Renewal opp stages (Salesforce tracking)

Lindsey Kemmerich

Hi all - we're (finally!) building out lifecycle tracking for customers in Salesforce after the initial close.

We're starting off fairly broad since we have quite a bit to go with our SFDC build-out, but curious where customer stage design has gone well / been problematic for others that we can learn from.

Here's how we're thinking about it so far:
- Deliver: implementation (3-6 months) against SOW + first QBR
- Adopt: target 90-day program to drive value. Exit criteria include hitting baselines for customer health + complete set of stakeholder engagement activities.
- Optimize: lots of variability here at the moment. We have multi-year contracts, so assuming delivery and adoption go to plan, we could be in this stage for ~2+ years. We plan to monitor customer health + define key activities throughout (and expansion opps can be opened in parallel), but any challenges you foresee with this long of a stage? Does it lose it's meaning?
- Contract: negotiate order form terms with business and/or procurement depending on customer type.

A bit about our customers/contract cycles:

• Working with financial services primarily
• Initial contract term typically is 3-5 years
• Legacy contracts had auto-renewals so the renewal event wasn't much of an event, but with new customers, we're moving to a model where new order forms will be written up for subsequent periods
  • I think this will be beneficial for securing multi-year renewals, but curious if others have had issues with this leading to churn
  • Switching costs are high so customers would have to be prepared in advance, but that doesn't mean there's no risk

Borrowing from this post on dashboards (Customer Success Leadership Community), we're thinking we can get more granular with renewal stages (initiated, proposed, negotiating, etc.), but maybe there's a better way to incorporate that in the overall  stages?

Look forward to hearing how others are tackling this!