How to Realign Their Focus

For many organisations, IT vendors are more than suppliers. They’re strategic partners who provide critical systems, services, and expertise. At least, that’s how it should be.

However most IT vendors aren’t built around your long-term success. They’re built around renewals. Retaining contracts, hitting sales targets, and maximising revenue often sit above helping you achieve your outcomes.

That misalignment leaves a gap, and it’s your responsibility as a leader to close it.

Why Vendors Default to Renewals

• Commercial incentives: Vendor account managers are often measured on renewal and upsell quotas, not on client success metrics. Bain research shows that despite increased investment in customer success, 75% of software firms saw declining net revenue retention, evidence that renewals often take priority over real value delivery.
• Short-term sales cycles: Their priority is to keep revenue flowing, which means focusing on contract dates instead of transformation outcomes.
• Resource constraints: Vendors allocate their best teams to winning new business. Existing clients are sometimes left with “maintenance mode” support.
• Asymmetry of information: Vendors understand your environment in detail, while many organisations lack the same depth of oversight, making it easier for vendors to control the narrative.

When renewals, not results, drive behaviour, you get check-the-box service, misaligned roadmaps, and technology that stagnates rather than scales.

The Risk of Vendor-Centric Thinking

If left unchecked, vendor behaviour can erode more than budgets.

• Stalled transformation: Projects are scoped for the renewal cycle, not long-term business goals.
• Escalating costs: You end up buying add-ons you don’t need while core challenges remain unresolved.
• Dependency without leverage: Vendors hold the knowledge, and you become reliant on them for direction.
• Frustrated teams: When solutions don’t deliver, internal stakeholders lose trust in both IT and leadership.

This isn’t partnership. It’s a transactional cycle where you pay more but achieve less.

 

How to Realign Vendor Focus

The good news: you don’t have to accept the renewal trap. With the right approach, you can redirect vendor energy toward your success.

1. Redefine Success Metrics
Build performance scorecards that measure outcomes aligned with your business objectives, not just uptime or response time. Tie these directly to contract reviews.

2. Link Renewals to Value Delivered
Shift renewal conversations from dates and pricing to impact. If a vendor wants a contract extension, they must demonstrate tangible business value achieved. West Monroe highlights that aligning renewals to commercial outcomes rather than sales quotas is essential for sustainable vendor relationships.

3. Demand Strategic Roadmaps
Push vendors to align their product evolution with your long-term vision. Insist on joint planning sessions where your goals shape their delivery priorities.

4. Create Governance Structures
Establish steering committees that include both internal leaders and vendor representatives. Make it clear that oversight goes beyond the sales team. The Customer Success Collective notes that nearly two-thirds of customer success teams are already tied to renewals, reinforcing why clear governance is critical.

5. Diversify Vendor Relationships
Avoid over-reliance. Bring competition into the mix so vendors understand that renewal is earned, not guaranteed.

6. Hold Them Accountable Publicly
Document commitments, publish results internally, and hold vendors to account in front of stakeholders. Transparency keeps everyone honest.

 

Shifting the Balance of Power

Vendors will always care about renewals. That’s their business model. But you can make renewals conditional on delivering value, not just surviving another cycle.

The organisations that thrive don’t accept vendor-defined success. They define it themselves and force their partners to align.

 

Closing Thought

Most IT vendors aren’t built to care about your success. But they will care if you make it the condition for their continued business.

Real partnerships emerge when value delivered is the price of renewal. Anything less is just a contract