Driving Retention as a Growth Lever: Lessons from DriveGTM and Auth0

If last week’s Insight Partners conference, DriveGTM in Austin, had a theme, it was racing cars. And if it revealed a powerful insight to make your car go faster, it was this: Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) is the critical engine to accelerate valuation. Ryan Hinkle’s in-depth analysis—shared for the first time at the event—made it clear: of all the key levers that determine a company’s valuation, GRR stands tall as the most impactful. In fact, GRR is the essential component to the “Rule of 40,” which heavily influences valuation.

What is Gross Revenue Retention (GRR)?

As a refresher, Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) measures how much of last year’s revenue you retain today—excluding expansion. The best possible GRR is 100%. For example, if you closed $1 million in contracts last January, and retain $950,000 from those same contracts today, your GRR is 95%. GRR is distinct from Net Revenue Retention (NRR), which includes expansion revenue, cross-sells, and upsells, and can be over 100%. (Target NRR is usually >120%) In other words, GRR is a pure measure of your ability to retain existing customers without relying on growth within those accounts.

When we think of GRR, we often think of the usual suspects: Customer Success, reliable support, a secure and evolving product, and the overall experience that keeps customers committed. But what I found eye-opening during DriveGTM was this: Growth and Demand Generation teams have a meaningful role in driving GRR too.

A Personal Retention Journey from Auth0

Back in 2017, I attended a Reforge program on “Activation & Retention.” As a growth marketer focused primarily on acquisition—scaling campaigns, generating demand, and building viral loops—I was less experienced in retention strategy. The course was a revelation. To clarify, activation is the process of getting new users to experience the core value of your product quickly, whereas retention is about keeping those users engaged over time. Around the same time, I joined Auth0 as Head of Growth, and I began to think differently about how growth efforts could bolster retention.

This shift in mindset allowed us to put in place initiatives that directly moved the needle. We managed to drive an 8% increase in first-year retention at Auth0 by applying some key lessons from Reforge. These lessons applied to both activation and retention, but were especially impactful for driving early engagement that led to long-term customer retention.

Growth Can Drive Retention: A Surprising Encounter

Listening to the keynote at DriveGTM about the significance of GRR, I didn’t immediately connect the dots to my own work at Auth0. It wasn’t until a chance encounter later in the evening with Barry Markowitz, EVP of the Insight Onsite Team, that I realized how closely aligned it was. Barry reminded me of an initiative I had spearheaded years earlier—an initiative she still shares as an example of data-driven retention strategy.

In hindsight, it’s no surprise that Barry gravitated to that story. Even back then, she seemed to intuitively understand that boosting GRR was a core driver of a company’s value. Today, with Hinkle’s data-backed insights, the importance of GRR is even more concrete.

Applying the Reforge Framework to Developer Tools

The Reforge course on Activation & Retention was packed with analyses and processes to help drive retention. One key takeaway: work backwards from successfully retained customers to find correlations. Reforge taught us to run correlation analyses across eight categories, ranging from user personas to acquisition parameters, and even down to specific feature usage.

But there was a catch: most examples from the course revolved around B2C products or frequently accessed B2B tools like Slack or Dropbox. Auth0 was different. As a developer tool, Auth0 was often a “set it and forget it” solution. Our users didn’t need to log into our dashboard every day. They implemented our SDK, and if all went well, they didn’t think much about it after that.

So, how could we adapt the lessons from Reforge to a dev tools company? Activation for a developer tool like Auth0 involves getting a developer successfully set up and integrating our SDK, while retention means ensuring the solution continues to provide value without frequent interaction. This distinction was crucial for us to properly adapt the Reforge methods.

Foundations for Growth-Driven Retention

We needed some foundational elements to make the Reforge insights actionable for us:

• Product Usage Telemetry: It wasn’t just about tracking the dashboard; we needed feature usage data from across our SDKs.
• User Aggregation: We differentiated between corporate users and individual developers using personal emails. Aggregating usage at the company level was key.
• End-User Data: Since Auth0 provided authentication to our customers’ customers, end-user data mattered too.
• Defining Retention: We needed a clear definition. Was retention active usage of our admin interface, or was it linked to the number of end-user logins?

With this groundwork in place, in the very capable hands of Shane Kercheval - our rockstar data scientist - we tracked 40 potential predictor variables to assess what impacted 12-month retention.

Working Backwards to Drive Retention

One of the key strategies we used was to break down 12-month retention into smaller, measurable steps. Instead of waiting a full year to determine if our changes were effective, we worked backwards from 12-month retention to identify signals we could measure earlier:

• What can we observe at 3 months that correlates to 12-month retention?
• What can we observe at 1 month that correlates with 3-month retention?
• What can we observe in 7 days that correlates to 1-month retention?
• What can we observe on the first day that correlates to 7-day retention?

By breaking retention into these smaller steps, we were able to create shorter feedback loops. These allowed us to experiment and iterate more rapidly—using early signals as proxies for long-term success. This method helped us ensure that the changes we implemented could be validated in a shorter timeframe and gave us confidence that they would ultimately lead to higher 12-month retention.

Driving Results: The Power of “num_colleagues”

One particularly interesting insight was what we called “num_colleagues”—the number of colleagues at a company who signed up within a certain timeframe. When three or more developers signed up from the same company within 30 days, retention increased significantly.

We turned this correlation into action. Auth0 had an “Admin Invite” feature that allowed users to invite their colleagues. It was underutilized—not prominently placed, and not well promoted. We decided to elevate it within the onboarding experience, framing it as “Don’t lose access to your account! Invite a backup admin.” This messaging won A/B tests and increased invites by 30%, with a net 24% increase in new users accepting the invites.

Importantly, we also saw an 8% increase in 30-day retention among those who used the feature—suggesting that the “num_colleagues” variable was not just correlated with retention but could be a causal driver. It’s worth noting that successful activation efforts—like getting more users within a company onboarded quickly—can often have a direct impact on long-term retention.

Extending Growth Strategies to Drive GRR

The examples from Auth0 highlight specific tactics that show how growth and marketing teams can effectively drive Gross Revenue Retention (GRR). Beyond activation, growth teams should aim to maintain customer engagement throughout the entire lifecycle. This includes proactive strategies to reduce churn and ensure customers are primed for annual renewals.

Customer Education Campaigns: At Auth0, we ran targeted webinars and created in-app messages to educate users on new features and best practices. This ensured customers were continuously aware of our product's value, ultimately driving renewals.

Re-Engagement Initiatives: We identified users who had decreased activity and launched specific email campaigns and personalized incentives to bring them back to the platform before renewal. This helped reduce churn and supported higher GRR.

Promoting Usage Depth and Breadth: Encouraging the adoption of multiple features made our product stickier. At Auth0, we highlighted the underused features via onboarding prompts and targeted campaigns, which helped users integrate the product more fully into their workflow.

Customer Advocacy and Community: We fostered community engagement through customer events and exclusive online forums. By making customers feel more connected to Auth0, we drove both product usage and advocacy, which in turn supported GRR by strengthening emotional and functional ties to the product.

Key Takeaways

• GRR Is Key: GRR is perhaps the most important factor in a company’s valuation.
• Growth’s Role in Retention: Growth and Demand Gen teams can make a meaningful impact on retention.
• Adapt Frameworks Thoughtfully: Applying a retention framework to a developer tool product may take extra effort, but it’s possible and can lead to powerful results.
• Work Backwards & Shorten Feedback Loops: Start with the characteristics of successfully retained customers, and use short-term signals to run rapid, iterative tests.
• Correlation vs. Causation: Breaking retention into smaller steps—7-day, 30-day, and 3-month markers—enables faster experimentation and helps identify causal relationships.

Final Thoughts

Driving GRR isn’t just about support and customer success teams doing their job well. Growth teams, armed with data and a willingness to experiment, can help make a difference in keeping the customers you worked so hard to acquire. So, if you want your company’s car to go faster—focus on GRR.