ChurnZero Surveyed 793 Revenue Leaders. Four CS Roles Lift NRR Up to 8 Points — a Dedicated Renewals Team Correlates With Lower NRR Instead.

Ask a VP of Customer Success what they'd do with three new headcount slots, and "build out a dedicated renewals team" is one of the first answers you'll hear. It sounds like the obvious move — a specialized function focused entirely on getting signatures across the line should, in theory, get more signatures across the line. ChurnZero's sixth annual Customer Revenue Leadership Study, released in partnership with 6sense, Pavilion, and four other research partners, surveyed 793 customer growth leaders in 2025 and found the opposite pattern sitting right next to three roles that behave exactly the way you'd expect.

That 8-point gap is the largest single-role effect in the whole study, and it's not alone. Three other roles — customer enablement, support, and account management — show the same directional pattern: present the role, NRR is meaningfully higher; leave it out, NRR drops. Then there's a fifth role in the same dataset, measured the same way, that moves in the opposite direction entirely. Understanding why one specific role breaks the pattern tells you more about how to staff a retention org than the four roles that behave the way everyone already assumed they would.

What ChurnZero actually measured

The study draws on 793 customer growth leaders — 70% managing customer success, 14% sales, 16% a combined function — with the most common titles split between senior director/director (32%) and EVP/SVP/VP (31%). Most respondent companies have been operating 6-10 years. Participants reported their current team's role composition and their company's NRR and gross revenue retention (GRR) for 2025, and ChurnZero's research partner, 6sense, ran the correlation between "does this role exist on your team" and "what NRR did you report."

This is a correlational survey, not a controlled experiment, and the study is upfront about that distinction in its own framing of the renewals-team finding below. But a sample of nearly 800 revenue leaders, measuring five distinct roles against the same retention metric with a consistent methodology, is a meaningfully larger and more specific dataset than the usual "best practices" advice this topic normally gets.

Source: ChurnZero, 6th Annual Customer Revenue Leadership Study, 793 respondents (2025).

Four rows tell a clean story. The fifth row is the one worth actually staffing against.

The role that doesn't fit the pattern

A dedicated renewals team — a function whose entire job is managing the renewal motion, separate from the CSMs or account managers who own the broader relationship — reported 93% median NRR, against 97% at companies with no dedicated renewals function at all. Every other specialized or pooled role in the study moves the same direction as "more coverage, better retention." This one runs backward, and it's not a small gap: four points of NRR, on the metric the entire report is built around, in the opposite direction from everything else measured.

ChurnZero's own explanation is reverse causation, and it holds up against how renewals functions actually get built in practice. Nobody stands up a dedicated renewals team while NRR is comfortably at 100% and climbing — there's no budget case for it. A dedicated renewals function gets approved after renewals have already started slipping, after a stretch of quarters where "whoever owns the relationship also handles the renewal conversation" stopped being good enough, after a board or a CFO started asking pointed questions about the renewal pipeline specifically. The team is a response to a fire, surveyed mid-fire. Comparing its NRR to companies that never needed to light one is comparing a company already working through a known problem to the median of everyone, including companies with nothing yet to fix.

That prevalence chart backs up the reverse-causation read. Only 20% of surveyed companies run a dedicated renewals team at all — it's the least common structure in the study after dedicated expansions teams. If a dedicated renewals function were a straightforward retention upgrade, you'd expect it to spread the way CSM coverage has (82% of teams now run one). Instead it stays rare and concentrated, which is exactly the pattern you'd expect from a structure built as a targeted fix rather than a default best practice.

Why the other four roles don't have this problem

The mechanism that makes CSM, enablement, support, and account management different from a dedicated renewals team is coverage timing. All four touch an account continuously, well before a renewal date is anywhere close — a CSM running quarterly check-ins, a support team resolving tickets, an enablement function training users on features they haven't adopted yet. None of that activity waits for a 90-day renewal countdown to start. By the time a renewal conversation actually happens, an account with good coverage in those four roles has already had months of signal collected and, ideally, problems caught.

A dedicated renewals team, by construction, enters closer to the renewal date. It can negotiate, it can escalate, it can offer a save play — all useful — but it's working with whatever health the account already has by the time the clock starts. It's structurally the same problem we've written about with CSM coverage ratios: a low-touch book gets roughly 17 minutes of CSM attention a week once you divide the hours, and a dedicated renewals team compresses that already-thin attention into an even narrower window right before the contract ends. Good renewal negotiation can't manufacture health an account never had.

What this means for how you actually staff retention

The study's own prescription, and the one the data supports, is to treat the four coverage roles as the minimum viable team before adding anything more specialized. In order of correlation strength in this dataset:

• Customer success management — the single largest NRR gap in the study (8 points), and already the most common role (82% of surveyed teams have one). If you only staff one function, this is the one with the most data behind it.
• Customer enablement — training, certification, and community work, present at only 47% of surveyed companies despite showing the second-largest NRR gap (5 points). This is the most understaffed high-leverage role in the dataset relative to its measured impact.
• Support — a 5-point gap, and one of the few roles here that's reactive by nature but still shows a strong correlation, likely because a broken support experience is one of the fastest ways to turn a renewing account into a cancel-reason statistic.
• Account management — a 4-point gap, concentrated in companies where account management, not a sales team, owns expansion revenue.

If your team already has these four roles reasonably staffed and NRR is still soft, the data suggests the next move isn't "add a renewals specialist" — it's closer diagnosis of why the coverage you already have isn't catching risk early enough. That's the same argument behind building a real churn health score: the goal is surfacing a shrinking account while a CSM or enablement team still has time to act on it, not building a faster response once the renewal clock has already started.

If you do run a dedicated renewals team already, ChurnZero's recommendation is specific: don't treat its existence as evidence the retention problem is handled. Pair it explicitly with deeper enablement and adoption work aimed at why renewals got hard in the first place, and measure it against the accounts it inherited, not against the companies that never needed one. A renewals team that only chases signatures is managing the symptom the other four roles were supposed to prevent.

One more data point from the same study is worth sitting with before you restructure anything: whether the customer go-to-market function reports to a single executive or is split across multiple leaders showed no meaningful difference in NRR or GRR at all. Org chart shape doesn't move the number. Role coverage does. A company obsessing over whether CS should report to the CRO or run independently is solving a different problem than the one this data says actually matters.

After two years of decline from 2022 through 2024, NRR and GRR both stabilized in the 2025 data — which the report frames as a reason to stop blaming the macro environment and start auditing your own team design, since external volatility is no longer doing as much of the explaining. If you want to see what a specific improvement in retained revenue is actually worth before deciding where to invest, our dollar retention rate calculator turns a hypothetical point or two of NRR into a dollar figure you can bring to the headcount conversation. And for the accounts that still slip through a well-staffed team's coverage, a cancellation flow that captures a real reason on the way out gives every one of these four roles something concrete to act on for the next account that looks the same way — instead of a renewals team finding out for the first time at the signature stage.

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