This article comes from Vas Gambhir’s insightful talk, ‘Maximize renewals with omnichannel GTM’, at our #GTM24 event.
Are you leaving money on the table with your renewals strategy?
With the subscription-driven nature businesses today, renewals aren't just a metric – they're the lifeblood of sustainable growth.
As the VP of Customer Success & Renewals Transformation at Cisco, I've seen firsthand how a well-crafted renewals function can take a company's go-to-market success to the next level.
But here's the kicker: most organizations are barely scratching the surface of their renewal potential. What I've learned is that creating an effective renewals strategy isn't just about hitting targets – it's about synchronizing your entire go-to-market approach.
So today, I'll walk you through the key elements that can help you maximize your renewal potential and capture more value from each channel that matters to your business.
Whether you're a seasoned GTM professional looking to fine-tune your renewals strategy or a leader aiming to build a renewals function from the ground up, this guide will provide you with practical, battle-tested insights.
Let's dive in!
Key design decisions for your team
Once you've mapped out your roles, there are three key design decisions to consider:
1. Incentives
Incentives are crucial for aligning your team's actions with your business goals. Consider the key collaboration points you need between different roles in your go-to-market strategy.
Also, think about how you want to handle migrations or portfolio transitions. Who should lead these conversations? Your trusted advisor in customer success, or the person driving the renewal?
There's no one-size-fits-all answer, but it's a critical decision that can significantly impact your renewal rates.
Finally, consider whether your customer success team should have a quota or revenue-generating role. In some cases, particularly in consumption models, this might overlap with your account management function.
In other environments, it might make sense for customer success to lead both value realization and closing deals in certain segments.
2. The role of partners
Partners are increasingly looking to add value beyond just helping you scale. Defining how big a role you want partners to play in your ecosystem is one of the most critical decisions you can make.
If partners lead, you're implicitly saying that your direct relationship with the customer is in support of the partner. If you want to own the direct relationship, you need to explicitly define the services those partners will provide.
