Treat renewal as a pipeline, not a date. Every renewal gets a stage, an owner and a forecast category, opened at least a quarter out for anything material. Attach a small number of named plays to the triggers that repeat (health score drops, champion leaves, usage crosses a threshold, executive goes quiet) so the response does not depend on who noticed. Write the plays down with the assets attached, the way GitLab publishes theirs. Then review the misses monthly. The process is not the document, it is the review that keeps the document honest.
4 hand-picked resources, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
Why we picked it A real public company's internal renewal process, published rather than described. You can copy the structure instead of inventing one from blog posts.
From The GitLab Handbook reference
Open handbook.gitlab.com →Why we picked it Shows what a productised CS play looks like when written down for a whole team: a named motion, tied to a product stage, with the assets attached. Rare to see this published.
From The GitLab Handbook reference
Open handbook.gitlab.com →Why we picked it A three-step forecasting framework plus the honest list of what breaks it (cross-team data gaps, non-recurring revenue, scale). Useful when your renewal forecast keeps missing.
From ChurnZero by Chris Pilbeam 10 min read
Open churnzero.com →Why we picked it The single most common cause of a surprise churn, handled step by step, including the 48 hour window for reaching the new contact and the 'you, we, me' meeting structure.
From ChurnZero by Emily Nesterick 9 min read
Open churnzero.com →How expansion, upsell and churn reads from a different seat.
The same ground, over in Grow & market, our Starting Up track.
The same ground, over in Grow organically & retain, our D2C track.
