Renewals Manager

Role Overview

This role engages early and often with customers and partners, together with Renewals Specialists, often initiating and leading conversations to understand business needs, technology objectives, and long-term plans across multiple accounts and segments. It builds relationships with customers and channel partner teams to understand business priorities and objectives, ensuring alignment with the CX recurring revenue strategy. Throughout the renewal process, the position collaborates with the Renewals Specialist from opportunity identification to close, initiating engagement through a warm handoff from Sales and Customer Success, and confirming roles and responsibilities early to ensure a smooth transition, aligned activation strategy, and unified customer engagement. The role collaborates cross-functionally with field sales, inside sales, channel teams, delivery, operations, and customer success to provide a unified customer-facing solution, ensure on-time renewals, and identify expansion opportunities. It partners with sales on deal strategy and with customer success on adoption and sentiment to address competitive, adoption, and technology risks across the renewal portfolio, ensuring the appropriate expertise is involved to resolve complex scenarios. The role conducts proactive risk assessments to identify potential risks early in the renewal process, collaborating with relevant teams to develop and implement resolution strategies that ensure successful renewals and customer satisfaction. It leads the end-to-end renewal process for support services and collaborates with the Renewals Specialist on software subscriptions, engaging customers, partners, and Cisco teams to ensure successful agreement renewals. The position leverages AI tools to provide actionable insights, optimize renewal strategies, and strengthen customer relationships for effective revenue retention and growth, while developing and executing comprehensive renewal strategies that include commercial positioning, value articulation, and negotiation oversight for both transactional and complex, multi-product agreements. Additionally, it manages forecasting for renewals and potential churn, advising account teams and leadership on pipeline health and revenue retention, and identifies and drives growth opportunities-including cross-sell and upsell-across the customer base by leveraging insights from data, customer feedback, and market trends.

What You'll Do:

• Works on cross-functional, complex or large multi-architecture renewals
• Oversees renewals strategy for a portfolio of large enterprise accounts, including complex and high-value deals
• Validates customer data and feedback, and applies structured methodologies (e.g. MEDDPIC) to customer interactions to ensure customer goals are met
• Proactively identifies and leverages competitive market data to shape customer messaging
• Partners with account team to proactively plan around and strategically align with customer procurement cycles
• Owns the renewals process for assigned accounts, engaging customer decision makers and cross-functional teams to align on commercial terms and to ensure quote availability, commercial alignment, and ordering arrangements are in place for on-time renewals
• Applies consulting tools and strategies to optimize renewal outcomes that support expansion and retention; manages forecasting and risk mitigation
• Drives simplification and automation in renewal processes
• Applies strong working knowledge of Cisco processes and customer procurement cycles to apply renewal plays independently
• Identifies risks and engages cross-functional teams to resolve issues and to support forecasting and pipeline hygiene
• Drives simplification and automation in renewal processes
• Collaborates with account team to ensure innovative customer outcomes
• Establishes self as a trusted advisor to customers and account teams, helping customers to understand recommendations applying consulting and negotiation skills, and addressing resistance
• Begins to collaborate and build credibility and trust, internally with Sales and Customer Success teams, and externally with customers, growing autonomy and exposure
• Coaches peers in renewals practices and process/solution facilitation.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelors + 7 years of related experience, or
• Masters + 4 years of related experience, or
• PhD + 1 year of related experience, or
• equivalent relevant work experience.
• Language: Proficient in written and spoken English and Korean.

Why Cisco? 

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.

Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. 

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.