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In the spring of 2005, Marc Benioff gathered his lieutenants together for an offsite in the sleepy seaside town of Half Moon Bay, California. San Francisco–based Salesforce.com was on a roll, the likes of which has been seldom seen, even in the technology world. After a swift five-year run to a successful initial public offering (IPO) in June, the remainder of 2004 brought more good news in the form of 88 percent bookings growth. Nearly 20,000 customers had purchased the company's customer relationship management (CRM) solution, up from less than 6,000 two years prior. The year 2004 concluded with Salesforce sporting a market cap of $500 million, and that number would quadruple by the end of 2005. All charts were pointing up and to the right, just the way you'd want them if you were an employee or an investor.

The offsite was pretty typical, celebrating the success of the company, planning for continued hypergrowth as the market continued to expand, and generally mapping out a glorious future. And then David Dempsey stepped to the podium to deliver the presentation that would earn him the nickname Dr. Doom.

By 2005, the Irish-born Dempsey was already five years into his Salesforce career. He had spent 11 years at Oracle before moving on, just as the dotcom bubble burst. Unfazed, he and two other ex-Oracle executives approached Benioff in early 2000 with a proposal to bring Salesforce.com to the European market. After several months of negotiations, the deal was struck. Today, Dempsey is a senior vice president and the global head of renewals, which, as is the goal of all recurring revenue businesses, carries 70 to 80 percent of Salesforce's annual bookings responsibility. In 2015, that renewal number is approaching $5 billion.

When you have that kind of responsibility, you quickly begin to understand the levers of the business and what it takes to be successful. Great sales leaders and CEOs have made their careers by understanding what's happening in the market and in their businesses and by taking the necessary steps, within their control, to keep their business growing. That might require major product changes, breaking into new markets, or any number of other strategies. The same general blueprint has been followed for years. But for Dempsey, there was something distinctly different about this challenge. No one had ever done what he was trying to do. No other subscription-based business-to-business (B2B) company had ever reached the size and growth rate of Salesforce, which also meant that, before him, no one had really needed to understand the reality and nuance of subscription software renewals the way he had to.

Renewing software subscriptions is not like renewing maintenance contracts in which the hardware or software is already paid for, installed in the data center, and running critical parts of the business. And, by the way, leaving the customer a prisoner to the vendor in many ways. One of the imprisoning factors is the cost of hardware maintenance. If the hardware is critical to the company's infrastructure, then you are basically required to pay for insurance in the case of failures. Paying for maintenance is that insurance. To make things worse, the hardware vendor typically has a stranglehold on the maintenance market because they are often upgrading and replacing proprietary hardware components. Sure, over time, a few third-party options have sprung up, but vendors always keep at least 90 percent of the business, so the competition is token at best. The software maintenance business is an even better business for vendors because no one else can provide software upgrades and bug fixes for their proprietary software. So, the renewal of a maintenance contract – hardware or software – is mostly a formality, with a tiny bit of negotiation involved. Unfortunately, the assumptions about maintenance renewals carried over to the SaaS (Software as a Service) world that Dempsey and Salesforce lived in. Those assumptions were misleading at best.

The renewals Dempsey was responsible for were often battles, not givens. For most SaaS products, customers have choices. Even with 20,000 customers, Salesforce was still often as much nice-to-have as it was must-have, which is always the case in a new market, as CRM was at the time. The bottom line on SaaS renewals is that customers can, and do, choose to not renew their contracts at a much higher rate than for maintenance products. That's because they usually have choices. Other vendors in the same market offer easy conversions to their product and lower prices. Customers are not captive like they are to maintenance contracts. That's just one of many ways that the recurring revenue business model has shifted power from the vendor to the customer, and Salesforce in 2005 was no exception. Customers had choices – competitors, the option to build their own solution, or just to do without CRM altogether – and they exercised that choice. Boy, did they ever.

Into the middle of that reality strode Dempsey, understanding it in a way that no one else did because he was the man responsible for renewing Salesforce customers' contracts. The message he shared with the rest of the Salesforce executive team was not good news. The bottom line was simple and direct: despite what it looked like from the outside, Salesforce as a business was in a death spiral. Underneath the glowing results and amazing growth rates, there was a fundamental flaw in the business, and continuing on the current path would bring disaster. The culprit was summed up in one simple word —churn. Customers who decided they no longer wanted to be customers. Churn. A luxury afforded to customers in a recurring revenue business. Churn. A simple concept, totally part of our thinking today, but one that, in 2005, no other subscription-based B2B company had dealt with at this magnitude. Churn.

The churn rate at Salesforce was 8 percent. That doesn't sound so bad until you add these two words —per month! Do the math if you wish, but it will come out like this: almost every customer was exiting the business every year. Salesforce was starting to learn what every other subscription company has learned since (thank you, Salesforce). You can't pour enough business into the top of the funnel to sustain real growth if customers are leaking out the bottom at a high rate. Yes, you can show glowing growth rates for new customer acquisition, and that's a very good thing. But the allure and value of a recurring revenue business such as Salesforce is in growing the overall value of the installed base. That takes new customer acquisition plus high retention rates plus positive upsell results (selling more to existing customers). Only when all three of those gears are working do you have the healthy business engine that investors will reward.

Dempsey's presentation awakened Benioff and set the wheels in motion around a company-wide initiative to focus on, measure, and reduce churn. One simple, fact-based presentation delivered to the right audience at the right time started something that is only now, 10 years later, gaining full traction as a discipline and a business imperative for all recurring revenue businesses. Dr. Doom had effectively given birth to the customer success movement.