Customer Success
Definition
Gross Revenue Retention is NRR without the expansion credit. It measures pure retention — revenue kept from the starting cohort after accounting for churn and contraction only. GRR can never exceed 100%; it measures the floor.
Key points
- Formula: (Starting ARR − Contraction − Churn) / Starting ARR × 100
- GRR ≤ 100% always (expansion excluded)
- Best-in-class: 90%+ GRR
- GRR shows pure retention health; NRR shows growth from existing base
Example
Same cohort as NRR example: start $1M, contraction $50k, churn $50k (expansion ignored). GRR = ($1M − $50k − $50k) / $1M = 90%.
Stop stitching tools to track this
CRM, communications and operations share one database here, so the numbers this term describes are a dashboard rather than a spreadsheet.