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Renewals Solution (Not Software)

Jim Stockwell
Jim Stockwell

For many business challenges, a quick-fix solution can be tempting. Buy and install a piece of software and your renewal business will immediately be easier to manage and more effective at driving revenue (not that such a piece of software exists). However, we all know that it's never that easy. Every company has unique needs and requires different levels of change management to begin using a new system. A simple piece of software will rarely deliver any significant or long term impact.

The true path to turning your IT channel renewal business into an effective source of recurring revenue – by improving partner satisfaction, making better use of your install base, mitigating margin compression, and hedging against economic downturns – is to approach your renewals solution as a process.

Step 1: Assess Your Existing Renewal Business and Identify Inefficiencies, Data Errors, and Opportunities for Improvement

A renewal business relies on data from many disparate sources: pricing manuals, product SKU books, contract terms, and more. It requires reviews and approvals up and down the channel between vendors, distributors, resellers, and end customers.

Manual data management methods like spreadsheets create too much opportunity for errors, and manual methods of communications like email for quote reviews, revisions, and approvals invite delays as people inevitably miss a message in their inbox or are out of the office for travel or vacation.

In order to rebuild your renewal business as an optimized and efficient sales tool, you must first identify and understand where the current problems lie. Are there particular types of data that are more prone to error than others? Which steps in the renewals process are most time-consuming or inefficient?

Step 2: Benchmarking – Creating Workflows that Work

Most IT companies struggle with their renewal operations. While specific solutions need to be tailored individually, there are common themes that can be benchmarked in terms of data management, quoting procedures, partner interactions, common partner complaints, challenges within the industry, and program goals. Tapping into resources that can present these commonalities in a format from which to build your company's successful renewal business is a valuable starting point.

With benchmarking data in hand, you can develop workflows that will walk your operations through the renewals process step-by-step, from identification of the renewals opportunity to closing. An example of a simplified workflow based on industry benchmarking may be:

  1. Automatically feed and cleanse data from of disparate sources
  2. Generate local currency quote 90 days from expiry
  3. Express opportunity to relevant channel partner
  4. Continue to remind partner or end customer of renewal until closure
  5. Receive and process order
  6. Send invoice
  7. Repeat
Keys to Growth: Reporting that Provides Visibility into the Renewal Business

Many IT businesses have little to no visibility into the renewals side of their business, which makes strategic planning and growth nearly impossible. In order to gain control of the renewals business, the channel must be able to easily access related data. In order to establish and maintain an effective renewals business, the channel must be able to access data that provides:

  • Accurate and consistent visibility of available opportunities (by vendor, channel partner, and service type)
  • Real-time feedback on bookings, renewal, retention and transaction rates
  • Win/loss statistics
  • Analytics to measure the effects of pricing changes, service migrations, or strategic decisions related to service offerings
  • Performance reporting with ability to drill down into specific regions, territories, individual sales agent, or end user
  • Filters that enable selective reporting such as products, service offerings, opportunity types, or specific business areas
  • Historical comparisons to enable identification of deviations from positive trends

Role-based dashboards and reports that are automatically pushed out based on an individual user's preferred schedule will ensure that this valuable data is integrated into daily decision-making.

At the end of the day, building a renewal business that continually grows and contributes to the bottom line is a process, not a simple product that can be installed.

Get more detailed information about best practices in renewals management by downloading our "Ultimate Renewals Playbook."

Ultimate Renewals Playbook

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