Fix Your Broken Renewal Pipeline: A Practical Guide

Your renewal pipeline is broken.

You know it.

Your customers call asking what’s renewing.

And you have no clue.

Meanwhile, Mega VAR can show them their renewals in seconds. That’s why they’re winning the business—and why you’re slowly losing yours.

If you want to fix it, follow this process. It’s not easy, but it’s the right way to do it.

Phase 1: Get Your Contracts, Assets, and Software in One Place

Right now, your data is scattered across emails, spreadsheets, internal tools, and maybe even Post-it notes. You can’t manage renewals effectively if your contracts, assets, and software aren’t centralized.

This first phase is manual, and there’s no way around it. But it’s necessary.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Pull every contract from every source—distributors, OEMs, internal sales tracking, and customer files.
• Map each contract to the right customer so you can track who owns what.
• Identify associated assets and software to ensure no renewals are missed.
• Standardize naming conventions so there’s no confusion about what’s being tracked.

Once you have everything in one place, you’ll see the gaps. Some contracts will be missing. Some assets won’t have serial numbers. But this step is about building a foundation, not perfection.

Phase 2: Open Up the Customer Portal to Beta Users

Once you have the data in one place, don’t keep it locked away. You need to expose it to your customers in a controlled way.

This is where a customer portal comes in.

Start with a beta group—select a handful of key customers and let them access their contracts, renewals, and asset data. The goal here is to:

• Test the data quality—customers will quickly tell you what’s wrong.
• Prove value—show customers their renewals before they ask.
• Streamline your internal process—eliminate back-and-forth emails asking for basic renewal info.

If you don’t have a portal, this is where you start looking for a system that can provide one. The key is making the data accessible, accurate, and actionable for your customers.

Phase 3: Start Running Quotes Through the Same System

Now it’s time to eliminate the manual upload process for contracts and assets by integrating CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) directly into your system.

Most VARs and MSPs still:

• Generate quotes manually.
• Store asset and contract data in disconnected tools.
• Manually upload and update renewal information.

This slows everything down.

By integrating CPQ into your system, you:

• Automate renewal quotes based on real-time asset and contract data.
• Eliminate redundant data entry by tying quotes directly to contracts.
• Make renewals seamless so your team focuses on selling, not admin work.

This is where everything starts working together—your contracts, your customer portal, and your quoting process all feed into one renewal pipeline.

What Comes Next? Thinking Long-Term

Once you have these three phases in place, you can start layering in real automation and intelligence to take your renewal pipeline from functional to world-class.

Here’s what to think about next:

• Notifications – Automatically remind customers (and your team) when renewals are coming up.
• Cloud Sharing – Allow customers to export, download, and integrate their renewal data.
• Lifecycle Management – Label assets, track end-of-life events, and plan refreshes.
• Parent-Child Relationships – Tie assets together properly (e.g., a firewall and its subscriptions).
• Serialized vs. Non-Serialized Assets – Handle renewals differently for software, licensing, and physical hardware.

To make all this work, you need a platform designed for renewals—one that understands the OEMs, product quirks, and gotchas that most VARs and MSPs struggle with.

If you keep trying to manage renewals through spreadsheets and disconnected systems, you will lose.

If you take the time to build a structured, automated renewal pipeline, you will win.

Your move.