I work for a SAAS business and we have annual contracts. I have been struggling with the best way to handle renewals with a deal pipeline. At the moment I have a separate pipeline broken up into 1- 3 Months, 3-6 Months, 6-9 Months, 9-12 Months then won lost. When a successful renewal occurs we repeat the cycle. This feels like a real hack, does anyone know of a better solution?
We have two types of deals in our pipeline - net-new and renewals.
For renewals, we still work to deal stages - our Account Managers (AM) re-engage the account Decision Makers (DM) and work through the renewals process. This is managed by deal stages, rather than time periods. We are not SaaS providers but do sell HubSpot licenses as part of our agency agreements of course.
We have custom fields for contract start and end dates and then an internal trigger alert email for a renewal c. 90 days out.
Our internal email then kick-starts the account renewal engagement process. I only get involved if the AM can't manage the renewal or flags a potential issue. This was actually of more value when we worked to 12-month contracts as we have moved to 3-month project sprints and the AM is closer to the DM on a more regular basis.
Do you think a call into the account is worthwhile to identify renewal issues early on, or to seek out upsell opportunities? A friendly chat can be worth its weight in gold!
(P.S. I didn't see your question properly when I responded earlier)
We are also a SaaS business with annual contracts (or 3 year contracts), and we handle renewals much in the same vein as you... We have our Sales Pipeline and our Renewal Pipeline. It made sense for us to do that because the stages and weights didn't line up at all for our renewals. So the stages that we have are Renewal Anticipated (30%), Quote Acceptance (40%), Renewal Confirmed (70%), Verbal No (10%) and Closed Won and Closed Lost.
Once a deal is Closed Won (either new business or a renewal) we create a deal right away for next year's renewal, and put it in Renewal Anticipated...where it will then sit till a quote is sent out 60-90 days in advance of the renewal, and once the customer acknowledges receipt of the quote we move it to Quote Acceptance. It moves to either Renewal Confirmed or Verbal No when they state that they will or will not be moving forward with the renewal, and then Closed Won or Closed Lost from there. It has worked very well for us so far.
You can set up workflow to have a deal auto-created when one moves to Closed Won, but I found that using Zapier to set up a zap to create a new deal allowed me to create a more complete deal record than the workflow, so we do that to help automate the process...and to make sure that a renewal doesn't fall through the cracks because someone forgot to make next year's deal.
We have initiated quarterly Health Check calls to all our customers, which have really helped flag and fix potential issues before they become actual issues AND have increased our up/cross selling.
