AWS Marketplace features to accelerate your renewals strategy

Renewing customer agreements in AWS Marketplace provides a trusted opportunity to continue to grow your business, align for scale, and accelerate deals. Building a renewals strategy to maximize customer and revenue retention is critical for your continued growth. To support this, AWS Marketplace has launched two new seller features that help create an effective renewals approach. These features support your renewals planning strategy and your SaaS contract and contract with consumption (CCP) renewals private offer process.

The first new feature is the agreements and renewals dashboard. This seller report surfaces upcoming ending agreements and provides a comprehensive list of all agreements that have the opportunity to be renewed.
The second new feature is future dated agreements (FDA). This capability allows creating a future dated agreement in the AWS Marketplace Management Portal on the private offer creation page. Sellers can specify a future start date as a part of the SaaS contract and CCP renewal private offer creation process.

In this post, we highlight each feature and explain how they can be utilized to support and strengthen your AWS renewals strategy. We also include resources on where to go to learn more about the how-to and technical aspects of each feature.

Feature overview

Agreements and renewals dashboard

The agreements and renewals dashboard provides an accurate, consistent assessment of your active customer agreements in AWS Marketplace and allows you to view these agreements by their end date. It’s crucial to have clear visibility on when agreements are ending in order to effectively track and plan for their renewal.

This dashboard allows you to view active agreements by their end date. A customizable date filter can be used to view agreements that end within a specific timeframe such as the next 30, 60, or 90 days. This allows you to anticipate upcoming agreements that are about to expire so you have enough time to negotiate a renewal before the active agreement ends. The dashboard also provides the flexibility to apply other filters to help organize your upcoming ending agreement data with specific parameters. Some examples of these filters include the ability to group ending agreements by Channel Partner, geographic location, or product title.

You can utilize your end date filters to view upcoming ending agreement data at a high level and a granular level, each providing different ways to plan for renewals.

High-level data displays information for ending agreements by volume over time, such as by quarter or by month. This data can be utilized for long-term renewals resource planning and understanding when those needs will be the highest. An example of this is demonstrated in the following image.

bar graph with agreement end date on x-axis and agreement count on y-axis displaying ending agreement count by month over a 12 month period

Granular data is also surfaced in the dashboard, providing specific details pertaining to each ending agreement that can be used for tactical renewal planning on an agreement-by-agreement basis. The granular data surfaces up to 34 unique data points for each ending agreement, and the data can be downloaded directly from the dashboard.

Granular data section with unique data points and button in top right corner to click to export data to CSV or Excel file

For more information on the agreement and renewals dashboard and to get started on utilizing the dashboard, visit the What’s New post and the Seller Guide.

Future dated agreements

Once you have aligned with the buyer on moving forward with a renewal, FDA is utilized to create SaaS contract and CCP renewal agreements, providing the flexibility to align with your renewal sales cycle process. FDA allows you to differentiate between when a renewal is booked, when product usage begins, and when the customer will be invoiced using the flexible payment scheduler (FPS).

Prior to FDA, all agreements required the customer to book and begin using the product in real time, upon agreement creation. With FDA, a customer can book the renewal of their existing agreement while that existing agreement is still active. Once the existing agreement ends, the use of the product in the FDA renewal begins. FDA agreements provide notification support both at the agreement signed date and at the agreement start date, which removes the need to manually manage and track when a renewal is booked and when the product usage will begin.

With FDA, invoices can be scheduled either before the usage begins after the agreement signed date, at the time of the agreement start date, or anytime after the agreement start date using FPS. Differentiation between when the renewal is booked and when the customer is invoiced for the renewal offer allows you to collect and recognize revenue at the right times during your renewal sales cycle.

In the following image examples, we demonstrate the option to create a new offer with the future start date, specify the end date, and set the payment schedule. The demonstration includes invoices that are scheduled to occur both before and after product usage begins.
Selecting button to indicate new offer starting at a future date and selecting service start and end dates when creating a private offer Using flexible payment scheduler to set payment amounts and invoice dates that occur before and after service start date