A renewal comes in smaller than last year.
The account team has an explanation ready. Budgets tightened. A new VP wants to consolidate vendors. The champion left. It was always going to be a tough one.
All of that might be true. And underneath it, almost always, is something nobody puts in the notes: the customer renewed on the version of your product they actually experienced. Which was a fraction of the one they bought.
They never found the integration that would have made the tool sticky. They rebuilt the same report by hand every week instead of saving it. They used three features out of the twelve that make accounts expand instead of contract.
So when the renewal conversation came, they were valuing the small product. Because that is the only one they ever met.
Adoption gets filed in the wrong department
Here is the quiet category error.
Low adoption looks like a product problem. A feature isn't used, so it goes on the PM's list, somewhere below the next launch, as a usability chore. "We should improve discoverability." It rarely gets funded, because, as Atlassian's Megan Cook puts it, this kind of work is "not like the shiny, exciting new thing."
But adoption doesn't get paid out in the product. It gets paid out on the revenue line.
Cook says it plainly: usability problems "impact your new customer acquisition as well as your ability to expand. There was some good revenue connections in there." That is the whole point in one sentence. The feature nobody found isn't a UX nitpick. It's the expansion that didn't happen and the contraction that did.
In SaaS, the number that decides whether you have a real business is net revenue retention, and it lives or dies on this. Jason Cohen's benchmark is blunt: median NRR at IPO is 119%, and of 100-plus public SaaS companies, only about two sit under 100%, "and they have horrible financials." The companies that clear it by a distance, Twilio at 140 to 170%, Slack at 135 to 155%, Datadog around 130%, don't get there on new logos. They get there because existing customers use more of the product over time and pay for more of it.
Deeper adoption is the mechanism behind every one of those numbers.
The link is not a theory
Amplitude found that users who adopt 70% or more of a product's core features are roughly twice as likely to stay. Twice.
Now set that next to the size of the gap. Userpilot puts mean adoption of "core" features across B2B SaaS at 24.5%. Three out of four users don't touch the features you consider core, which means three out of four users are sitting in the half of the curve that is twice as likely to leave.
When I was a Solution Architect at Mixpanel, I built the dashboards that made this visible for hundreds of teams. The pattern was always the same. The accounts that expanded had quietly crossed into deep usage. The accounts that churned or shrank looked "fine" on logins right up until renewal, because they were active in the shallow end the entire time.
The usage was real. It just wasn't the usage that pays.
The math nobody runs
So here's the one thing to do this week, and it takes a spreadsheet, not a roadmap.
Pick one feature you already know correlates with retention or expansion. The integration, the saved report, the second seat, whatever your data says sticky customers do.
Count the accounts that never adopted it.
Now put a number on the gap. If accounts that use that feature renew at a meaningfully higher rate or expand more, you can estimate what each non-adopting account is worth in lost retention and expansion. It will not be precise. It does not need to be. The first time you see "we are leaving an estimated X in NRR on the table because this one capability was never found," the conversation about whether adoption work is fundable ends.
That number is not a product metric. It's a revenue forecast.
The reframe
Hila Qu tells a story from Acorns that lands this perfectly. Her team kept asking how to improve retention, and got nowhere, until they realized the biggest lever for retention was actually activation: driving adoption of the one feature that correlated with people staying. The question "how do we improve retention" became "how do we drive adoption of this." Same goal. Suddenly tractable.
That's the move. Stop treating adoption as the PM's housekeeping and start treating it as the front end of the revenue number the whole company already watches.
This is the gap we built Deway to close, guiding each user to the features that make accounts expand instead of contract, in real time, without anyone building a tour for it. But you don't need us to run the spreadsheet above.
The next time a renewal comes in smaller, the budget story might be true. The harder question is the one worth asking first.
Did that customer ever actually experience the product you thought they were renewing?
Alon Binman is the co-founder of Deway (deway.ai), an AI-native autonomous adoption layer for SaaS products. Before Deway, Alon spent 15+ years at the intersection of product and customer success, including roles as a Product Manager, founder, data and product strategy consultant, and Senior Solution Architect at Mixpanel. You can reach Alon on LinkedIn.