Renewals can be complicated. From business to business, different teams may handle renewals, or the renewal process may be different for each customer segment. Also because we all are at different stages and every organization is different, you can’t just take someone else’s playbook to be yours.
Playbooks are your recipes of rules to follow. They summarize what to do in different scenarios like renewal and how to go about doing these things. It can help you standardize your process and be consistent with your customer experience.
The Renewal plan
Renewal is an event; it is a transaction, which essentially is going to be reflecting-
- What you’ve done for the customer and
- What value have you delivered for the customer in the entire year, assuming you have an annual plan.
Many companies have weekly renewal meetings where they discuss the upcoming renewals with their Customer success managers.
To know more about Saas renewal rate, SaaS renewal rate.
What can be done in the last 30 days?
Customer Success playbooks enhance customer experience and improve the way you deliver your service to customers. Having a playbook that explains the process and the steps to renewal well is vital to orchestrating the customer lifecycle. One point that is stressed multiple times in several places is to get a signed renewal 30 days prior to the contract end date.
But there is nothing that you can do alone in the last 30 days. Out at the most, you can be doing some fire fighting at best. But there’s no foolproof renewal plan alone which sort of helps you do something magical in the last 30 days.
When should the Renewal Process start?
Customer Success playbooks make sure your customer success best practices are consistent. It is a fact that “renewal” is a step in the customer journey that starts when the customer signs the agreement. And, that it should always be part of conversations with your customer. The Customer Success team needs to capture what the customer expects out of this entire process and ensure that they are invested in the process. If there is poor customer onboarding, you should not expect a successful renewal.
So you want to be thinking about it from day one. Right from the moment of signup, leading up to onboarding, and then making sure that you do a check-in quarterly, monthly, or whatever your customers are expecting and whatever you’re promising and delivering that value on an ongoing basis. And that is what leads to renewal.
Conclusion
So there is, unfortunately, no renewal playbook that you can use in the last 30 days, and make the magic happen. But do you have a renewal process, or do you take it off in the entire larger customer journey, which would never stop at onboarding but will go all the way beyond even the first renewal for multiple renewals? In a data-driven connected world trying to achieve renewals without Customer Success software is like trying to write a snail mail in the world of emails and real-time messaging.
P.S. – The main image has been taken from pexels.com
