Nobody Runs MEDDPICC on a Renewal

When new pipeline is this hard to create, the customer base carries the number, and it is still the least inspected revenue most companies have.

Think about the last new-logo deal your team forecast at commit. Before it got there, somebody checked that the economic buyer had actually been in a meeting, that the champion was still a champion, that the metric the buyer cared about had come up more than once, and that the paper process had a name attached to it. Probably more than once, in a deal review, with a manager pushing back.

Now think about the largest renewal on your books this quarter. Who checked any of that?

In most companies nobody did, because nobody thinks of a renewal as a deal. It goes into the forecast at full value on the day the contract is signed and stays there until a customer success manager hears something they don't like, usually around the point where there is very little left to do about it.

Under-inspection costs you in both directions. The renewal that quietly dies is the obvious one. The one I think about more is the account that is growing in a direction nobody is watching.

Here is an example from our own book. One of our customers was running at 158% of the seats they had bought. If all we had been watching was the renewal, we would have kept their annual contract at exactly the same number and called the account healthy, because by every usual measure it was.

The more useful finding came when we looked at who those users actually were. The team that bought Spotlight was not the main user. A whole other team inside the customer's revenue organization had started using it on its own, and that team's management didn't know the tool existed, let alone that it was something they would want. Nothing more sophisticated than a breakdown of active users by team showed us that, and it let us go back into the same account and offer Spotlight to a group nobody had ever sold to. That is a very different conversation from asking for a bigger renewal.

Why this year is different

New pipeline has become expensive to create. Every buyer's inbox is now full of outreach a model wrote, most of it reads that way, and the deals that do make it into the pipeline are taking longer to close. None of that is a reason to stop prospecting. It is a reason to look hard at where next year's number will actually come from, and for a lot of software companies past their first few years, the honest answer is the customers they already have: keeping them, and growing the number of teams and users inside each one.

Those buyers already know what you do and already trust you enough to have signed once. Which makes it strange that the discipline we spent a decade building for new business mostly stops at the signature.

What customer success already has

Customer success teams are not flying blind. Most run a health score built from product usage, support tickets and survey results, a QBR cadence, and an executive sponsor program on the biggest accounts. Usage data in particular is honest in a way a rep's notes rarely are. If I were standing up a CS function from scratch, I would build exactly that first. But a health score would have rated our 158% account green and moved on, and the expansion was in the detail underneath it.

What a health score tells you is whether the product is being used. It cannot tell you whether the renewal is still alive. A customer can log in every day and still not renew, because the person who signed has left, because a new CFO is reviewing every vendor above a certain size, or because the outcome they bought you for hasn't been mentioned in a meeting since onboarding. Each of those shows up in conversations months before it shows up in a dashboard.

Run the renewal like the deal it is

A renewal is an opportunity. It has a close date, an amount, a buyer, a decision process and competitors, one of which is always the option to do nothing. An expansion is the same thing with a different amount. So the questions are the ones you already ask on new business.

Is the economic buyer the same person who signed, and have they been in a meeting this year? Is there still a champion, and is that person engaged or just being polite? Did the outcome the customer paid for actually happen, and is anyone on their side saying so out loud? Who is actually using what you sold, and is it the team that bought it? Who has started showing up to calls who wasn't there at the start, and what do they think of you?

None of that is exotic. It is MEDDPICC with the metrics pointed at outcomes delivered rather than outcomes promised.

The reason it rarely happens is the same reason it rarely happened on new business ten years ago. It is a lot of work, the CSM is carrying dozens of accounts, and nobody has the hours to go back through every call to answer four questions per customer.

Where Spotlight fits

We built Spotlight to do that work on new-business opportunities, and a renewal or expansion in Salesforce is an opportunity like any other. The same engine listens to every customer conversation, qualifies the opportunity against the framework you run, whether that is MEDDPICC or one you define for renewals, and keeps track of who on the customer side is engaged and how they feel about you. It scores each opportunity on that evidence: whether the champion and economic buyer are present, stakeholder sentiment, how recently anyone met, and how long the opportunity has been stuck in its stage.

That score feeds a bottom-up forecast, so a renewal that is quietly going wrong stops sitting at full value. And the manager who owns the book gets the same Friday summary of their largest accounts closing in the next ninety days that a sales leader gets, with risks and next steps attached.

What gets harder

The first quarter is uncomfortable. Renewals that were sitting at full value will move, because something in the evidence says they should, and the customer success forecast will drop before it gets more accurate. Have that conversation with your CFO before the numbers have it for you.

It also changes the CSM role. Running a renewal as a deal means asking customers commercial questions earlier and more directly than many CS teams are used to. Some of your CSMs will find that a natural extension of the job, and some will feel it is a different job.

And it only works on conversations it can see. A renewal that gets decided over dinner between your CEO and theirs won't show up anywhere until somebody debriefs it.

This week, pick the three largest renewals in the next two quarters and put them through a deal review, with the same questions and the same skeptical manager you would use on a new-logo commit. If all three hold up, good. If one doesn't, you found it with time left to do something.

See how Spotlight.ai runs renewals with the same rigor as new business at Spotlight.ai.