Renewals

A renewal is the re-signing of a contract when its term ends — where the year's work is banked or lost. Vocabulary:

• auto-renewal (renews by default unless notice is given)
• notice period (how far before expiry cancellation notice is due — often 30–90 days)
• uplift (a built-in or negotiated price rise at renewal, e.g. 5% per annum or CPI-linked)

The renewal timeline

The most important habit: a renewal is a project that starts 90–180 days before the end date, not an email the week before. A sensible enterprise cadence:

• T-180: internal review — health (usage, support history, stakeholder map), classify as safe / at-risk / expansion opportunity. If at-risk, the save plan starts now.
• T-120 to T-90: customer conversation about value delivered — ideally a value-review meeting (see QBRs). Surface dissatisfaction while there's time to fix it; confirm who will sign this time (people and budgets move).
• T-90 to T-60: commercial proposal: term, price, uplift, any expansion bundled in. Also check the customer's procurement lead-times — in the NHS or big pharma their internal approval alone can take 60+ days.
• T-60 to T-0: negotiation and paperwork. Nothing new should be discovered here.

Never rely on auto-renew as a retention strategy — legally safe, relationally dead.

Risk signals

The things that predict churn months in advance:

• Usage decline: fewer logins, active users, transactions. The single strongest leading indicator.
• Champion departure: your champion — the insider who personally advocates for you — leaves or moves. Accounts often churn at the next renewal, when nobody in the room remembers why they bought.
• Missed QBRs / declining engagement: meetings postponed twice, slow replies, attendee seniority dropping. Disengagement precedes cancellation.
• Unresolved support tickets: especially escalated ones. Watch severity and age, not just count.
• Structural signals: M&A, new leadership, budget freezes, a competitor's champion hired into the account, procurement suddenly asking for the contract "for review".

Voice from the field

"The seeds of churn are planted early."
— Lincoln Murphy, Sixteen Ventures (2013)

Save plays

The structured responses when an account turns red:

1. Diagnose before medicating. Value (no outcomes), product (gaps or quality), relationship (a person problem), or budget/politics (nothing to do with you)? Each has a different play; discounting a value problem just delays the churn a year.
2. Re-onboard / success plan: for value problems — return to the original business case, restate what success was meant to look like, run a 60–90-day plan with named owners on both sides.
3. Executive engagement: bring your executive to theirs; sponsor-to-sponsor conversations reset stale working-level relationships and signal the account matters.
4. Commercial restructuring: last resort, always traded — a smaller footprint rather than full churn ("downgrade to save the logo"), a bridge term, or a discount for a multi-year commitment or case study.

Field note

Ask a room of experienced AMs about renewals they lost and almost none of the stories start in the renewal quarter. The champion left in the spring, the integration ticket aged over the summer, the QBR slipped twice — and by the time procurement sent the termination notice the decision was months old. Renewal season is when churn gets recorded, not when it happens; that is the honest case for the T-180 habit.

Renewal negotiation

Customers ask for price holds or cuts; vendors want uplifts — justified with delivered value and product investment, not "our costs went up". Multi-year deals trade a modest discount for certainty and are usually good business (renewal risks removed, predictability improved).

Procurement often arrives late and pushes on price; your defence is documented value (what QBRs are for) plus options beyond "lower the price" — term length, payment timing, scope, service tiers. Never give a concession without getting one.