Before You Sign That SaaS Renewal
A 14-day playbook for renegotiating enterprise contracts with leverage you already have.
Most organisations enter a renewal with less information than the vendor has about their own usage. Fourteen days is enough to change that.
Days one to four: pull actual entitlement against actual active usage, by seat, module and environment. Days five to eight: identify shelfware, duplicate capability across the estate, and any commitment you have already overshot or badly undershot. Days nine to eleven: build two credible alternatives, even if you have no intention of executing them.
The final three days are the negotiation itself, conducted on your numbers rather than the vendor account plan. Leverage rarely comes from threatening to leave. It comes from being able to say precisely what you use, what you will commit to, and what you will not pay for again.
This playbook routinely returns double-digit savings without changing a single system — which is why it should run before the technical roadmap discussion, not after.