Sales Stages for Renewal Pipeline

Jake Smith

Hi -

Looking to understand if there are any standard and/or benchmark "sales stages" that are used to track and manage the renewal pipeline? Appreciate any and all feedback!

Steve Bernstein

Hi Jake -- Your question is music to my ears!  This is a broader topic, but generally our customers have deliberate plays that are driven well in advance of the renewal in order to

(1) Understand the stakeholder team with roles and responsibilities, not just single-threading with one contact in the account,

(2) strengthen relationships with all the right contacts,

(3) understand what's working well and what needs improvement, along with the impact, and

(4) execute Joint Success Plans based on those insights from 1-3.

Especially since people change jobs all the time, your stakeholder team -- the group of people that collectively make the purchase decisions -- need a cadence of ongoing engagement/dialog, which should be aligned to key customer goals and milestones, similar to how Sales runs their "hunting" process. I suspect you know this, given you are posting this question here, but without more information about your company and objectives it's tough to provide guidance... any specific questions or information you can provide to help the discussion?

/Steve

Steve Bernstein

Hi Jake -- In response to your DM (answering here for community-wide participation) where you asked about number of stages... For number of stages, the way we do it with Waypoint's TopBox software is no more than 3 "stages" in the first year:

1. Onboarding... roughly ~1 week after you believe the initial onboarding is complete is a great time to set a baseline for the account. We trigger "assessment" invitations to be sent to the onboarding participants AND to the key stakeholders ("buying committee") to have them assess their own level of readiness to obtain their goals and also key parts of the experience to date. Those assessments are then addressed for any "negative" (low rated) feedback, plus a baseline is set to track those same accounts and contacts over time to alert for drops in sentiment. You'll also be educating your customers on your process by demonstrating that you listen, so they are much more liable to participate again in the future. Look for 80% participation (response) rates here.

2. Time to first value: Usually you will have a milestone that customers achieve that demonstrates some value for your offering. Many of our customers find this is usually 3-6 months into the relationship.  They should assess their (new) experiences and outcomes to date. And same follow-up process, but probably with an EBR following, i.e. best to spend EBR time on SOLUTIONS based on sharing their feedback (aggregated at the account level), rather than discussing problems in the EBR.  Now you have a well-formed Joint Success Plan that articulates the key things that will address their gaps, with responsibilities assigned and agreed on BOTH sides.

3. Depending on the timing of  #2 and the length/complexity of your renewal and remediation process, you may want one more assessment prior to the renewal phase so you know clearly who the participants are in the renewal process, plus if any issues are liable to come up.

In subsequent years it's essentially rinse-and-repeat, with a max of 2 assessments (each 6 months).

Hope this helps, and happy to continue the dialog!

/Steve

Jake Smith

Thanks Steve - super helpful to get your insight and feedback!