How to handle renewals in your deal pipeline - Best Practices and Pro Tips

[Dan1]

Earlier this year I posted this question to the community and had some great help from many Hubspot Pro's. I wanted to give back to the Hubspot community and pass on the knowledge to other new Hubspot CRM users. 

So I put together a 2 minute video to show the renewal pipeline we created and use based on the feedback gathered. We run a B2B SaaS business with annual contracts, so it is specific to our requirements, however,  hopefully, it will provide some ideas and a basis for a renewal deal pipeline setup. 

If anyone has any further suggestions then please share on this post so that we can build some best practices around this topic. 

All the best, 

Dan 

www.orgcharthub.com

[roisinkirby]

Terrific - thanks for sharing @Dan1

[dleitch]

Hi Dan1,

Thanks for sharing.  Just a quick question.  For the year 2 renewal, is there a 3rd pipeline or does it just start over in the same renewal pipline as year 1?  Also, do you think the renewal process you have setup would work for additional years (i.e. 3, 4, 5, etc.)?

Thanks!

[Dan1 · Accepted solution]

Hi @dleitch, 

When the deal is won for the renewal, the cycle starts again and we rename the deal with "2nd year" tagged onto the end. It's helpful having all the renewal deals (1st, 2nd, 3rd year etc) in one pipeline as you can see the renewal amounts for each quarter very easily. 

I hope this helps, 

Dan 

[louischausse]

Your solution work if you have contracts with standard duration (i.e. 1 year) and the deal close date is the same date as the start date of the contract.

Here's my current situation:

What if a deal can be renewed in advance for a new contract start date in the future and the contract term is always different from one customer to another?

Any thoughts?

[JAnderson5]

This is so helpful! Thank you so much. 

[louischausse1]

thank you for the video

How do you manage workflow reenrollment? It will only work for one cycle?

[Dan1]

@louischausse1 , its split into two workflows, the second below restarts the cycle. Sales pipeline to renewal pipeline

The second restarts the deal in the renewal pipeline once it's gone through the cycle. 

Renewal Pipeline workflow

 I hope this helps? 

Kind Regards, 

Dan 

[louischausse1]

Thank you @Dan1!

I figured out something else by creating a list of contact "to renew" as my enrollment criteria. Since it is contact-based there is no re-enrollment issue.

[CamPage]

Hey Dan - This is really really helpful, thanks!

Question - Do you have a workflow to move deals automatically into each quarter or do you do that manually? If so, how did you set that up? 

Thanks!

[Dan1]

Hi @CamPage , 

Glad its helped 🙂 

We manually moved the deals quarter to quarter manually. But this was so that I could review them with the team together.  So I didn't look into a workflow for that part of the pipeline.  If you figure it out please tell the rest of us, sorry I can't be of more help on this. 

Kind Regards, 

Dan

[mbutterworth]

This is awesome, Dan! Thanks so much for taking the time to share this!

[Dan1]

@mbutterworth  glad it helps

[louischausse · Accepted solution]

Your solution is awesome, but will only work if your contract always has the same term length.

For businesses working with variable contract end dates, that won't do the trick.

Unfortunately, that is not something that HubSpot can manage with its built-in tools.

That's why we've built RenewalSpot, a custom module to manage renewals. Here's how it works:

Check out this video overview of RenewalSpot: https://share.vidyard.com/watch/Hg8U3bAE5xeAWPAqFjWKbs?

Renewal deals are created automatically for each closed-won deals with a known contract end date. Then, a task is generated with a reminder date XX days before that contract end date to notify the deal owner (or another user of your choice) that the renewal is coming soon.

Other settings and configurations are also available to suit your use case.

If you are interested, we can have a chat to setup RenewalSpot on your HubSpot portal.

Learn more here: https://www.auxilio.io/en/products/renewalspot

[Dan1]

@louischausse  top work!! It's so good to have a solution to help with the renewal process. 

[JennyOD]

Hey @Dan1 hope all is well!

From a reporting perspective, how do you ensure you are not double counting revenue? e.g. Deal is moving from Year 2 renewal to Year 3. If you wanted to see how much rev you have in your BoB, how do you ensure you are not counting the original deal closed and the year 1 renewal amount? Thanks a million

[Dan1]

Hi @JennyOD , its a good question. I used these pipelines and workflows back in 2016/ 2017 at my last company, when I was Head of Account Management for Akkroo (Acquired by Integrate.com). We built OrgChartHub as in internal solution in 2017, it was a side project back then, as was this video. I shared the video to show how we were handling renewals at Akkroo at the time, as I thought it would be helpful to other HubSpot customers, I think it has been 🙂

At the time we didn't use the reporting functionality very heavily in HubSpot so this didn't become a factor,  but as you say it would be a factor today and it would double count. I think I need to work on an updated solution and video to try and figure out how it should be done in 2021, incompassing reporting 😊.  

[JennyOD]

Thanks so much for coming back to me @Dan1. If you do think of anything that could solve for this or know of anyone that has perhaps solved for this and wouldn't mind letting me know, that would be great! I am working on this with a customer of mine so any insights would be hugely appreciated. My email is jodoherty@hubspot.com if anything/one springs to mind. Thanks again

[Dan1]

@JennyOD I certainly will, speak soon. 

[JAnderson5]

Thank you for the amazing video. I think this would work well for my company. One issue is that we have subscription numbers that need to be copied to the new deal. Are you attaching products from one deal to the next? Do you have to manually move your deal own the pipeline, or are you using workflows to trigger the change of stage; which triggers your tasks?  

[Dan1]

Hi @JAnderson5 ,

I am really pleased the video helped you. There are a number of properties that we copy across from the sales pipeline when creating the deal for the renewal pipeline. We have a workflow that creates the new deal and this is where we set the properties to be copied across. You can see the workflow below, hopefully this helps you? 

We also have workflows that move the deals along the renewal pipeline based on the close date. You can see one of these workflows below: 

All the best, 

Dan Currin 

Co-Founder 

OrgChartHub 

GeoMapper 

OrgChartHub & GeoMapper named in the Top 30 HubSpot Apps