their successor. That lets you gather context, ask questions and lay the groundwork. Make the most of it, because everything they can tell you is worth its weight in gold.
- Second scenario, the most common: you find out after the fact. An automatic notification, a bounced email, a LinkedIn profile that's changed. Now you have no contact and need to find one, fast.
How? By digging into product usage to identify your power users, the people who spend the most time in the tool. By drawing on CRM intel and on what Sales noted during the sales cycle to track down the executive sponsor. Or by getting creative on LinkedIn to approach the right people. It's doable, but it's more work with less margin for error. Hence the importance, upstream, of never depending on a single contact. More on that below.
Understanding why they left
Not all departures are equal, and the reason changes how you read the risk.
Your champion might leave for a better opportunity, because their role was cut, out of frustration with their management, or because they weren't performing as expected. Each of these tells a different story about the state of the account. A champion who leaves for a better job leaves you with a healthy account and a potential ally elsewhere. A champion pushed out in a reorganisation signals a wider reshuffle of responsibilities, which means your entry point is going to move too.
Your immediate goal: understand the short-term situation and identify who will take over responsibility for the outcomes your product helps achieve. Only then should you ask yourself what it means for the account's long-term strategy. Don't mix the two: patch things up first, then rebuild.
Who is your new contact?
Once you've identified the new contact, do your homework before reaching out. The quality of that first conversation will shape everything that follows.
If your departing champion makes the introduction, make the most of them while they're still there. Ask them how to win over their successor, what matters to that person and how they like to work. That's priceless intelligence you won't find anywhere else.
If you're approaching cold, piece together the context from the person's online presence: the types of companies and roles they've had, the content they publish and comment on, the priorities they talk about. You're trying to understand their world before you speak to them.
Above all, in that first conversation, avoid diving headfirst into your product. Ask them about their priorities and the data that would help them build their immediate action plan. Share the context of what's been done so far and gauge how familiar they are with your solution. You're not there to run a demo. You're there to understand who you're dealing with.
Rebuilding the relationship: a genuine "re-onboarding"
Finding a new point of contact doesn't close the case. It opens the real project: recreating the bond you had with your champion.
What lies ahead is counter-intuitive: you'll need to "re-sell" your solution to a customer who has already signed. Yes, the contract exists. But you have to assume the new contact has little or no experience of your product, and not necessarily any interest in it.
Depending on their profile, the difficulty varies enormously. If the new contact is already a promoter, the battle is almost won. If they're a detractor, if they have bad memories of your tool, if they're more comfortable with a competitor or don't believe in your value, it'll be a real fight. The key is the same in every case: start from their goals and their priorities, then demonstrate, with evidence, the value you've already delivered.
In practice, it looks like restarting onboarding. You schedule a business review-style meeting to go back over the results achieved and present a strategic plan for what comes next. You set new goals and new milestones. You reinvest in the relationship. And you keep your communication customer-centric: the new contact needs to understand what they stand to gain and how your product makes their life easier, not what your roadmap has planned for the quarter.
Never depend on a single champion
Everything above is a crisis plan. The best crisis plan is the one you never have to roll out because you planned ahead.
The rule fits in one sentence: never let an account rest on a single person. Champions don't fall from the sky; you cultivate them through proactive engagement and by continually demonstrating value. And there's nothing stopping you from cultivating several, right from onboarding.
A few practical ways to broaden your footprint in the account:
- Regularly share best practices and content with stakeholders other than your champion.
- Ask your champion how to show value to other departments (presentations, recorded demos and so on).
- Set up a shared communication channel (Slack, customer portal...) where several users can see the conversation.
- Ask directly who else should be invited to QBRs or regular check-ins.
- Run surveys to check that other users are engaged and satisfied, because a happy team will carry a lot of weight when it comes to winning over the future champion.
Ideally, aim for at least three points of contact in the organisation. The other preventive habit is monitoring. A health score that includes usage, plus an alert when a key contact's activity suddenly drops or their account is deactivated, gives you a head start. The data warns you before you've even received an email. That's exactly the kind of weak signal you need to be able to read so you don't get caught out.
Treat the departure as an opportunity
One last perspective to adopt, and not the least important: a champion who leaves doesn't stop being your champion. They simply become one somewhere else.
Someone who loved your product and joins a new company is a ready-made entry point for a new deal. All the more reason to keep the relationship going after they leave, through LinkedIn or industry communities. In SaaS, personal relationships outlast logos. A happy former champion is often worth more than ten cold prospects.
Conclusion
Losing a champion is unsettling, but it isn't a death sentence. The account churns in one case out of two, which means one in two is saved, and your response makes the difference. Two reflexes trump all others: act fast to rebuild a point of contact, and lean on the value you've already delivered to win over the new contact. And the real winner will be the one who didn't wait for the departure to build multiple relationships in the account. The moment your champion leaves isn't the time to start thinking about that. By then it's too late for that, but never too late to act.
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