Missed commitments before renewal: how they happen and how to see them two months out
How do you catch a missed customer commitment before the renewal?
A promise made on a sales call has no owner, no ticket and no date anyone checks. How it slips, and how to see it before the renewal call.
How a promise goes missing
A founder on a call says the feature will be there before the renewal. The customer writes it down. Nobody on our side does. The sentence sits in a recording or a sent folder, and the work tracker never hears about it.
Three months later the renewal call opens with that sentence. Nobody lied. The promise had no owner, no ticket and no date that anyone looked at, so nobody saw it slip.
Why the usual places miss it
The CRM holds the deal and the close date, not what was said to win it. The roadmap holds what engineering plans, not what sales told a customer. Call notes hold the words, but nobody rereads last quarter's notes before a renewal.
So the list that matters, what we owe this customer and by when, lives in no system. It has to be built from the places the words already are.
Build the list from what was said
CommitOps reads mail and call transcripts and proposes each promise as a candidate, with the exact sentence it came from. A quote that is not in the source word for word is thrown away before anyone sees it. A person keeps the real ones, and each kept promise gets a ref, an owner and a due date.
Lateness is worked out from the due date each time a page loads. Nobody marks a promise late by hand, so none stays marked on time by mistake.
Line the promises up against the renewal date
Renewals lists every account renewing in the next 90 or 180 days, ranked by the revenue renewing. Each row shows the open promises due by the renewal date, late ones first, and where the date came from: the CRM, Stripe, a contract or a date typed by hand.
Read it two months out and there is time to finish the work, or to call the customer and move the date in the open. Read it the week of the renewal and there is time only to apologize.
What to do with each row
A promise with no work behind it needs an owner and a ticket this week. A promise that shipped needs one email, the easiest renewal conversation there is. A promise you will not keep needs a call before the customer raises it.
In the sample ledger, Acme Health has the first two kinds. C-142 has no work behind it and holds up a $40,000 expansion, and C-131 shipped without anyone telling them. Vantage Labs' $28,000 renewal waits on C-160, which has no owner at all.
Every company, person and figure in the examples belongs to the invented demo company in the sample ledger.