Revenue Churn
Revenue Churn doesn't count lost customers. It counts lost money, and the two numbers almost always tell different stories.
“Losing 1% of customers and 15% of revenue is not a good quarter dressed up as a minor problem. It's a risk-concentration problem.”
Otto GTM ObservatoryWhy it always diverges from Logo Churn
In a B2B model with concentrated revenue distribution (a few enterprise customers generate most of the ARR), logo churn and revenue churn tell almost opposite stories by construction. Losing 20 small customers weighs less on revenue churn than losing a single enterprise customer.
Monitoring both separately distinguishes a volume problem (many dissatisfied small customers) from a risk-concentration problem (a few vulnerable large customers).
Anti-patterns
Common mistake: reporting only logo churn in executive dashboards because it's a more reassuring number, hiding a far more worrying revenue churn on the few accounts that really matter.
Second mistake: excluding contraction (downgrades) from the calculation, treating only full cancellations as churn. A customer who cuts their contract in half isn't a retained customer, they're half a lost one.
Practical Application
A company with initial MRR of €218,400 loses €9,100 to full cancellations and €4,200 to downgrades, for a monthly revenue churn of 6.1%. In the same month, logo churn is only 1.4% (3 of 214 customers): the cause is a single enterprise account downgrading its plan, not a widespread satisfaction problem.