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

[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 

[BQuarrell]

Hi Dan,

This is really useful and I have just watched your video updated for 2021.

We are are just implementing HubSpot and have two parts ot our business, annual memberships + annual software licences.

We have various things that need to happen with our members and also our software customers and currently are looking at managing these in a ticket pipeline, how did you manage your customers outside of the renewals process? All our contracts are between £2k and £15k and we aren't looking to implement a separate customer success program at this stage. Thanks!

[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 

[Dan1]

@JennyOD I certainly will, speak soon. 

[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

[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

[severan]

I have been building around Dan's super clever prcoess for a bit and how we handle the double counting issue is by using the main "Sales PIpeline" in conjunction with the renewal pipeline.

The renewal deal, when moved to closed won in the renewal pipeline, triggers a workflow to move it to the main sales pipeline in stage closed/won. By doing that it accurately accounts for the won revenue in the main sales reporting as it is only representted ONCE in the entire system.  This will also trigger the NEXT years renewal deal creation. 

I like it this way as i can track renewal opportunity by quarter, and run churn and net dollar retention reports with the live data as well as keep track of overall revenue all in hubspot without doing any finagling. 

Not sure if I udnerstood the challenge and if this would work for the stated sue case, but there it is. 

🙂

[Gautier123]

Hey, 

I have the same issue of double counting and i try to implement a solution

to overcome this problem. 

When I try to implement your solution @severan, I have a double counting problem in my sales pipeline. Indeed, I have in my sales pipeline for each customer the first contract and the renewal contract. How do you manage this? 

Thanks ! 

[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

[BQuarrell]

Hi Louis, 

There doesn't appear to be any audio in your video, is that intentional? Trying to follow it!

Thanks

Ben

[louischausse]

Hi @BQuarrell,

Yeah I know I should record a new one, but the time is missing.

Do not hesitate should you have any questions.

[Dan1]

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

[mbutterworth]

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

[Dan1]

@mbutterworth  glad it helps

[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 

[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

[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.