The Renewal Conversation You Were Not Invited To

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Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a new episode of the Customer-Value-Led-Growth Newsletter.

I share strategies and guides to help you become a proactive CSM who delivers more value to your customers and revenue to your company every week.

Need additional help? Check out these resources 👇

You open your inbox and see a message from one of your champions:

"Hey, just wanted to give you a heads up. We had a leadership review last week, and we decided not to renew our contract. Our CFO concluded that the value we got from your product does not justify another investement. Thank you for your support.

You re-read it 3 times because you are in disbelief. How did that happen? You open the account in your CRM and start reviewing.

11 months of call notes. Check-ins and QBRs. Features explained and escalations resolved. Everything covered. 11 months of showing up and caring deeply about the customer’s success.

On the outside, everything looked bulletproof. But somewhere in the past few weeks someone you have never met decided in a meeting you have not been invited to that it ain’t good enough.

The renewal conversation happened without you and the decision was not in your favor. Not because the value has not been there. Because nobody could see it.

In today’s post, you’ll learn why it happened and how you can be present in internal renewal conversations without being in the room.

Here is the thing no one will tell you directly. You were not in the room because you were never positioned to be there. Methaphorically speaking, not physically.

It was because for 11 months, the value your product was delivering to this customer was stored in

But it was invisible to the people who needed to see it. Invisible value does not survive a budget conversation.

This is not a new problem. It’s not a rare problem. CSMs have been struggling to demonstrate value for as long as the profession has existed.

But something has changed in the last few years that makes it more urgent than it has ever been.

Budgets are tighter. Every investment is being scrutinised. And the bar for a high-enough ROI has risen significantly.

If you can’t answer the question “What did we get for this investment?” with a number, you are screwed. Most CSMs can’t. Not because the answer does not exist. Because nobody built a system to capture it.

This is likely how the conversations went:

The CFO sat in front of a spreadsheet with a list of all the software the company is using. Expenses in one column and business (financial) outcomes in another one.

When they asked your champion about the ROI, they could not answer with a number. They tried to defend your product by saying how great it’s been to work with you. How the product has transformed their work. How much the users love it.

The CFO listened politely but said something like, “I am sure it’s a great product, but I need to understand the value in terms of financial impact to justify another investment.”

This is where renewals are dying. It does not happen in a heated debate. It happens in a quiet acknowledgement that there’s no objective measure to quantify the value.

If you are lucky, your champion left that meeting with the task to find out the ROI before the decision is made. But too often the decision is already made before you have a chance to react.

The most common mistake CSMs make is demonstrating value only at renewal time. They are hastily put a deck together featuring what happend in the past 11 months. Usage reports, adopted features and resolved tickets.

That’s not a valuy story. It’s a retrospective summary. A real value story that wins the CFO’s favor is built throughout the year. It compounds every quarter (or month) and includes 3 components:

Not product outcomes. Business outcomes. The difference is critical.

"Your team completed the workflow automation module" is a product outcome. It tells the CFO what that team has done with the product. But they don’t care about your product or how the team used it.

"Your team's average processing time dropped from 6.2 hours to 2.8 hours after automating the workflow. It’s approximately saving 300 hours per month across the team.”

That tells the CFO how it mattered for the business. Every piece of evidence you capture needs be expressed in terms of what changed for the business.

Outcomes need numbers, and numbers need context. You need to translate them into financial language that makes the ROI obvious. It requires to understand your customers cost structure well enough.

If you know that the average fully-loaded cost of an hour of the team is $100 you can calculate the full savings. 340 hours that are saved per month equal $ 30k in costs savings.

If we assume, that end of Q3 is where the internal review happens it accumulates to $270k in total cost savings. If they are paying $3k per month for your product, they got $10 for ever $1 they invested in return.

Now the CFO has a number to make an informed decision. Another piece of advice: Don’t let them make the calculation themselve.

Finally, the CFO might ask whether this would have happened without your product. You need to be able to answer it with specific evidence.

Before: Processing time was 6.2 hours. The team was managing the workflow manually. The operations director had flagged it as a productivity risk in their Q1 planning meeting.

Solution: Workflow automation module deployed in month four. Three enablement sessions run with the team in weeks six, seven, and eight. Full adoption confirmed after 3 months.

After: Processing time dropped to 2.8 hours by month five. Has remained below 3 hours for seven consecutive months.

Send this report (management summary) to the CFO at least quarterly. And if you get them to participate, present it in your QBR.

The escalation that needs handling right now. The onboarding is behind schedule. The check-in that should have happened two weeks ago. There are many distractions that keep you from taking action.

Here’s how to start building and communicating the valuy story anyway:

Think of what has happened in a customer account in the last month. A problem that was solved. A milestone that was accomplished. A workflow is completed.

Now ask yourself what it delivered for your customers’ business. Write down the answer in a format that you could share with their CFO that they would immediately understand.

That should not take you more than 5-10 minutes. If you have no specific cost calculation, use industry benchmarks. It’s also worth reaching out to your champion about data to quantify the impact.

When you have the next call scheduled ask your champion a single question:

"When your leadership asks what this investment is delivering, what do you tell them? Did it resonate in the past?"

That question tells you whether your champion has a value story to tell. And it also tells you whether it resonates with the economic buyer.

If the answer is vague or uncomfortable, you have just identified the gap that is going to make the renewal harder than it needs to be. And you have identified it with enough time to close it.

Large companies are using hundreds of software products. Participating in every QBR would make a full time job. If the CFO is willing to join they will pick only a handful. Try to be one of the chosen.

Demonstrating value in person trumps sending a monthly or quarterly report. So think of them as tools to spark interest in joining the conversation. Invite them to the next QBR and tell them why it’s worth their time.

The problem is not that you were not invited to the internal revenue conversation. It’s not about physical presence. It’s about the lack of awareness about the outcomes from the people who need to see it.

Don’t wait for the "official” renewal conversation you have with your customer to demonstrate the ROI. It might be already too late and budgets already decided.

Capture evidence whenever it surfaces and translate it into the language the conomic buyer speaks. If you share the value story throughout the year, the renewal becomes a mere formality.

Become visible.

Start today.

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