2 min read

Stop Rescuing Revenue and Start Growing It

Bob Riefstahl Updated on December 31, 2025

Customer Success

Stop Rescuing Revenue and Start Growing It

We believe there’s a goldmine in your current customer base when Client Services Teams have a solid strategy to manage your relationships.

Does this sound familiar?

They licensed your solution, signed up for a lower tier of users and options, didn’t implement it well, and didn’t interact with you during the subscription. Just before their renewal deadline, you received an email informing you that they will no longer be using your platform.

Now you’re in crisis mode with a client you hardly know. You ask for a meeting, beg for continuation, ask what went wrong, offer discounts, etc. The problem is that they didn’t use the application like they thought they would, and the cancellation is being directed by an executive no one has met.

“With the right plan in place, you’ll get the renewals AND grow revenue long after the sale.”

You Need a T minus 12 Strategy

No matter what you offer, this is a relationship business. Your team is responsible for helping each client achieve the transformative change your salespeople promised your customers. You have to be more than a question-and-answer resource and order taker.

A T Minus 12 Strategy includes goals and tactics that count backward twelve months from your client’s renewal date. Focus on where you want the customer's minds and hearts at the renewal of the subscription. Ask yourself these questions:

Do you have a milestone-based T minus 12 strategy that your Client Success Managers strive to achieve each month of a client’s contract?
Is your Customer Success team prepared to seek executive contact to learn how your solution can contribute to their strategic initiatives?
Can your team build and validate a T-12 Renewal Map that connects solution functionality to business impacts and executives' strategic initiatives?
Is your team prepared to proactively demo to clients additional functionality they have already licensed to help them achieve those business impacts and the strategic initiative?
Can your team deliver stories of other successes that align with an individual client’s T-12 Renewal Map?
Is your team equipped with a methodology for handling even the most difficult questions and objections from individual contributors, managers, and executives?

Gold Isn’t the Only Thing You Can Mine

Honest, deep, and lasting relationships with customers help you gain real-time intelligence about what is working for them, what isn’t, and what they’d find valuable in the next build. Close and deepening relationships with your client’s users are the best way to turn the expressed frustrations of a client you might lose into an opportunity to innovate past your competition. You’re the provider. It’s your job to drive the relationship. Clients will always chart the smoothest course. The deeper you can plant yourself as integral to their success, the harder it will be for them to switch to someone else.

Reducing customer churn starts with the end in mind and builds back to the beginning. Build your T minus 12 strategies, or contact us, and we’ll build one with you. Don’t just provide a platform and answer questions. Meet their leaders, learn their pain, adopt their goals, help them achieve their goals, and become the one partner they can’t succeed without.