Interview with Marina Delgado, founder of an industrial filter manufacturer with 87 employees in Monterrey, Mexico. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Your company paused all new-customer acquisition for three months. What prompted that?
A: We were growing, technically. Revenue was up 14% year over year. But our support tickets were up 40%, and the same handful of customers kept calling about the same two problems. I looked at our churn number for the first time in a year and nearly dropped my coffee. We were paying for new logos while the ones we had were quietly leaving.
Q: What did you do instead?
A: We reassigned the entire sales development team for one quarter. Instead of cold calling, they called every customer who'd bought from us in the past 18 months — 214 companies — and asked three questions: what broke, what they almost bought elsewhere, and what they'd tell their worst competitor about us. The worst competitor question got us the real answers. People are brutal when they think they're being disloyal.
Q: What came out of those calls?
A: Three patterns. First, our lead time was the real product — customers tolerated the price but not the wait, and we'd never measured the wait honestly. Second, the spare-parts reorder process was so bad that six customers had set up standing orders with our competitor "to have a backup." They told us to our faces. Third, our documentation assumed the customer had a filtration engineer. Most of the buyers were the plant manager's cousin.
Q: How did you fix those?
A: We cut lead time by 19 days just by reorganizing the warehouse — no new machines. We rebuilt the reorder form so a purchase assistant could complete it in four minutes. And we rewrote the manuals with a glossary, which sounds small until you see the support tickets for "basic questions" drop by a third.
Q: And the results?
A: At the end of the quarter, churn had fallen from 11% to 4%. Expansion revenue from existing customers — bigger filters, more units, spare-part subscriptions — was up 31%. And then we went back to acquisition, but with a different pitch: "ask our customers what happens when something breaks." That line closes more deals than any case study we ever wrote. Turns out retention isn't a strategy you bolt on. It's the foundation the growth sits on.
