Does your business have a strong contract renewal strategy to ensure first-time customers and suppliers become long-term partners?
You’ve likely heard the saying: retaining an existing customer or supplier is more cost-effective than sourcing new ones. If your business is facing delayed or missed renewals—whether with customers or suppliers—it might be time to adopt an automated contract renewal strategy. This will help you retain valuable relationships, foster loyalty, and simultaneously identify areas to expand your footprint, both with customers and suppliers.
Renewing contracts with customers and suppliers is an essential business activity that not only strengthens your relationships but also provides an opportunity to deliver excellent service while gauging satisfaction on both sides.
It may be the responsibility of your suppliers to chase you for renewals; but it may be up to you to anticipate the necessary steps and make the renewal process seamless for customers. An automated contract renewal strategy can ensure a smooth and consistent experience, keeping both customers and suppliers happy. With automation, and integration into your CRM, you gain complete visibility of the process without sacrificing personalisation. The result? Faster revenue cycles and streamlined supplier engagement, leading to stronger, more reliable partnerships.
Why customer and supplier retention software is critical for satisfaction
The renewal stage of a contract is critical for maintaining long-term business relationships, whether it’s with customers or suppliers. Re-engaging customers and suppliers at this point is crucial, but slow, disorganised processes can severely reduce the likelihood of a successful renewal. This is particularly problematic when the renewal process is manual, leading to errors and forcing teams to focus on fixing issues rather than ensuring positive engagement and success.
Businesses without an automated renewal process tend to see much higher rates of missed or late renewals, with both customers and suppliers. Having a strategy that puts satisfaction and experience at the core is essential for turning first-time buyers and suppliers into trusted, repeat partners.
Automation should be at the centre of your contract renewal strategy—here’s how it benefits both customers and suppliers:
Five business benefits of automating your contract renewal strategy
Time-consuming manual contract management slows down your revenue and operational cycles. Whether you’re renewing contracts with customers or suppliers, manual data entry and document creation often occur in silos, resulting in bottlenecks that delay renewal. This can lead to missed opportunities and reduced satisfaction for both customers and suppliers, ultimately impacting your bottom line.
Tools like Zway Automation Suite allow teams to send tailored, consistent agreements that reinforce your brand and satisfy both customers and suppliers. With customisable templates populated with your CRM data, you can create error-free renewal documents effortlessly. Everything is managed from a single system, eliminating inefficiencies, delays, and mistakes.
By automating the renewal process, your teams gain valuable insights into both customer and supplier relationships through your CRM. This centralised approach provides a clear overview of which customers or suppliers are due for renewal, helping to reduce the risk of missing key opportunities.
Solutions like Zway make it easy for teams to track renewals and manage critical data. When used with Zway’s suite of tools teams can automate every step of the renewal process, from information gathering to contract creation, all the way to sending and receiving signed documents. This ensures a smooth renewal experience, whether for customers or suppliers.
Once your customers' or suppliers' renewal needs are identified and the relevant contracts are prepared—complete with accurate data, terms, pricing, and solutions—you’re ready to initiate the renewal.
A significant advantage of automating your contract renewal strategy is the ability to monitor where each renewal sits in the process. With tools like Zway, securing necessary signatures is quick and secure. Customers and suppliers can review and approve contracts faster, reducing delays and saving both time and money, while also decreasing risk and improving overall satisfaction.
Both your customers and suppliers are likely busy, and keeping track of contract renewals may not be their top priority. One of the best ways to ensure that your teams maintain engagement throughout the lifecycle of both customers and suppliers—from the initial agreement through to renewal—is by having access to the right data at the right time.
Automating your contract renewal strategy ensures a consistent, end-to-end experience for both parties. By using Zway, you can automatically generate and distribute renewal documents without the need for manual input. Your customers and suppliers will receive their renewals on time, with minimal effort on their part, ensuring continuity and fostering trust.
The contract renewal process doesn’t need to be difficult, whether it’s with customers or suppliers. It also shouldn’t slow down your revenue cycle or jeopardise supplier relationships. Automating the process ensures smooth transitions, allowing your business to focus on growth and collaboration. Moreover, managing everything within your own CRM ensures that all data is updated and stored efficiently in both customer and supplier records—with fewer clicks required.
The Zway Business Automation Suite provides multiple tools that drive team efficiency while speeding up the accuracy of contract renewals.
Let’s talk about marketing funnels and sales pipelines.
Follow these three “Golden Rues” and you will be fine. Here’s some more detail to explain:
A small business has no business having a website if it doesn’t produce new business (sales). Yes, customers can go there to learn about you, but that is not the primary objective of a website. The primary objective is to sell. Design your website so that it is made up of “landing pages”, then, link those landing pages to take your customer on a journey down your funnel.
A Landing page is a webpage that has a defined action the user can take. The user is given no other choices. For example: “Click Here to book”. Webpages that let viewers click around and read are useless nowadays. Landing pages that are linked, ask customers questions and take information and feed them back to you are useful. This is called a “Marketing funnel”.
A small business must not rely on the crack-cocaine-like lead sources from the likes of Trust-a-trader, Bark or Check-a-trade. These companies are pernicious in the long run. Rather, a small business should have two to four of their own channels that will produce leads. Leads THEY OWN. Typical low-cost channels for lead creation are: Facebook groups, email lists, local, targeted, social media advertising, Google, word-of-mouth and SEO. Each of these lead sources should aim to take the prospect as quickly as possible through the funnel, out the other end, with an order in hand. The way this is best achieved is automation. You should not even need to see leads that are not ready to buy. Your funnel should do all that for you. This is done by linking a quality CRM to your funnel.
Nowadays it is easy to set up funnels that take leads from any source and automatically “treat” them. In this example, different sources of leads need to be treated in different ways. For example: A Word-of-mouth enquiry may not need to see additional details before being asked to “book in a free estimate visit” or whatever other actions you want them to take. Whereas an enquiry from a Facebook ad may need to see several pieces of information and go through a few funnel pages before they are ready to buy or book.
Your CRM will handle all your quotes, orders, stock purchasing and invoicing later. But right now, it MUST be part of these funnels. Gathering information and following the journey from suspect, to prospect, to client for you.
Zway CRM does all of the above. You can buy it for as little as £69 for a once-off perpetual license. No need to sign up for those ridiculous monthly SaaS plans offered by the cowboys of Silicon Valley.
How small businesses work
My friend recently started his own plumbing business after years of working for a bigger firm.
He was immediately surrounded by friends and family with enough work to get him started and busy for months. All without offering “Mates rates”.
So, getting enough work is not the problem these guys face. Yes, a few of them face difficulties maintaining a profitable flow of work, and that comes down to marketing over the longer term and providing a service that people value. I will cover that in my next post. But for now, let me mention the first thing my friend said to me, even before his first month of trading was finished.
“Dave, he said, the work is great, and I can even handle the bookings and projects, but it's the day-to-day admin that’s already killing me. I hate it”.
I wondered why he thinks it’s so hard, so I asked a few more questions. Turns out he decided to do his own bookkeeping and accounting using QUICKBOOKS.
And, so lies the problem. You have heard me go on and on about the evil villains at the large SaaS companies and how they force small businesses onto a never-ending payment for their pointless software. Here we go again.
Quickbooks is a tool for an Accountant, or even for a Bookkeeper. It’s not a tool for a Plumber. It will eat up your time and give you nothing in return. Then, at the end of the tax year, it will give you the basic tools to make your legal tax return digitally.
Let me be clear – Quickbooks or Xero are not suitable tools for small business Owners. They are tools for Accountants. An Accountant will give the business Owner advice on the best way to pay less tax. Quickbooks will not. An Accountant will ask questions when something appears to be wrong, Quickbooks will not. An Accountant will save you time, Quickbooks will not. An Accountant will save you more money than they cost. Quickbooks will not.
I told my friend, “Mate, let an Accountant use those tools. You just get on running your business and let your own easy to use systems send the information to your accountant”.
Zway is a CRM for small business that allows you to create a full products and services catalogue in less than an hour. Done once and forgotten.
Zway is a CRM that allows small businesses to create quotes and invoices for clients in seconds, using your product & Services catalogue.
Zway is a CRM that keeps records and produces reports to send to an accountant as you go. Without your input.
Zway is an Inventory and Stock Management tool that allows small businesses to buy whatever they want and keeps track of expenses and receipts as you go.
Then, at the end of the period (monthly or quarterly normally), it sends a file to your Accountant with everything they need to make your tax digital and keep you legal.
TLDR. Summary – Small business Owners should not be spending any time messing with accounting software.
