I was asked the other day what the average SaaS customer length is. I responded confidently that I thought it was about three-and-a-half years. My customer disagreed, though not without some uncertainty, and felt it was longer.

So I checked online, as you do, and I couldn’t find my three-and-a-half years statistic anywhere. Perhaps it was a customer I’d worked with previously that I was misremembering as an average. Anyway, I couldn’t find an average figure for customer churn anywhere. That’s because it depends.

It depends, of course, on the amount of customers you lose, otherwise known as your churn rate. Your average SaaS customer length is 1 divided by your churn rate. So if your churn rate is 5% per month, your average customer length is 20 months, which isn’t great. If it’s 10% per year, then your average SaaS customer length is 10 years, which is a whole lot healthier. Naturally, you can only make these calculations with a good body of data and some history behind you.

If you’re new to the game, then you need to do some research around average churn for the sector you sell into, or the size of company you sell into. To generalise grossly, churn rates tend to be lower the larger the customer you work with, since the deals tend to be bigger, more complex, more embedded, with a higher cost of sale, to generalise on the reasons as well.

If you want to read more on this, you might find this article, this one and this one useful.