How these connect
GRR is your floor. NRR is your ceiling. Logo churn is the leading indicator.
These five metrics aren't five independent dials. They're a single story told five different ways. Reading them as a system is what separates operators who understand retention from operators who just track it.
Gross Revenue Retention is your floor. It tells you what would happen to revenue if your sales team stopped doing anything — no upsells, no expansion, just keeping the lights on for existing accounts. Anything below 90% GRR for SMB SaaS or 95% for enterprise is a structural product or onboarding problem, not a sales problem.
Net Revenue Retention is your ceiling. It builds on GRR by adding expansion — upgrades, additional seats, add-on modules. The gap between your GRR and your NRR is the size of your expansion motion. If GRR is 90% and NRR is 92%, expansion barely exists. If GRR is 90% and NRR is 115%, you have a real second engine running.
Logo churn moves first. Revenue churn moves a quarter later. Customers churn one at a time, then the dollars follow. If you watch only revenue churn, you'll see the problem after it's already cost you. Logo churn is where the early signal lives — track it weekly, not quarterly.
Customer lifetime sits underneath all of it. It's the denominator that turns your retention numbers into LTV, which is what every investor multiplies against CAC to ask whether your business actually works. A two-year customer lifetime supports a much smaller CAC than a six-year one.