Mid-Year Review: 5 Numbers to Check in Your CRM Before the Summer Break

Your holiday plan is set. Your out-of-office message is half-drafted.

But before you close the laptop and head for a drink at the beach, there are five numbers in your CRM that deserve just a few minutes of your time. Not because it's fun, but because these numbers will determine whether you come back to a business in control, or to a fire you could have seen coming.

This is the mid-year review you can actually do yourself. No big report projects, no half-day offsites, no consultants. Just five concrete checkpoints, what they tell you, and what to do if the numbers don't look good.

Let's go through them one by one.

For subscription businesses, churn rate is the closest thing to a health check. It tells you whether you're actually keeping the customers you've spent time, money, and energy winning.

Do you know what your monthly churn is right now? Not just an educated guess, like the actual number?

A healthy churn rate for Nordic B2B SaaS companies on a subscription model is typically between 0.5 and 2 percent per month. If you're consistently above that, it's a signal that deserves attention now, not after half your customers have sent cancellation notices.

Take the number of customers who cancelled during a given month, divide by the total number of customers at the start of that month, and multiply by 100. Do this for January through June, and look at the trend, not just individual months.

A churn rate that has climbed month over month since January is a pattern. A single spike in March with otherwise stable numbers is probably something else.

Find the three customers who have been quiet the longest in your CRM, meaning no logged activity, no dialogue. Have an informal conversation with them. Not a sales call, not a survey. An honest question: what do you actually use, and what's missing?

You'll learn more in 20 minutes than from three months of assumptions, and maybe you have prevented another spike in your churn number.

A pipeline full of deals that haven't moved since March is not a pipeline. It's a buried time capsule of wishful thinking.

The mid-year check is about clearing out and seeing what's actually there. And maybe you’ll land a new customer before the summer break?

Go through every open opportunity in your CRM and ask this question about each deal: when was the last real activity? Not «email sent», but actual dialogue. A response came back. A meeting happened.

Deals with no real activity in 60 days or more should either be actively followed up or moved to «on hold» or «lost». Fake opportunities in your pipeline create false confidence, and that's actually worse than an empty pipeline. You can't plan around something that isn't real.

Flag every deal older than 60 days with no activity. Send one short, honest email to each of them: «You've been in our pipeline for a while now. Is this still relevant, or should we close it out for now?»

You'll be surprised how many people respond. And the ones who don't, you can confidently remove.

Here's an uncomfortable truth: money that isn't in your bank account isn't money. It's optimism.

Overdue invoices are a cash flow problem that builds quietly through the half-year, usually while attention is elsewhere.

Pull a list of all unpaid invoices sorted by due date.

Invoices over 60 days overdue require a different approach than those that are a week late. What's the total? What share of your monthly MRR does that represent?

For many early-stage SaaS companies, overdue invoices aren't necessarily a sign of bad customers. They're more often a sign that billing workflows and reminder processes aren't automated well enough. Customers forget, not because they don't want to pay, but because the invoice ended up in the wrong folder.

Contact every customer with an invoice more than 30 days overdue before you leave for the break. A personal email or a friendly phone call will do far more than an automated (cold and boring) reminder. And if you haven't already, set up automatic payment reminders in your CRM or billing system, and try to keep them personal and friendly.

It doesn’t take too long and it can save you a lot of uncomfortable conversations.

Some leads contact you once, and then they wait. If they don't hear back, they find someone else. Not because they wanted to, but because they needed an answer and no one came.

Research from Harvard Business Review shows that the odds of qualifying a lead are seven times higher if you respond within the first hour compared to waiting two hours. After 24 hours, the odds drop dramatically. It's not that customers are impatient. It's that their evaluation process is ongoing, and you're not the only one they spoke to.

Check your CRM for leads that came in this year with no follow-up activity logged. Pay special attention to channels where it's easy to lose track: website contact forms, emails to info@..., inbound LinkedIn messages.

What's your average response time on new leads? Do you know?

Find leads from the past 90 days with no logged activity. Some are too old to pursue seriously, but many aren't. A short, honest message works well: "I can see we didn't follow up earlier. Are you still interested in having a conversation?"

Going forward, set up a simple alert in your CRM that flags new leads not contacted within 24 hours. Most CRMs have this built in. Use it.

In the day-to-day rush, it's easy to overlook what's expiring in August and September when it's only June. But customers who are about to renew are much easier to retain now than after they've made a decision.

Renewal isn't just «do they pay the next invoice». It's an opportunity window for retaining, and even upselling or crosselling.

Pull all subscriptions or contracts expiring between now and September 30th. Sort them by size, meaning ARR or MRR contribution. Which customers are on a plan they've outgrown? Which customers haven't heard from you since onboarding?

A customer you haven't had a real conversation with in six months is a renewal risk. Not because they're unhappy, but because it's too easy for them to treat the subscription as something that just keeps going without ever actively reconsidering it.

Take your five largest renewals in the next 90 days. Schedule a short check-in with each of them before the summerbreak. Not to sell, but to understand how things are going and whether there's anything they need.

Customers who feel like you care about them renew. Customers who feel like an account number don't.

That's a fair question, and the honest answer is: you can do parts of this review in a spreadsheet.

But you'll likely be missing critical data points, especially around activity logs, response times, and pipeline history over time. It's not just that a CRM makes it faster. It makes it possible to see patterns that aren't visible in a spreadsheet.

The churn pattern you'd spot in April? Not visible if all your contracts live in separate documents. The pipeline aging you're catching now? Hidden behind green cells and optimistic notes.

If you're running spreadsheets as a CRM today and recognise the challenges above, it might be the right time to consider a next step.