Nobody owns the renewal date

Ask your team a simple question this week: who owns the renewal date?

You'll get a few answers. Sales will say customer success. Customer success will say they manage the relationship but the commercial side sits with sales. Finance will say they invoice whatever the system tells them to. Somebody will mention that the CRM has a renewal field.

What you won't get is a name. And that gap costs more than most boards realise.

What goes missing

Here's what happens when renewals belong to everybody.

The contract auto-renews at the old price. The indexation clause that would have added 3% or 4% was never triggered, because nobody sent the notice. That money is gone for the year, and the base you'd index next year is lower.

The customer's notice window passes without anyone talking to them. Then their notice arrives, 90 days out, and you're negotiating from behind.

A three-year deal quietly rolls onto a one-year term, because the renewal was processed as admin rather than sold. You've just swapped a committed customer for one who can leave every twelve months.

Usage has grown well past the contract, and the renewal goes through at the same volume. Nobody looked.

None of this shows up as a line on the P&L. It shows up as net revenue retention a few points lower than it should be, and a board asking why.

Why it falls through

The renewal sits on a handoff. Sales wins the deal and moves on. Customer success inherits the customer but usually isn't commercial. Finance has the billing schedule but not the contract terms. The terms themselves live in a PDF that nobody opens until there's a dispute.

So the CRM has a renewal date and a value. It doesn't have the notice period, the indexation clause, the cap, or what the customer is actually using. Without those, you can't run a renewal. You can only process one.

The fix

You don't need new software. You need a register and an owner.

Build the register from the contracts, not the CRM. For every live contract: renewal date, notice period on both sides, auto-renewal terms, indexation clause and index, any caps, and current usage against entitlement. It's a few weeks of dull work. Do it once.

Set triggers well ahead. 120 days out, the account is reviewed: usage, health, uplift due. 90 days out, the uplift notice goes. 60 days out, the commercial conversation has happened. If you're starting at 30 days, you're already negotiating on the customer's timetable.

Give it one owner. Not a team. A person, with renewals in their objectives and in how they're paid.

Apply the uplift by default. Waiving it should need sign-off from someone who isn't measured on that renewal. You'll be surprised how many waivers stop happening when someone has to ask.

Put renewals in the weekly forecast call. The next 120 days of renewals, their value, the uplift, and any risk. Called the same way as new business, with the same scrutiny.

Start earlier than you think

The best renewal work happens long before the renewal. When I ran retention and adoption across a large software group, the biggest lever was moving the start of the renewal process from month eleven to month three. By the time the commercial conversation came round, we already knew whether the customer was using what they'd bought, and had fixed it if they weren't. That programme ran at 120% net and 90% gross revenue retention.

A customer who's getting value from the product rarely fights a contractual uplift. A customer who's barely logged in will fight everything.

The question to ask on Monday

Pick your next ten renewals. For each one, ask: what's the notice date, has the uplift been applied, and how does usage compare with the contract?

If the answers come back quickly and they're all good, you're in better shape than most. If they don't, you've found the gap.

Veridian runs renewals tracking, uplift governance and the weekly forecast as part of outsourced revenue operations. Or start a conversation.