Alex Atkins
VP of Growth and Operations at Sturdy
On Pipeline
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Don't Miss the One Sentence That Kills a Deal (with Alex Atkins from Sturdy)
Alex Atkins, VP of Growth and Operations at Sturdy, built a quarterly report called Churn Is Not a Customer Success Problem from first-party data drawn from tens of millions of customer conversations. It became Sturdy's single highest…
Key takeaways
- Mine your own first-party data for a story nobody else can tell, the way Sturdy analyzed what Alex Atkins put at "like 47 million" inbound and outbound business conversations.
- Title the piece with the claim your top persona already suspects, as Alex did with Churn Is Not a Customer Success Problem, so CS leaders read it to defend themselves and CROs read it because it said out loud what they already suspected.
- Go in ready to be proven wrong. Alex expected the data to blame CS for most churn, and it showed almost 75% of churn sitting outside CS and CX control.
- When a piece flops, keep the data and change the angle, the way Alex's first version, called something like "AI in Business," evolved into the churn report.
- Replace the weekly round of "who thinks what's going to close" with AI reading every account conversation, so one buried sentence in an email doesn't decide a deal without anyone noticing.
In Alex's words
"First-party data. What is a cool story we can tell with first-party data?"
"And CS, you know, was cleaning up after all these decisions that were already made months earlier by other departments that they had absolutely no control over."
"that means almost 75% of all churn is completely out of the realm of of control of CS and CX, right?"