What is the best way to create and roll out a repeatable and scalable renewal process when joining as a revenue leader?

There isn't a one size fits all approach, however, this framework is a good place to start in order to deeply understand your customers. I like to position each obstacle as a "how might we" question in order to solve:

1. Assess & Define Customer Lifecycle: What are the behaviors of our most successful customers? What did their customer journey look like? How were they onboarded? What are the behaviors of customers who expanded? How might we scale the successes and learn from the failures? 

   1. Awareness: How might we get our product in front of more customers with the right messaging at the right time? Which channels are most/least effective? MQL by source.

   2. Evaluation: How might we customize the customer experience to solve specific pain points to drive customer acquisition? How do we get to realized ROI faster, specific to a use case?

   3. Acquisition: How might we drive time to value faster and reduce onboarding so customers expand sooner? What onboarding hurdles can we eliminate? How might we automate onboarding and reduce internal resources to support our customers (turnkey vs. CX resources needed).

   4. Value Realized: How might we drive quantifiable impact faster and get multi-threaded across the executive team to instill value at the business level? What value do we provide at the departmental level vs. corporate/business level to solve organizational wide challenges?

   5. Rules of Engagement: Audit exisiting process, identify gaps, inefficiencies, and opportunities for improvement. Interview your current team and customers to understand current challenges and customer needs.

      1. What is your CX team responsible for? How might we put together a comp plan that incentivizes the outcomes we're aiming to drive with our customers?

   6. Customer Support: How might we drive impactful QBRs with our customers in order to be a mission critical solution globally? 

      1. Product Led: To reiterate, how might we automate more of the onboarding process?

      2. Customer Maturity Model: Prescriptive with our customers by creating custom milestones of achievement throughout their contract to guarantee renewal. 

      3. Segmentation: Defining where CS/Support resources are best spent based on CAC. How might we remove internal blockers to our CX team so they can spend all of their time with our highest valued customers?

2. User Engagement & Referral Programs: Encouraging existing users to refer new customers can be a cost-effective way to expand the customer base

   • Insert referral bonus in our product

   • Incentivize G2 review post positive implementation

3. Data Monetization: Leveraging product insights to determine which accounts have the highest propensity to expand & which should be flagged as churn/contraction risk.

   • Advocacy: How might we build a customer advisory board as a revenue stream? How might we get our customers on stage touting about the impact our solution has on their organization? 

   • Churn: How might we reduce regrettable churn? How do we measure customer health? How might we get ahead of customers moving to a “red” stage? How might we identify at-risk customers sooner in order to reduce risk of churn?

   • NRR: What is driving the most successful NRR outcomes? What can we replicate in our motion across each segment of our customers to drive renewals? How might we drive more multi-year contracts to drive longevity with our customers? How might we get in front of our customers far before renewal to ensure they’re healthy (reiterating the customer maturity model from day 1 of onboarding)

4. Expansion: How might we get multi-threaded sooner and provide more use cases to our customers? 

   1. Create expansion playbooks & account plans for high growth propensity accounts (ARR threshold, employee size, etc.)

   2. Training CS on discovery (value selling, multi-threading, solving for outcomes, driving solutions vs. selling features)

   3. Enable your entire revenue organization on how to negotiate (give/get)

   4. CS opportunity to build muscle by identifying opportunities. Incentivization around expansion pipeline creation (% payout for expansion deals)

   5. Customer Health: Define, report, measure, analyze customer health to ensure gross revenue retention? How might we create a customer maturity model that guides our customers through custom journeys to realize ROI quickly? 

      1. At Risk: How might we implement a system to identify at risk customers in order to act quickly to eliminate regrettable churn? How might we get to a fast yes/no sooner to ensure we don't waste resources on renewals that are already lost. What learnings can we take?