Improving Revenue Retention in 2025

Last year, I bought a pair of ski pants and the zipper fell out on the first chair lift. I called Burton, and they offered an exchange. New pants, first chair, same problem. Support informed me that I was required to return the pants for repair. The repairs would be completed after ski season. For the inconvenience, Burton offered me a 20% discount on my next purchase of skiwear. The next time I am in the market for skiwear that I can't wear during ski season, I will use that coupon.

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I started my first business over 25 years ago. Since that day, I have lived in an almost constant state of fear that somehow, somewhere, things would get so broken that we'd treat a customer like this.

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Let's be clear, no one who runs a business wants stuff like this to happen. Yet, it happens all the time.

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If you run a software company, your engineering team will have usage tools and server logs to tell you when your product is "down" or running slowly. They can report which features are being used and which ones aren't. You'll learn that certain features in your product cost more to run than others, maybe because of a bad query, code, or something else. And you'll know what needs to be upgraded.

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However, every time a customer contacts a business, they are "using" (or "testing") your product. If you sell ski pants, your product is ski pants, and your customer service team. If you sell software, your product is your tech and your customer service.

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Yet, your customer-facing teams have very poor usage data, if any at all. Which feature of our service gets used the most (billing, success, support)? What are the common themes? Is one group working more effectively than the others? Does a team need an upgrade? 

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(BTW, what costs more, your AWS bill or your payroll?)

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The reason your customer-facing teams don't have usage data is because this data is "unstructured," and it is everywhere. Imagine if your engineering team needed to check 50 email inboxes, 1,000 phone recordings, a CRM, and a ticket system to get your product usage statistics. 

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That's where your customer-facing teams are today. Until you can get answers from these systems as easily as an engineer can, you’ll continue to churn, annoy customers, and try to hire your way out of a retention problem. It won’t work.

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The question is no longer about whether you will use AI; it’s when. And no matter where you are on your journey, navigating the ethical implications of AI use is crucial. Ethical AI is not just a buzzword but a set of principles designed to ensure fairness, transparency, and accountability in how businesses use artificial intelligence. In the case of Sturdy, we’ve made ethical AI a core commitment. These principles guide our every move, ensuring AI benefits businesses without crossing the line into unmitigated risk.

What Is Ethical AI?

Ethical AI refers to developing and deploying AI systems that prioritize fairness, transparency, and respect for privacy. For businesses, this means using AI to make smarter decisions while ensuring that the data and technologies used do not cause harm or reinforce biases. The importance of this cannot be overstated—AI has the potential to either empower or exploit, and ethical guidelines ensure we remain on the right side of that divide.

Sturdy’s Commitment to Ethical AI

Sturdy's approach to AI revolves around several inviolable principles:

1. Business-Only Data Use: Sturdy’s AI systems focus solely on improving how businesses make decisions. They don't delve into personal data or manipulate information for other purposes. The data processed by Sturdy comes from business sources like support tickets, corporate emails, or recorded calls—never from personal channels.
2. No Ulterior Motives for Data: The data collected by Sturdy is knowingly provided by our customers, and the company doesn't use this data for any purpose beyond what's agreed upon. This ensures transparency and trust between the platform and its users.
3. Privacy and Protection: One of the most critical aspects of Sturdy’s approach is its commitment to not allowing any entity—whether a business or government—to use its technology in ways that violate privacy. If a client were found to be doing so, Sturdy would terminate the relationship.
4. No Deception: Our product is engineered to prevent deception. It never manipulates or deceives users, ensuring that the insights drawn from AI are used to enhance business practices rather than exploit loopholes.

Human Oversight and the Role of AI

At the core of Sturdy’s AI principles is the belief that AI should not replace human decision-making but augment it. Our Natural Language Classifiers (NLCs) are built to detect risks and opportunities based on the probability that a conversation indicates a particular issue. For example, when a customer complains about a "buggy" product, Sturdy’s AI might tag it as a "Bug" and label the customer as "Unhappy." However, humans remain in control—analyzing the situation and deciding the best action.

Final Thoughts

Sturdy's approach to AI exemplifies how businesses can responsibly use technology to drive growth and improve operations while safeguarding ethics. They demonstrate that AI doesn’t need to infringe on privacy or replace human decision-making. Instead, AI should be a tool that empowers teams, ensures transparency, and upholds ethical standards. Navigating the ethics of AI is not just a challenge—it’s an ongoing commitment, and Sturdy is setting a new standard for how it should be done.

(The image attached to this post is not entirely accurate but read on, and I’ll explain)

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Sturdy’s brand message lately. Part of this process entails interviewing folks from various walks of life about the current state of their businesses, their teams, and the companies they invest in.

The recurring theme: Sales Leaders aren’t having a good time right now. But you knew that already. I want to talk about what you don’t know.

After one of my interviews, I received a text with a quote by the former CEO of Swedish Airlines, Jan Carlzon.

An individual without information can’t take responsibility. An individual with information can’t help but take responsibility.

There are many different “things”’ that impact revenue: bad service, confusing products, poor response times, overselling, bug reports, price, whacky renewal processes, etc. You already knew this.

You know a lot about economic conditions, because that information is widely, and publicly available. You probably know a fair amount about “Sales Things” because your team is talking about “percent to goal” in almost every meeting, and there are a lot of discussions about what’s working and what isn’t. And, you likely review almost every deal in your pipeline.

What would happen if the opportunities in your pipeline were randomly placed in your ticket systems, CRMs, and a smattering of email inboxes? Knowing what was working with sales would get more difficult, if not impossible.

Today, the issues that affect service, product, marketing, etc., are randomly smattered across every customer-facing system in your business. The only way you “know” they happen is if someone else decides they are important enough to log or forward.

How do you get the information you need to make an impact?

Where is the information your product team needs to know?

Where is the information that your pricing team needs to know?

Where is the information that your renewals team needs to know?

If your Product Marketing Manager wants to know how their new pricing plan is working, what would inform that? A pretty good source—I’d argue the best source—of that information is sitting in emails, tickets, and call transcripts. But, if you are a Product Marketing Manager, you don’t have access to tickets, call transcripts, or customer emails.

You’ve been paywalled.

If you want to know what features to fix, there’s a data point in your Support Chatbot. When your Renewals Manager needs information on an account , they need to scroll through tickets and ask a few people, “What’s going on with this account?”

As a result, every business has smart people who rely on other people to log things, categorize things, and forward things. This is why our teams have logins to systems they seldom use -  so they can find a “thing” they might need.

The irony is that the information you need to know to do your job effectively is harder to source than the information about things you can’t control.

You probably know the inflation rate. If you don’t, you can discover it in one search.

Your VP of CS probably doesn’t know “What’s the most common source of customer frustration in the last 90 days?” Why? Because that information is splashed across your business in a host of silos that VP can’t access. Imagine trying to do that job, without that answer.

Imagine if that VP could answer that question in one search, using what customers are actually saying to every person in your business.

This paywalling has made our businesses fragile and slow. The hints of the B2B slowdown were arriving at our doorsteps in emails and tickets for months. “We’re cutting costs”. “Procurement wants a discount.” Why didn’t we see this coming? Because we weren’t looking for it, and couldn’t find it.

Time to get faster, and sturdier. You have smart people who can take responsibility. Bust the paywalls and give them information they need to react and act.

Do that hard things,

Steve

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