After years of renewal discussions, we went through three years of meeting notes and found clients keep asking the same 5 questions. This year we turned them into a one-pager and sent it ahead of the meeting.
1. Will It Still Be the Same People Next Year?
This is really a question about stability. We don't promise "absolutely no staff changes" — that's not a promise anyone can keep. We answer with specifics: who the primary contact is, who backs them up, that handovers follow our operations handover checklist, and how much notice we give before staffing changes. Attaching the names of the people who actually handled tickets this year works better than any promise.
2. Can Responses Be Faster?
The old agreement says 2 hours; the client wants 1. We usually pull last year's tickets: average first response, the longest one, where things got stuck. More often than not the bottleneck isn't us picking things up slowly — it's waiting for the client to provide data or for an account to be provisioned. Looking at the numbers, a blanket "faster" target rarely holds up, but "account issues resolved same-day" does.
3. Why the Price Increase?
No dodging: we lay out the three items — server and certificate renewals, the two systems added this year, and on-site coverage going from 5 days to 7. One number per item, not bundled into a total. If the client wants to trim, they know exactly which item they're trimming.
4. Will a New Team Take Over from Scratch?
Related to the first question, but this one is about risk. We pull out our 2021 handover checklist and show them: cron jobs, certificates, and external dependencies each documented, with a one-month dual-signature period. That page carries more weight than saying "trust us."
5. Is the Old Data Still There?
The easiest to overlook and the most critical. We answer with specifics: backups run daily at 3 a.m., kept for 7 days, restore drills monthly, what export formats are available, and whether a full export is provided when the contract ends. That last one always goes into the contract — never just verbally.
That One Page
One page, 5 items, two or three lines under each, with ticket stats and the external data inventory attached. Sent before the meeting; the meeting itself is mostly confirmation.
Once, after reading it, a client said: "Item 5 — you added that yourselves; we hadn't even thought to ask." Yes. That one should always come from us.
This year's renewal took 40 minutes; two years ago it took two meetings. That page now sits at the front of our renewal folder, titled simply "Send this first."
