Sales Trends to Keep Up with in 2021: Renewal Selling

Many downstream processes, including territory management and quota planning, benefit from the solid customer data foundation Mary discussed in our previous post. In fact, building that solid data foundation is the first step for anything you want to do with sales, especially for what will be a major focus area in 2021 – renewal selling.

Make current customers a top priority

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of being able to effectively sell to existing customers. The probability of success when selling to a customer you already have is 60-70% compared to just 5-20% when selling to new customers. Plus, acquiring a new customer can be five times as expensive as retaining an existing one.

Connect the data to drive renewal success

Although renewal selling is obviously very important, research from Ventana shows 50% of the organizations polled have digital selling experiences that are NOT fueled by data and intelligence, nor do they leverage strategic automation. This exposes risks regarding:

• Reliable continuity for the business.
• The ability to address organizational changes.
• Creating churn and instability in the workforce.
• Reduced customer retention.

What keeps companies from selling effectively to their own customer base? How do you bridge the data disconnect? Success requires connecting people, processes, and systems across the organization. A common source of truth enables a new world of opportunities where real-time signals and triggers from across the organization can be used to drive defined renewal selling actions.

Looking ahead

In 2021, our customers are taking a fresh look at how:

• The entire organization could effectively become a renewal selling machine.
• Every touchpoint can be infused with intelligence and automation.
• Each renewal touchpoint can communicate value to the customer and help foster and build relationships.
• Businesses can accurately forecast renewals, retention, and expansion success using the data they already have

By strengthening the connections among Sales, CPQ, Subscription Management, Commerce, and ERP, Oracle is investing heavily in providing effective renewal selling abilities.

We’re building workflows and guided selling experiences that drive more renewals, upsells, and cross-sells. Fueling this critical sales use case, we’re leveraging a single source of truth for customer and account, assets, products, pricing, subscriptions, and renewals.

Look for more details about these opportunities to strengthen sales with your current customer base in future posts.