# A renewal pipeline in Pipedrive: how a five-person team keeps track of who is about to leave

https://salesbond.app/blog/customer-renewal-process-pipedrive/
Published: 2026-10-02 · Updated: 2026-10-25

Build renewals as a second pipeline in Pipedrive: one deal per customer, a contract end date on it, and stages that follow the time left until that date, not the sales conversation. The person who runs the account owns the deal. That is the whole customer renewal process for a small team, and it fits in an afternoon of setup.

The rest of this article is how we do it, which fields we keep, and what we watch for in the weeks before a renewal goes quiet.

## The invoice that expired on a Sunday

Priya ran accounts at a five-person team selling scheduling software to clinics. One of their oldest customers, a physiotherapy group with three locations, had a twelve-month contract that ended on a Sunday in March. Nobody noticed on the Sunday. Nobody noticed on the Monday either because the deal that had won them was marked Won eleven months earlier and lived in the closed section of the pipeline, where nobody looks.

The customer noticed. Their finance person saw the invoice, asked the office manager whether they still used the product, and the office manager said “I think so, but the new clinic uses something else”. That sentence is how a renewal is lost. Not with a complaint. With a shrug, three weeks after the date, when the conversation has already moved on to the alternative.

Priya found out from the cancellation email. When she opened Pipedrive, everything about that customer was correct and nothing was useful: the won deal, the organization, two notes from the onboarding call. No end date anywhere, no open deal, nothing with a due date. The CRM had done exactly what it was asked, which was to record a sale. It had not been asked to remember that the the sale had a shelf life.

## Renewals are not new deals: why the renewal process needs its own pipeline

A new deal moves because the buyer learns something. A renewal moves because the calendar does. That is the reason we keep them apart.

Put a renewal into the sales pipeline and it sits in “Qualified” or “Proposal” next to deals that are actually being sold. The stage names lie about it. “Proposal sent” means something for a prospect; for a customer whose contract ends in forty days it means the account manager sent a PDF and is waiting, which is not a stage, it is a hope. Rotting won’t save you either. Pipedrive resets the rotting clock whenever the deal is updated, so last week’s note keeps the tile green even if the end date is Friday ( [Pipedrive: the rotting feature](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/the-rotting-feature)).

A separate pipeline fixes three things at once. The stages can be named after time left, the win rate stops mixing renewal conversions with new business, and the Monday review gets its own ten minutes instead of being buried under the sales list. Pipedrive itself recommends separate pipelines when a process needs its own fields. Creating one takes a minute: open the pipeline dropdown in the pipeline view and pick “+ New pipeline”, which needs deal admin rights ( [Pipedrive: multiple pipelines](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/how-can-i-have-multiple-pipelines)).

Renewals pass both tests in our [rule for when multiple pipelines make sense](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-multiple-pipelines/).

We wrote about why open pipeline volume hides a weak forecast in [revenue at risk in a sales pipeline](https://salesbond.app/blog/revenue-at-risk-sales-pipeline/); renewals mixed into that pipeline are one of the ways it happens. And if your team already argues about what belongs in the pipeline at all, read [Pipedrive leads vs deals](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-leads-vs-deals/) first. The same rule applies here: a renewal is a deal with a date, and it should exist as a deal, not as a reminder in someone’s calendar.

## Fields you actually need (three or four, not twenty)

Custom fields live under the account menu, then Personal preferences, then Data fields, with a “+ Custom field” button per entity ( [Pipedrive: custom fields](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/custom-fields)). We put these on the deal, because the deal is what moves:

- **Contract end date.** A date field, and the one that must never be empty. On Premium you can make it a required field so Pipedrive asks for it; on Growth, mark it as an important field instead. Everything else in the pipeline is derived from this date. If you sell subscriptions as [recurring products in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-recurring-products-vs-installments/), decide that before the first renewal deal too.
- **Renewal value.** The expected amount for the next term. Pipedrive’s own Value field can hold it, but we keep a separate monetary field so the won amount of the original deal and the amount at stake now are never confused in a report.
- **Risk reason.** A single-option field with four or five options you would actually say out loud: champion left, usage dropped, budget review, price, no contact. The point is a column you can sort, not a diary. If price keeps showing up as the reason, sort the list before the next [price increase letter](https://salesbond.app/blog/price-increase-customers-pipedrive/) goes out.
- **Term length** (optional). Months. Needed only if your contracts vary; if everything is twelve months, skip it and put the number in the pipeline name.

On Premium you can also make these pipeline-specific fields, visible only in the renewal pipeline and hidden from the sales one ( [Pipedrive: custom fields](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/custom-fields)). On other plans they simply appear everywhere, which is untidy but harmless. Either way add them as columns in the deals list view, so the whole pipeline reads as a table sorted by end date. That table is the renewal report. You will not need another one. For [quarterly check-ins without a recurring activity](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-recurring-activities-workaround/), the same idea works with one more date field and an automation.

Twenty fields is the failure mode. A team that has to fill in “renewal probability”, “executive sponsor sentiment” and “expansion potential” on every account stops filling in the end date too. Who owns which field, and how a small team keeps that honest, is the subject of [CRM data ownership for a small sales team](https://salesbond.app/blog/crm-data-ownership-small-sales-team/).

For the five customers you cannot afford to lose, add a layer on top of the renewal deal: a [one-page account plan](https://salesbond.app/blog/key-account-plan-small-sales-team/) kept in the organization record, with growth ideas, risks and a dated next action.

## Stages by time to expiry

Name the stages after days remaining, not after what the account manager is doing. Ours look like this, and the numbers are our choice for twelve-month contracts with a thirty-day notice period, not a benchmark; shorten them if your notice period is shorter.

1. **Won, not yet due.** Every active customer has a deal here. It is the parking stage; nothing happens except that the end date exists.
2. **90 days out.** First contact about the next term. The goal of this stage is one answer: are they planning to continue, and has anything changed on their side.
3. **45 days out.** Terms on the table. Price, seats, any change to scope. If a risk reason is set, this is where it gets worked.
4. **14 days out.** Signature or an explicit “we are not renewing”. Nothing stays here without a scheduled activity.

There is no “Renewed” or “Churned” stage, because Pipedrive closes a deal one of two ways. A customer who renews is marked Won. One who leaves is marked Lost, with a lost reason; we keep the lost reasons list the same as the Risk reason options so the two line up.

![Timeline of a renewal deal from Won, not yet due to 90, 45 and 14 days out, closing as won or lost](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/customer-renewal-pipeline-pipedrive-2.png)

Why a deal and not a Pipedrive project? Pipedrive points post-sale delivery work to Projects, but a renewal is a new sale with a price and a yes or no at the end, so it belongs in a pipeline ( [Pipedrive: multiple pipelines](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/how-can-i-have-multiple-pipelines)). The first thirty days after the sale are work for Projects, and an [onboarding project template](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-projects-client-onboarding-checklist/) keeps them the same for every customer.

Automations make the stages move on their own. Pipedrive’s date triggers for deals accept a “before date” parameter, so an automation can fire a set number of days before the contract end date and create an activity or move the deal ( [Pipedrive: automations](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/workflow-automation)). We run three of them, one per time stage, each creating a call activity for the deal owner and moving the deal forward. Automations are available on the Growth plan and higher, per the same article. On Lite, a filter on the end date column, sorted ascending, is the manual version and it works, it just depends on someone opening it.

We also switch rotting on for “14 days out” with a short limit and leave it off on “Won, not yet due”, where a parked deal going red for a year is noise. One catch from the [Pipedrive rotting article](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/the-rotting-feature): a scheduled future activity doesn’t keep a deal from rotting, but any edit to the deal does, including a move made by an automation.

The deal that creates all of this is the won deal in the sales pipeline. When it closes, someone, or an automation triggered on the deal being updated to Won, creates the renewal deal with the end date filled in. We prefer the automation because the moment a deal is won is the moment everyone forgets about the customer for eleven months, and that is exactly what happened to Priya.

## Early signs a customer is drifting

The pipeline tells you when a renewal is due. It does not tell you whether it is in trouble, and the stages can be perfectly on time while the account is quietly leaving. The signs we have learned to read live outside the renewal deal, in the rest of the CRM.

The first is the people. The person who signed is no longer the person replying, or is no longer replying at all. In Pipedrive this shows up as emails to the organization going to a new contact who was never on a call. Nobody flags it, because technically there is a reply. Ask the question anyway: who decides on the renewal now, and have we ever spoken to them?

The second is the rhythm of buying. For customers who order repeatedly rather than sign annually, the gap between orders is the signal. A clinic that reordered every six weeks for two years and has now gone eleven weeks is telling you something, long before anyone writes “churn risk” in a field. [Finding repeat buyers who stopped](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-inactive-customers-accounts-filter/) starts from a filter on accounts with no open deal. Your won deals already hold this history; we looked at what else they reveal in [an ideal customer profile built from won deals](https://salesbond.app/blog/ideal-customer-profile-won-deals/). A spreadsheet of won deals per customer earns its keep here, and so does our product: we build SalesBond, a sales management layer on top of the CRM a team already uses; we started with Pipedrive. Its Customer Health module works from won deals only. It takes each repeat customer’s buying cycle, compares it with the days since the last purchase, and shows the customer as on track, overdue or leaving, with no score and no prediction behind it, just the ratio. Overdue and leaving customers show up as cards in Sales GPS, and “Contact” puts a task in the CRM. For a renewal pipeline that means the “Risk reason” field has a source instead of a guess. [Check your CRM with SalesBond](https://salesbond.app/) if you want that list without building the spreadsheet.

The third sign is support. A customer who stops asking questions has either learned the product or stopped using it, and from the CRM alone you cannot tell which. The honest move is a call with no agenda beyond “how is it going”, scheduled from the 90-day stage, and the answer written into teh deal as a note. Not a score. A sentence. If Zendesk is connected, [check the open Zendesk tickets before the renewal call](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-zendesk-tickets-renewal-call/) too; it takes about three minutes.

And then there is silence in the renewal deal itself. A deal that reached “45 days out” by automation and has had no completed activity since is the most common shape of a lost renewal we see. The move counted as an update, so the deal looks fresh. It is on time, it is green, and it is nobody’s problem until the date passes. If you only watch one thing in this pipeline, watch for deals that moved by trigger and were never touched by a person.

## Who owns the renewal, the rep or whoever runs the account

Whoever runs the account. In a five-person team that is usually the person who onboarded the customer, sometimes the person who sold them, occasionally the founder. The rule we hold to is that the owner of the renewal deal is the person the customer would call with a problem. If that is not the rep who closed the original deal, the deal owner changes at the moment the renewal deal is created.

The argument against this is commission, and it is a real argument. The rep who sold it feels they own the relationship. Our position: the rep owns the win, the account manager owns the renewal, and if the team is too small to have the second role, the founder owns renewals and says so in the pipeline. What does not work is a renewal deal owned by someone who has not spoken to the customer since the signature. That was the physiotherapy group. The deal owner was the rep, the rep was closing new clinics, and from where he sat an eleven-month-old won deal was finished business.

Priya rebuilt the pipeline in a week. Forty-one customers, forty-one deals, one date field. The first Monday she sorted the list by end date and found two contracts ending inside thirty days that nobody had mentioned. Both renewed. Neither would have on their own.

If you set up one thing this week, make it that date field on every active customer. The stages can wait a day.