For years, renewals has been handled as an administrative task: a spreadsheet, a pipeline view, a reminder to send a quote 90 days out.
The data says that’s no longer how the best-performing companies treat it.
Renewals has become a strategic function with its own organizational structure, its own economics, and a tooling gap nobody has filled yet.
Are you still treating renewals as a task instead of a strategy? This is what it’s costing you.
Ownership has already moved to dedicated specialists
Fifty-two percent of companies now have dedicated renewal specialists who own the renewal. Not sales, not customer success, but a named function with its own accountability (TSIA).
Companies where a renewal specialist owns the process grow at 22%. When sales owns the renewals quota alongside net-new targets, growth drops to 13%.
Organizational design with dedicated renewal specialists is a growth lever, and many companies haven’t pulled it yet.
The board is watching GRR, not just NRR
Median gross revenue retention (GRR) fell from 88% to 84% in the most recent year measured. Net revenue retention (NRR) barely moved, holding around 101% over the same period.
That gap is the story. NRR looks stable because expansion revenue is papering over it. GRR, the number that can’t be flattered by upsell, is still bleeding, and the 75th percentile fell almost as much as the median, from 95% to 91%. Nobody is exempt.
Investors now ask for GRR and NRR as a pair, with a GRR floor that investors won’t let a business slip below.
GRR is a headline metric now, because retention has moved to the centre of how portfolios get valued. That’s a board-level signal that renewals is being measured as a strategic output, not an operational line item.
The tooling hasn’t caught up
Forrester, the independent analyst firm that tracks enterprise software markets, published its Q4 2025 Wave evaluation of customer success platforms. Its assessment was stark. “Many of today’s customer teams are expected to rely on cobbled together software solutions that are ill equipped to support their work.”
The tools that do exist stop short of the job. Customer success platforms track health and signal but stop before the transaction happens. Quote-to-close tools pick up at the transaction with no upstream intelligence about which accounts are at risk. Most software can’t manage the complexity of product and pricing packaging inherent in clients’ portfolios.
No major analyst firm defines renewal management as its own category. It gets folded into customer success, which means it inherits customer success’s priorities and tooling instead of its own.
That matters because most CSMs spend the bulk of their week on tickets, status updates and chasing signatures rather than running a strategic renewals process.
Together, that’s a growth-efficiency lever being run on spreadsheets, by people who don’t have time to manage it strategically, in a category that doesn’t formally exist yet.
Renewals is becoming a System of Work
Tidal Ventures, an investor in Renewtrak, published a thesis in May 2025 that names a pattern worth borrowing: enterprise software is moving from Systems of Record i.e. tools that store data and wait for a human to act on it, to Systems of Work, i.e. tools that do the work itself. In their words, “a System of Work doesn’t just tell you what needs doing; it’s the system that actually does it.”
That’s the gap the previous section describes, just given a name. A spreadsheet is a system of record in its most primitive form. Even the customer success platforms and quote-to-close tools that replaced it are still largely systems of record: they display a health score, surface a risk flag, generate a quote. A person still has to notice, decide, and execute every step in between.
Applied to renewals, that means the winning model isn’t a better dashboard. It’s a system that moves a renewal from early signal through to a closed, governed outcome. A human is reviewing and approving, but not operating, every step.
From tactic to strategy: what changes
| Tactical view | Strategic view |
|---|---|
| Send the renewal reminder 90 days out | Identify signal (opportunity or risk), devise intervention, governed execution, issue quote, conclude renewal. |
| One step, one person, one spreadsheet | A connected, insight-driven motion with accountability and governance at every stage. |
A tactic is a reminder to renew.
A strategy is governed motion from early signal through to close, with evidence at each stage and someone accountable at every gate.
I ran a “magic wand” exercise with customers recently: if you could fix anything about renewals with no constraints, what would it be?
The answers kept coming back to systems and process, visibility, and customer experience.
It left me with this: the tactical fixes you’d want to make are usually pointing to a strategic rethink.
Fixing one tool or adding one headcount doesn’t solve any of it on its own. A strategic framework does.
The efficiency mandate makes this urgent
Every function is being told to cut cost without cutting output, and renewals hasn’t been exempt.
But the outsourced renewals model most companies default to still prices per head or per hour. That’s tactical pricing applied to a function that should be strategic.
You don’t solve a do-more-with-less mandate by adding more tactical effort. You solve it by giving the function strategy-grade tooling and real accountability.
Cost-to-renew: the number almost nobody tracks
Most revenue leaders know their customer acquisition cost (CAC) to the dollar. Renewal revenue costs a fraction of that to secure, yet resourcing and attention still flow toward new acquisitions.
If companies calculated a cost-to-renew the same way they calculate CAC, renewals would show up as the cheapest revenue they have.
Yet almost nobody runs that calculation. Not measuring it is itself evidence that renewals is still being treated as a tactic.
What’s next for renewals
With an increasing focus on outcomes rather than inputs, and economic conditions that demand efficiency and cost management alongside growth, now is the time to consider how businesses can build strong revenue foundations effectively.
Renewals represents a significant and often untapped opportunity. A shift towards this way of thinking is happening but nascent; the solutions are finally available to accelerate that shift.
Leading companies are developing renewals strategies to meet the moment, and no longer treating it as sales’ poorer second cousin.