Several SaaS businesses had grown quickly while granting significant early-stage discounts to win or retain major customers. In some cases, legacy discounts reached up to 90%.
Those concessions had become embedded in customer expectations, suppressing contract value and making renewals commercially difficult. Account management and customer success teams were inheriting pricing positions that no longer reflected the value of the product or the maturity of the customer relationship.
This was not just a pricing problem. It was a renewal process problem.
Customers had been conditioned to expect discounted economics. Internal teams were often cautious about challenging those expectations because of perceived churn risk, relationship sensitivity and lack of confidence in the commercial position.
The business needed to recover ARR and improve renewal economics without creating unnecessary churn or damaging strategically important relationships.
BreakPoint Black redesigned the renewal negotiation approach, combining advisory projects with advanced capability building for the teams responsible for customer conversations.
The work focused on positioning strategy design, price-recovery logic, customer segmentation, concession discipline, messaging, escalation control and the behavioural skills needed to hold a stronger position without appearing blunt or arbitrary.
For account-management-led renewals, the emphasis was on commercial control and value recapture. For customer-success-led renewals, the emphasis was on information gathering over the contract term, building leverage through increased product stickiness by design, relationship management and disciplined expectation shifting.
The renewal processes became more controlled, more commercially disciplined and better aligned to value recovery.
Teams were better equipped to gather negotiation intelligence in order to boost negotiating power, shift expectations through deliberate positioning strategies, challenge legacy discounting and protect ARR in renewal conversations while still managing churn risk and customer relationships. Actions across sales, CS and AE teams were set up to conform to a central, aligned commercial strategy.
The opportunity was not simply to negotiate harder. It was firstly to identify that the renewal negotiation process should start much earlier – in terms of intelligence gathering, positioning and leverage building – than previously realised by the client, and to redesign this process to set it up for success. This recovered significant total contract value at renewal, generating gains across the existing customer base at a time when new sales were more challenging.
Applied across ON24 (account-management renewal strategy and ARR recovery from inherited discounting) and Showpad (customer-success renewal discipline and expectation-resetting capability).