How To Fix Your Renewal Process With Salesforce (For Free)

Renewals keep your cash flow stable, your workforce secure, and your growth predictable. But  when teams are focused on chasing new business, renewals can fall by the wayside. 

But without focusing on your renewals process you leave yourself vulnerable. 

We’ve seen it too many times in recent years, especially in tech companies. Cash flow can dry up, investment is non-existent and loans are crazy expensive, all of which can force you to make tough decisions like reducing investment in your workforce and even laying employees off. This not only stifles future growth, but it leaves you chasing new business even more, but at a much higher acquisition cost versus existing business. 

So, how can you do your best to avoid this? The first step is to make sure you have a robust renewals process in place. 

In this article, we’ll unpack the most common pain points businesses face in the renewals process, and how you can use Salesforce to help turn unpredictable revenue into a steady, reliable stream you can count on.

Visibility 

The first step to having a robust renewals process in place is ensuring you have visibility into when your customers are due to renew. This may sound easy, you sell a customer something and then you generate a renewal opportunity that is due to close at the end of the customer’s existing term. But this is a simplistic view of renewals. 

Renewing a customer involves much more than simply sending them an invoice for the renewed period and calling it a day. Having visibility into your renewal opportunities is step one, but step two is truly understanding your customer and their use of your product or service. If a customer is unhappy or doesn’t use your tool on a regular basis, they are a major churn risk. 

These details should live in your CRM, but could easily be buried or simply not up to date, depending on the state of your CRM. Uncovering them, and more importantly using them, is critical to ensuring your renewals do happen on time and ideally for a higher value than their previous year’s spend. 

Without clear visibility, there’s no time to repair strained relationships or address service issues. The result is lost revenue and churn that could have been avoided.

So how can you achieve this visibility in your CRM? 

Free Solution:
A basic CRM dashboard can provide some visibility. With a bit of manual effort, you (or your CRM admin) can set up reminders for renewal dates and track customer engagement by piecing together data from various fields. 

This approach can work, but it’s reactive and prone to gaps, especially if your team is stretched thin or turnover leads to a loss of historical context. Without reliable data, this strategy can fall short, leaving you prone to late renewals, unhappy customers and more. 

Paid Solution:
Instead of relying on your Salesforce Admin, who is probably already stretched extremely thin, a tailored dashboard, like the one provided by Plan2Renew, improves the renewals process by consolidating all renewal opportunities in a single, real-time view, color-coded by risk level.

Immediately, you’re able to identify and mitigate high-risk accounts (flagged in red), giving your team an indication of where to focus their limited resources. With intuitive visuals and tracking, your team will stay ahead of renewals, ensuring every opportunity is addressed before it’s too late. 

And because it’s 100% native to Salesforce, Plan2Renew can utilize all of your existing Salesforce data, meaning you can have a true 360 degree view of your customer, which is so important when it comes to renewals. 

Accountability

Your hand-off process might be rock solid when you sign a new customer, but renewals are different. Renewals often happen 12, 24, 36 or more months down the line, by which time your teams could be completely different, your company could look very different and more. 

Because of the length of time between initial signing and renewal, sometimes accountability can get lost in the shuffle making things chaotic in the process. Tasks get missed, team members assume someone else is handling the follow-up, and the result is unnecessary lost revenue (and customers!).  

Your CRM should be set up to handle renewals, even if the timeframe for them is years down the line. 

Free Solution:
Standard CRM task features can help assign responsibilities. Managers can manually create tasks, attach deadlines, and assign them to individual team members. While this method works, it relies heavily on consistent follow-up and manual updates, especially when team members leave, change roles, etc. which is common-place in today’s world. 

The system is only as good as the team’s discipline in using it, and it doesn’t address how tasks connect to the larger renewal strategy. 

Paid Solution:
Using a tool specifically geared towards renewals can improve your team’s accountability. Plan2Renew simplifies task management by tying each task directly to a renewal opportunity, making it clear who’s responsible for what at every stage. 

Unlike Salesforce tasks, which are general-purpose and often disconnected from the bigger picture, Plan2Renew prioritizes actions based on renewal-specific risks. High-risk accounts are flagged, tasks are tracked with clear deadlines, and all updates stay in one place. No chasing emails, no fragmented communication. 

Just a simple, focused way to manage renewals that keeps your team accountable. 

Missed Signals

Churn is a slow process. Long before a client decides to leave, they will show signs of dissatisfaction or disengagement. Maybe it’s a drop in usage, unresolved support tickets, or changes in communication patterns. 

The problem is, without a system in place to monitor these red flags, they’re easy to miss. By the time the renewal rolls around, the relationship is too far gone to salvage, leaving your team with a loss that could have been otherwise prevented had some signals been taken into account in advance.

Free Solution:
It is possible to try tracking warning signs manually in your CRM. For example, monitoring the number of support cases a client raises and comparing them against average benchmarks for similar accounts. 

While this approach can uncover potential risks, it requires significant manual effort, ongoing setup, and vigilance to interpret trends accurately. With busy teams and shifting priorities, it’s easy for crucial insights to be missed.

Paid Solution:
Plan2Renew integrates relationship strength metrics directly into your renewal process. These metrics provide a clear picture of account health, highlighting which clients need immediate attention. The Coaching Panel takes this a step further, offering actionable insights into relationship dynamics and guiding your team on how to approach each account. By the time renewal time comes, your team is ahead of potential issues, strengthening relationships and increasing the likelihood of securing renewals.

Standard Approach

Every account is different. Standard renewal processes often take a one-size-fits-all approach, overlooking the fact that every customer has unique needs. For larger or more complex accounts, this can be a critical misstep. 

With multiple stakeholders, a generic strategy won’t work. When teams don’t tailor their approach, they risk alienating key decision-makers, leaving renewals at a higher risk of failure. 

Free Solution:
A manual approach might involve gathering data on stakeholders and mapping their roles within the account. This can help your team identify decision-makers and influencers, enabling them to refine their pitch. 

While effective for smaller accounts, this process becomes difficult for complex ones, requiring significant time and coordination to pull together accurate insights.

Paid Solution:
With large, complex accounts, the renewals are bound to also be complex, which is why a custom Coaching Panel and Stakeholder Mapping from Plan2Renew help your teams close every renewal, no matter how big or small. 

The Coaching Panel offers tailored insights on how to approach each account based on its specific details, providing a clear path to renewal success. When paired with OrgChartPlus, you can visualize stakeholders, understand their influence, and create renewal pitches that address their unique priorities. 

This targeted approach ensures every renewal strategy feels relevant and personalized, improving your chances of success.

No Prioritization

Renewals can feel overwhelming. There’s so much data to sift through. It’s easy for teams to lose sight of what matters most, happy customers and sustainable revenue. 

Without clear prioritization, resources are often misallocated, and high-risk accounts don’t get the attention they need. This lack of focus puts renewal success at risk and wastes valuable time on low-impact efforts.

Free Solution:
Prioritize your accounts manually, using spreadsheets or CRM reports to rank accounts by perceived risk or importance. While this method can work for small portfolios, it’s time-consuming, prone to errors, and most importantly, isn’t scalable as you grow. 

Without real-time insights, it’s hard to stay on top of shifting priorities, leaving critical accounts vulnerable. There will always be some element of manual work for the sales rep or account manager, but manual prioritization can eat up their time and prevent them from spending time where they really need to, with your customers. 

Paid Solution:
Highlighting the most critical actions for each account, as well as factoring in risk levels and account complexity is crucial for the success of renewals, and with Plan2Renew’s “Next Steps” feature, you can do just that. 

High-priority tasks are surfaced in real-time, ensuring your team focuses on what matters most. Plan2Renew helps reduce churn and secures renewals by making these high-priority tasks clear, so your team spends their time where it counts.

Summary

Renewals are critical to maintaining stable cash flow and driving predictable growth, but without the right processes in place, they’re also a common source of revenue leakage. While out-of-the-box solutions like CRM dashboards and task features can help address visibility and accountability, they often fall short of delivering the proactive, strategic insights needed to secure renewals effectively.

Plan2Renew bridges this gap, and takes things one step further, by offering tailored solutions that address every stage of the renewal process. 

From dashboards that highlight high-risk accounts and relationship strength metrics that uncover red flags, to Coaching Panels and Stakeholder Mapping that enable personalized strategies, Plan2Renew turns renewals into an organized process.

Stop missing opportunities, and scrambling at the last minute. Enjoy steady, reliable revenue that helps your business thrive. With Plan2Renew, revenue leakage at the time of renewal can truly be a thing of the past.

Get in touch for a free demo today!