Between November 2021 and February 2022 Keystroke lost approximately 20% of our staff to poaching. Our story is not especially unique, as this has become increasingly common in the tech sector.

Thankfully these positions have all been filled in recent months and while we’re well on our way to recovering. Unfortunately, we recently discovered some Q1 renewal processes that had slipped through the cracks, specifically where they related to our VIP support plans.

From January through April the staff in charge of following up on these renewals had left, and this task had not been properly picked up by their replacements, and over one hundred support plans had been allowed to lapse in the time.

On Thursday I had identified the size and scope of this problem and set out early Friday morning to remedy it. The plan was to use our new Link2quotes online program to send our renewal quotes to all these customers, with the hope they could be renewed late. We were honest with people and explained what had happened during Q1, and offered them all the same “on-time” renewal benefits they would have received earlier.

See a sample of the template below (click to enlarge):

The whole process had to be completed quickly because with each passing day their renewals fell further into arrears, so I came up with a plan:

1. Create a quote template in Link2quotes for both VIP and VIP+ renewals
2. Identify the group of customers we’d be contacting.
3. Create and send renewal quotes to each of them based on their last plan, and explain in the cover email the reason for the delay
4. Each quote had to be adjusted for the contact, as well as the applicable sales tax and currency, but otherwise, all were the same.
5. And do this quickly and on mass.
6. Create the means of follow-up for all of them

WATCH VIDEO ON HOW TO CREATE A QUOTE WITH LINK2QUOTES

The advantage Keystroke has over many other teams is “we eat out own dog food”. For all the products we make for our customers, we use most internally, so we frequently add the program features we need in a high production environment, and this serves us well.

In this instance, I created two quotes, and included the images, product links, discounts, and descriptions to present the features to their full advantage, and then converted each of them into templates.

I then started going through the list, banging our quotes for each of them, until by noon I had completed over one hundred renewal quotes. Yes, you read that right, over one hundred quotes that morning. I then flipped over to the activity dashboard and started to watch the click-through activity these quotes were generating, and it was incredible.

By the end of business that day ten percent of these customers had accepted their quotes, renewed their support plans, and had been billed accordingly. It was a great day, and the ninety remaining customers who had not renewed yet, all had open Opportunities created and follow-up activities scheduled in Act! for me to pursue next week.

Friday reminded me of the power of what we do. Yes, we make productivity software, but more importantly, we’re a company comprised of smart, dedicated, and fallible people that learn from our mistakes, and never stop trying to do better.