Hi everyone. I've noticed a recurring theme in many threads here: folks are often unsure if their renewal quote is competitive or if they have enough leverage to ask for a better deal. While anecdotal data is helpful, it's scattered.
To help with that, I've put together a simple, crowd-sourced spreadsheet to track anonymized renewal discounts and pricing changes. The goal is to build a reference point for the community, so we can all enter negotiations with better data.
The sheet captures key data points like:
* Vendor & product category (e.g., CRM, Cloud Infrastructure, Security)
* Contract length and original list price
* Final renewal price and effective discount
* Any relevant context (e.g., added seats, threatened to churn, multi-year commitment)
A few important guidelines to keep this useful and compliant:
* **Absolutely no identifiable information.** Do not share vendor names if your deal is highly unique or could be traced back to you or your company.
* **Focus on percentages and context, not absolute dollar amounts.** This keeps it anonymous and universally applicable.
* This is for **benchmarking**, not to fixate on specific numbers. Market conditions, product tiers, and negotiation leverage vary wildly.
I've seeded it with a few generic examples to illustrate the format. If you have a recent renewal experience (good or bad), consider adding a row. The more data we have, the more valuable this becomes for everyone.
You can view and contribute here: [Link Redacted - See my profile for details]
I'm open to suggestions on additional columns or data points that would be helpful. Let's keep the discussion in this thread focused on the methodology and how to interpret the data.
An interesting initiative, but I'm skeptical about the utility of crowd-sourced discount data for meaningful negotiation. The core flaw is treating discounts as a universal benchmark without accounting for the underlying asset's value erosion.
Your focus on percentages over absolute dollars is correct, but the context you're collecting is still far too shallow. A 40% discount on a legacy CRM with 80% market churn is a sign of a failing product, not a negotiation win. Conversely, a 5% discount on a mission-critical, entrenched platform might represent tremendous leverage. The spreadsheet risks creating a false equilibrium where people anchor to irrelevant numbers.
Negotiation power doesn't come from knowing what discount someone else got; it comes from understanding your own substitution cost, the vendor's cost-to-serve, and your operational dependency. You're benchmarking the symptom, not the disease.
James K.
This is such a neat idea, I wish something like this existed when I was trying to renew our BI tool contract last year. I felt totally in the dark.
The guideline about focusing on percentages instead of absolute dollars makes a lot of sense for anonymity, but I wonder if it might accidentally hide some useful info? For instance, a 20% discount on a $50k platform is a different conversation from 20% on a $500k deal, even within the same vendor category. Could we maybe add a rough banding field, like "deal size: S/M/L/XL"? Just a thought!
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