You may be asking yourself, “Wait, does my company even have a renewal process?”
You aren’t alone. Many SaaS companies don’t have a formal customer renewal process. I was reminded of this at the Silicon Y’all event earlier this month when my session about fighting SaaS customer churn was followed by a fantastic presentation on designing SaaS renewal processes from David Cusimano, a principal at Accel-KKR.
My Silicon Y’all session went straight for the jugular—starting bottom up by getting scrappy to improve customer retention programmatically. David’s session worked from the top down, discussing the steps you take to execute a scalable, effective renewal process.
Both approaches are important. SaaS business fundamentals are built around recurring revenue, and you must have a process around the steps you take to ensure the revenue actually renews.
Whether you have 10 customers or 10,000, it’s probably time to take a look at your renewal process and give it an upgrade. Here are a few ideas to get the ball rolling.
Do document your SaaS renewal process
Sometimes people hear the word “process” and think it’s got to be something complicated. A process is just the steps you take to execute something. So, document the steps you take to renew a customer. The image I quickly sketched out above is just an example of how to start. Think about the customer lifecycle and when they need to be touched, how red flags will get surfaced (and what your red flags actually are), how you will continue to add value, and what you will do about adoption and usage issues. Then just write it down in a timeline from when the customer closes to when renewal happens—who does what, when, why and how. That’s a process. Don’t overcomplicate it.
Do start from the beginning
You notice above I wrote, “just write it down in a timeline from when the customer closes to when renewal happens…“
If you approach your renewal process 90-days out, you are focused on the wrong aspects of renewal. Checking in with a customer 90 days before they are set to renew, and sending an invoice 30 days before renewal isn’t a process. Well, it’s a process, but not a good one. You should be thinking about renewal from the day the customer signs the contract.
Renewal depends on customers adopting your product. It also depends on your customer getting value from it, and achieving their goals. And you need to be ensuring that is what happens for your customer, from day one. Because 90-days out is way, way, way too late to solve for that.
Do hold everyone accountable
A process doesn’t ensure anything actually gets done. A process is just words on paper until it comes to life by the people who are responsible to execute. When you document your renewal process be clear about who owns each step, how the steps should be executed, and how to escalate issues. Build in safety nets so the entire process can’t grind to a halt.
Don’t let your renewal process get stale
If your renewal process isn’t indoctrinated into your culture it’s going to get stale. And when it gets stale, the steps in the process will be perfunctory. Which means your renewal process will be executed without passion, care or attention to detail. The worst thing that can happen is that people ...