In SaaS, most metrics can be negotiated, padded, or spun. But not Gross Revenue Retention (GRR).
GRR doesn’t flinch. It doesn’t care how well your QBRs went or how creative your expansion strategy was. It ignores upsells and cross-sells. It simply answers one question: did the customer you closed still see enough value to renew?
That’s why GRR is getting a lot more attention across boards, investors, and revenue leaders. It isn’t just a post-sale KPI. It’s one of the clearest reflections of your upstream go-to-market strategy.
Low GRR is rarely a retention issue. It’s a targeting issue.
If your GRR is under 90%, the problem likely started long before the renewal conversation. It started with how you defined your ICP, who you let into the pipeline, and what your sales team was incentivized to push across the line.
By the time you’re spinning up special onboarding flows and escalating tickets to save the account, it’s already too late. That’s not retention. That’s triage.
The root causes often look like this:
Fixing GRR doesn’t start with your CS team. It starts with your positioning, qualification, and landing motion.
The shift in investor focus is real and measurable.
According to SaaS Capital’s 2023 benchmarks, the median GRR for private SaaS companies is 91%, while top-quartile companies exceed 95%. In cybersecurity and other industries with high ACV, where churn tends to be more expensive and harder to replace, that bar is even higher.
For companies with lower ACVs, typically under $25,000, holding on to 90% of revenue from existing customers is expected. As deal sizes increase, so do the retention benchmarks. Companies with larger ACVs should aim for gross revenue retention closer to 93% to remain competitive.
While net revenue retention (NRR) still shows a strong and exponential connection to overall growth, gross revenue retention has become more of a baseline requirement. Simply put, if your GRR isn’t at or above 90%, you’re likely falling behind your peers.
In a high-growth market, GRR might have been a secondary concern. But in this environment, investors are becoming more selective. GRR is rising to the top of their scorecard—not just as a measure of customer success, but as proof of product-market fit and long-term relevance
A high GRR suggests:
When growth slows, retention quality becomes the differentiator. GRR has become the filter for quality and one of the clearest signals that your business is built to last.
This is especially obvious in cyber markets, where deals are often driven by compliance needs, incidents, or fear-based urgency. That makes for fast closes but not always sticky customers.
The best vendors are the ones who don’t just land quickly but stay landed.
CrowdStrike is a good example. Even after a major global outage in 2024, they retained over 97% of their existing customer revenue. That wasn’t just a product win. It was the result of deep integration and clean customer alignment.
Smaller players like Action1 showed similar strength, posting 99% GRR without relying on aggressive expansion tactics. Their product landed in the right place, with the right buyer, solving the right problem.
High GRR isn’t just a retention win. It’s evidence that the whole system from targeting to delivery is working.
Let’s put it in perspective.
Imagine a $50M ARR company growing 20% annually but with GRR at 85%. That means they’re losing $7.5M of ARR every year and spending significant effort just to replace what they lost. The headline growth isn’t the real picture; it’s treadmill growth.
Now take a peer growing at 15%, but with 95% GRR. They’re compounding cleanly, not burning cycles chasing replacement revenue. Over time, that difference widens the gap in efficiency, valuation, and team focus.
SaaS businesses with GRR above 90% grow 1.5 to 2.5 times faster than their lower-retention peers. That’s the compounding effect of getting your front-end motion right.
When GRR starts to fall, the instinct is to look at your CS motion. But that’s just where the problem shows up. It’s not where it started.
Start with a churn audit. Look at the last 20 customers who didn’t renew and map out their journey. Were they really ICP? Did they activate? What did onboarding look like? Were there warning signs in the first 30 days?
Then focus upstream.
Refine how you define ICP—not just based on who buys, but who stays. Use both win/loss and renew/loss data to sharpen targeting.
Tighten sales qualification. If a customer doesn’t have clear urgency or the ability to activate quickly, you’re not winning a long-term relationship. You’re just delaying churn.
And revisit onboarding. Time-to-value in the first 30 days is one of the strongest predictors of retention. Customers don’t need to be wowed. They need to see one meaningful win, fast.
In short:
These three steps will do more for GRR than any retention playbook you spin up after the fact.
Gross Revenue Retention is one of the most honest numbers in your business. It doesn't care how good your CS team is at saving deals. It doesn't care how many features you launched last quarter. It only tells you whether you landed with the right customer, in the right way, solving a real problem.
If your GRR is strong, everything else flows more easily—expansion, referrals, efficient growth. If it's weak, you'll spend the year in damage control.
GRR isn't just a customer success metric. It's a GTM health check that reveals the effectiveness of your entire revenue engine—from how Marketing qualifies inbound leads, to how Sales targets and closes deals, to how RevOps structures your processes and monitors your funnel health.
And if it's off, don't just patch the back end. Fix the front.
Q: Our GRR is at 88%, but our NRR is 110% thanks to strong expansion. Should we still be concerned?
A: Yes. While healthy expansion is valuable, it's masking a fundamental problem: you're losing customers who shouldn't have been sold in the first place, and you're compensating by extracting more from those who stay. This creates two risks: (1) you're wasting acquisition costs on customers destined to churn, and (2) you're building growth on an increasingly narrow customer base, which becomes fragile if expansion slows. Strong NRR can hide weak foundations for years—until it can't. The best companies have both high GRR (95%+) and strong NRR, because they're landing the right customers AND expanding them. Fix your targeting and qualification first; expansion will be easier and more sustainable when it's built on a stable base.
Q: How can we tell if low GRR is a product problem or a go-to-market problem?
A: Look at your cohort retention by customer segment. If GRR is consistently low across all customer types, industries, and deal sizes, that's likely a product or value delivery issue. But if you see clear patterns—like SMBs churning at 75% while enterprise stays at 95%, or certain industries renewing well while others don't—that's a GTM problem. You're selling to the wrong profiles. Run a renewal analysis on your last 50 churned customers: Did they match your stated ICP? Did they achieve meaningful activation in the first 90 days? If the answer is often "no," your issue isn't the product—it's who you're selling it to and how you're onboarding them.
Q: What's a realistic timeline to improve GRR, and where should we start?
A: GRR improvements are lagging indicators by nature—you won't see meaningful movement for 12-18 months because you're waiting for current cohorts to renew. However, you can start seeing leading signals in 60-90 days if you focus on the right areas. Start immediately with: (1) a churn cohort analysis to identify which customer profiles are at risk, (2) tightening your ICP and sales qualification criteria based on renewal data, not just win data, and (3) optimizing time-to-first-value in onboarding. Track activation rates and early engagement metrics—customers who hit key milestones in their first 30 days are 3-5x more likely to renew. The actual GRR number won't budge quickly, but you'll see early indicators in activation and engagement that predict future retention improvements.
Q: Is there a difference in acceptable GRR benchmarks for different business models or customer segments?
A: Absolutely. While 90% is the general baseline, context matters significantly. Enterprise SaaS with high ACVs ($100K+) should target 95%+ GRR because these customers are stickier, more integrated, and costlier to lose. SMB/mid-market SaaS with lower ACVs ($5K-$25K) may see 85-92% as acceptable due to higher natural churn from business failures and budget volatility—though top performers still exceed 90%. Product-led growth models with large volumes of small customers often see lower GRR but compensate with efficient acquisition and strong expansion. The key is benchmarking against comparable companies in your segment and ACV range, not just generic SaaS averages. If you're enterprise-focused and sitting at 88% GRR, that's a serious red flag regardless of what SMB benchmarks say.
.jpeg)
.png)
