Acme Corp's CSM walked into what should have been a routine renewal call carrying exactly one data point: usage was up, and the champion had been responsive all quarter. That was enough to feel confident. It was not enough to actually know the account was ready to renew. Support tickets had backed up for six weeks with no resolution, and the procurement contact who'd have to sign off had quietly changed two months earlier, neither fact visible from a usage graph, both surfacing for the first time in the renewal conversation itself.
"The account looks healthy" is a feeling, built from whichever signals happen to be top of mind. Due diligence is a specific, repeatable check across the signals that actually predict whether a renewal goes smoothly, run before the call, not discovered during it.
Why "it looks fine" isn't the same as checking
A CSM's sense that an account is healthy is usually built from whatever's been most visible recently: a good QBR, a responsive champion, an upward usage trend. Those are real signals, but they're also incomplete by default, because nothing forces a CSM to check the signals that weren't top of mind that week.
Support ticket backlogs, stakeholder turnover, and contract-term details rarely show up unprompted in day-to-day account work. They only surface if someone deliberately goes looking, which is exactly what a feeling of general health tends to skip.
What an actual pre-renewal check needs to cover
Usage trend is the easy part, most teams already track it. What gets missed is the support layer: open tickets, especially anything unresolved past a normal SLA, and whether recent tickets carry a tone that doesn't match the account's health score. A security or compliance review quietly sitting in someone's inbox can stall a renewal just as easily as a bad support experience, and neither shows up on a standard dashboard.
Stakeholder continuity matters just as much: is the champion from a year ago still the champion, is the signer still the signer, and has anyone actually confirmed that rather than assumed it. Contract terms are the last piece, auto-renewal windows, notice periods, and pricing tiers that may have quietly drifted from what was actually agreed. None of these four categories takes long to check individually, but almost nothing forces a CSM to check all four on the same account in the same sitting.
Three mistakes teams make with renewal due diligence
Each of these substitutes a partial signal for an actual check.
Trusting a single health score instead of its underlying inputs
A composite health score can stay green while one specific input, an open support ticket, a stalled security review, quietly drags the actual renewal risk up. The score is a summary, not a substitute for looking at what's feeding it.
Skipping the check because the account "feels" fine
A CSM's confidence is a real signal, but it's built from recent, memorable interactions, not a systematic review. The accounts most likely to get skipped are exactly the ones that feel safest, which is also where an unnoticed issue does the most damage.
Running the check too close to the renewal date to act on it
Finding a stalled security review or a changed procurement contact one week before the renewal date leaves no real runway to fix it. The same check run 60 days out turns the same finding into a solvable problem instead of a last-minute scramble.
"Accurate predictions and concise, actionable explanations of churn risk saving my team 2+ hours daily. I love that it reflects the right reasons accounts are at risk without us handcrafting a health score."
Wendy Zingher, VP of Customer Success · LambdaTest
What a real due-diligence checklist actually looks like
A workable checklist is short enough to actually run every time: usage trend over the last quarter, open support tickets and their age, any pending security or procurement review, confirmed current stakeholders on both the champion and signer side, and a read of the actual contract terms rather than what everyone remembers agreeing to. Each item takes minutes to check and answers a question a health score alone can't.
The point isn't adding process for its own sake. It's making sure the same five questions get asked on every renewal, including the ones that feel too healthy to bother checking, since those are exactly the ones where a real gap most often hides. Pairing the checklist with a forecast that's actually grounded in real signals keeps the whole renewal pipeline honest, not just the individual account.
RetainSure surfaces the underlying signals, not just a single composite score.
So a stalled ticket or a stakeholder change never waits until the renewal call to surface.
How to build this checklist into your own renewal process
The simplest version doesn't need new tooling: add the five-item check as a required step at a fixed point before every renewal, say 60 days out, the same way a QBR prep checklist gets run on schedule rather than only when someone remembers. Make it a step in the renewal workflow, not a habit that depends on an individual CSM's diligence that week.
Then audit a handful of past renewals against the checklist retroactively. Most teams running this for the first time find at least one recent renewal that would have surfaced a real issue early, had the check actually been run, evidence enough to make the case for building it into the process rather than leaving it optional and dependent on memory.
Acme Corp built the five-item check into its renewal workflow the month after the near-miss, run automatically at the 60-day mark for every account. The next time a support ticket sat unresolved past SLA, it surfaced in the checklist review, not in the renewal call, giving the team six weeks to close it out before the conversation that used to be where problems like it got discovered for the first time.