"is Repentance Necessary For Eternal Life?"

If you randomly picked ten Christians and asked them, “What must I do to have eternal life?”, 9 out of the 10 would say something like, “You need to repent of your sins and trust Jesus as your Savior”. If you were to ask these same Christians, “What does it mean to repent?” typically they would say, “In order to go to heaven you must turn from your sins. You must forsake your sins”. Is repentance necessary for eternal life? What does it mean biblically to repent?