RENEWAL DECISIONS
Familiar contracts deserve fresh decisions.
Use what actually happened during the contract to decide whether another term deserves the same commitment, different terms or no renewal at all.
Renewals are easy to treat as administration.
- The customer is familiar.
- The service is running.
- People know each other.
There is no new tender forcing the business to reconsider the relationship from first principles.
So the contract continues.
But the business that originally signed it may not be the business renewing it.
- Costs may have moved.
- Delivery effort may be higher than expected.
- Scope may have expanded.
- Service commitments may have become difficult.
- The customer may have become more valuable, or less.
And a contract that made sense two years ago does not automatically deserve another two.
The problem
Familiarity removes the natural decision point.
A new opportunity gets scrutinised because nothing is certain.
An existing relationship can receive less scrutiny precisely because everyone already knows it.
That can make renewal the default when it should be a commercial decision.
Before another term, ask
What did the contract actually require from us?
What changed during delivery?
Where did value erode?
Which parts of the relationship worked well?
Which obligations repeatedly caused difficulty?
What would we price differently knowing what we know now?
If this customer arrived as a new opportunity today, would we still want the deal?
Where the Deal Desk is going
Renew or Walk
Renew or Walk will reopen the commercial decision before another term begins.
The intended question isn't simply whether the customer wants to renew.
It's whether the experience of the contract supports:
The module remains on the roadmap without a public delivery date.
A renewal should be earned by what the contract became, not assumed from what it used to be.
Use the history of the relationship to decide what the next version should look like.