The 7 Stages Every Customer Goes Through—That Most Businesses Can't Name

The Question That Exposes Everything

"Where are we with the Johnson project?"

Watch what happens next. Your team member pauses. They construct an answer from scratch—pulling context, remembering details, translating their mental model into words you might understand.

"Well, we finished the proposal and they signed last week. Now we're waiting on some information from their team before we can start the actual work. Oh, and accounting needs to send the first invoice."

Three sentences. No shared vocabulary. No standard stages. Just a narrative constructed on the fly.

Now multiply this by every project, every customer, every team member. Every status update requires a story. Every handoff requires a translation. Every time you ask "where are we?" someone has to build the answer from raw materials.

This is the vocabulary gap—and it's costing you more than you realize.

The 7 Stages

Every customer moves through the same seven stages. Every single one. The question is whether your team can name them.

Now imagine that same status question with shared vocabulary:

"Johnson is in early Engagement—kickoff complete, waiting on their asset delivery before we can continue."

One sentence. Instantly understood. No translation required.

The Funnel and the Flywheel

Notice the natural break in those seven stages.

The first three—Awareness, Acquisition, Activation—are the funnel. They get customers in.

The last four—Engagement, Retention, Revenue, Referral—are the flywheel. They determine what happens next.

Here's what most businesses miss: even in a one-shot deal, ERRR quality is the difference between retention and reset.

A great Engagement leads to Retention (they come back for the next project), Revenue (they pay happily and on time), and Referral (they send others into your Awareness stage). The flywheel spins. Your next customer costs less to acquire because the last one did the work for you.

A poor ERRR experience? You're filling the funnel from scratch, every time. No referrals feeding Awareness. No retention reducing Acquisition costs. Just an endless grind of finding new customers to replace the ones who never came back.

Giving Air to the Unspoken

I pronounce AAAERRR as "AIR" for a reason.

Every business has these seven stages. Every customer moves through them. But in most organizations, these stages go unnamed. They exist in the ether—understood intuitively by individuals, but never given voice in the conversations that shape how work gets done.

AAAERRR gives air to these stages. It makes the implicit explicit. It turns vague hand-waving about "the customer journey" into precise vocabulary that owners and operators can actually use.

When everyone on your team uses the same seven words to describe where a customer is in their experience, something powerful happens: you can finally have the conversations you couldn't have before.

These aren't just status updates. They're strategic diagnoses. And they're only possible when you have shared vocabulary for the stages themselves.

Why This Matters Beyond SaaS

The original Pirate Metrics were a growth hacking tool—a way to identify leaky buckets in your user funnel. Useful, but narrow.

AAAERRR, as I've come to use it, is something different entirely: a vocabulary for describing the stages of any customer experience.

This is where it connects to Deliberate Work—and to the two lineages that shaped it.

When I talk about designing work that runs without you, about moving from heroic effort to systematic excellence, the first challenge is always the same: people don't have language for the work they're doing. Every project is described differently. Every handoff is improvised. Every status update requires three paragraphs of context.

AAAERRR solves that problem.

The Vocabulary of Work

Consider how the framework applies to an executive coaching engagement:

Or an HVAC installation:

The framework doesn't just describe user metrics—it describes the shape of the customer experience itself.

Atomic Vocabulary, Clear Boundaries

Here's what I've come to appreciate most about this framework: it creates precise language for what is often muddy.

When someone asks "what stage is this customer in?" the answer shouldn't require three paragraphs of context. It should be a single word:

That precision matters. It matters in handoffs. It matters in reporting. It matters in understanding where work gets stuck.

When work is poorly described, it's poorly managed. AAAERRR gives teams a shared vocabulary that's:

• → Atomic — Each stage is distinct and non-overlapping
• → Sequential — They follow a natural progression
• → Universal — They apply across industries and contexts

When the Flywheel Becomes a Loop

In one-shot businesses, the flywheel spins once per customer. But in recurring businesses—SaaS, coaching retainers, HVAC maintenance agreements—something different happens.

The customer moves through the funnel once: Awareness, Acquisition, Activation. But then the flywheel doesn't just spin—it loops. Engagement, Retention, Revenue, Referral cycle repeatedly—every month, every quarter, every billing period.

This is the ERRR loop: the recurring cycle that defines subscription and retainer businesses.

This distinction turns out to be fundamental. Game theory explains why: one-shot and repeated games have entirely different dynamics. And if you're building recurring revenue, designing the loop—not just the funnel—is where the real work happens.

But before you can design either version, you need the vocabulary. That's what AAAERRR provides.

The Deliberate Work Connection

This evolution is core to how I think about the transition from accidental to deliberate.

Accidental businesses don't have vocabulary for their stages. Every project is a snowflake, every handoff is an improvisation. The only way to know what's happening is to ask someone who's deep in it—usually you.

Deliberate businesses have clear delineations. This is where Activation ends and Engagement begins. This is who owns each stage. This is what "done" looks like.

AAAERRR isn't just a growth framework anymore. It's a way of seeing work clearly.

And that clarity—knowing exactly where a customer is in their experience, what stage they're in, and what needs to happen next—is the first step from heroic effort to systematic excellence.

Where This Framework Came From

Credit where it's due: AAAERRR builds on Dave McClure's 2007 "Pirate Metrics" framework—AARRR—which became the lingua franca of SaaS growth teams everywhere.

It was elegant, memorable, and designed for one context: tracking users through a software funnel. But as I spent years helping businesses systematize their work—from solopreneurs to organizations with thousands of employees—I found the vocabulary almost universally applicable, but incomplete.

Awareness was missing at the start. Before someone can find you, they need to know you exist. And Engagement was missing in the middle—the actual work of creating and delivering value was glossed over entirely.

AAAERRR adds those two stages, transforming a growth-hacking tool into a shared language for how work gets done.