If you work in SaaS and you care about keeping customers (and revenue), you’ve probably heard about Planhat. Maybe your boss made you buy it. Maybe you’re just tired of tracking renewals in a cluttered spreadsheet. Either way, this guide is for people who want to actually use Planhat to manage renewals and cut churn—without spending weeks learning another “all-in-one” tool.
Let’s get practical. Here’s how to use Planhat the way it’s meant to be used: to keep customers happy, spot trouble before it hits, and make renewals less of a fire drill.
Step 1: Get Your Customer Data Into Planhat (and Clean It Up)
This sounds boring, but it’s the foundation. Planhat is only as good as the data you feed it. If your account info is a mess, your churn tracking will be too.
What to do:
- Connect your tools. Planhat plays well with Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, and a bunch of others. Use their native integrations or APIs. If your data lives in a spreadsheet, you can import that too.
- Map your fields. Make sure renewal dates, contract values, and product usage map to the same fields in Planhat. If you skip this, you’ll be hunting for info later.
- Clean up duplicate accounts and outdated contacts. Trust me, you want one source of truth. Fix it now or you’ll pay for it later.
Pro tip: Don’t bother importing every single data point. Focus on what actually matters for renewals: contract dates, value, usage stats, support tickets, and decision-maker contacts.
Step 2: Set Up Renewal Workflows—Don’t Just “Track” Dates
Just seeing a renewal date on a dashboard isn’t enough. You need a process to avoid last-minute scrambles.
Here’s what works:
- Create renewal playbooks. Planhat lets you build workflows (they call them “Playbooks”) for each renewal segment—annual, monthly, big accounts, whatever. Define who does what and when.
- Schedule reminders and tasks. Set automated reminders for CSMs to reach out 90, 60, and 30 days before renewal. Planhat can assign these tasks so nothing slips.
- Use templates, not one-off emails. Build out email templates for renewals and QBRs inside Planhat. It saves time and keeps the tone consistent.
What to skip: Don’t over-engineer your workflow with dozens of steps or complex logic. Start simple—just enough to keep renewals on track. You can always add more later.
Step 3: Track Health Scores, but Don’t Worship Them
Customer health scores are everywhere in Planhat. They look fancy, but they’re only helpful if they actually predict churn.
How to use health scores well:
- Pick a few real indicators. Usage drops, support tickets spike, no response to emails—these are red flags. Weight them higher than soft stuff like NPS or “sentiment.”
- Review and update regularly. Don’t set your health score formula once and forget it. If customers are churning but their scores are “green,” your formula’s broken.
- Share scores with the team. Make sure sales, CSMs, and execs see the same picture. A health score hidden in a dashboard helps no one.
What doesn’t work: Don’t treat health scores like magic. They’re guesses based on what you track. Use them as an early warning, not the entire story.
Step 4: Automate the Boring Stuff, But Stay Human Where It Counts
Planhat can automate a lot—alerts, emails, even playbook steps. Use it to keep the basics running, but don’t let automation replace actual customer conversations.
Automate:
- Routine renewal reminders
- Follow-up tasks for CSMs
- Internal alerts when accounts go “at risk”
- Data entry (where possible)
Stay human:
- Renewal negotiations
- QBRs and strategy calls
- Outreach to at-risk customers
Pro tip: Automation should make you more responsive, not more robotic. The key is to automate reminders and workflow, but still show up for the big moments.
Step 5: Track Churn (And Actually Learn From It)
It’s easy to ignore churn reasons or just blame “market conditions.” Planhat lets you dig into the details—if you actually fill them out.
How to get value from churn tracking:
- Log every lost customer, with a real reason. Don’t just pick “budget” for everything. Dig into why they left: missing features, bad support, poor fit.
- Look for patterns. Use Planhat’s reporting to spot trends—like a spike in churn for a certain product line or customer segment.
- Share churn insights with product and leadership. Don’t keep this in the CSM bubble. If you’re losing customers for the same reason, it’s everyone’s problem.
What not to do: Don’t set and forget churn reasons. Update your list, add new categories, and push for real feedback—not just what’s easy to record.
Step 6: Use Dashboards Wisely—Don’t Get Lost in Widgets
Planhat’s dashboards let you slice and dice data any way you want. That’s a blessing and a curse.
How to make dashboards useful:
- Pick a few key metrics. Track renewal rates, churn rate, upcoming renewals, and at-risk accounts. Don’t flood your screen with vanity stats.
- Build views for different roles. CSMs need different dashboards than execs. Keep it relevant.
- Review them regularly. Dashboards are only helpful if you actually look at them and act on the data.
What to ignore: Don’t spend hours customizing dashboards if no one uses them. Start with out-of-the-box views and tweak only what’s missing.
Step 7: Close the Loop—Use Planhat to Drive Real Actions
All the tracking in the world is pointless if it doesn’t change what you do.
How to close the loop:
- Set up regular renewal reviews. Use Planhat to run weekly or monthly renewal meetings. Review upcoming renewals, risks, and wins as a team.
- Document what works (and what flops). When a renewal goes sideways, note what happened in Planhat. Build up a library of lessons learned.
- Tie actions to outcomes. If you run a win-back campaign or change your playbooks, track the results. Don’t just hope things improve—measure them.
What Actually Helps (and What Doesn’t) in Planhat
Works well:
- Centralizing all renewal and churn data in one place
- Automating reminders and repetitive tasks
- Giving CSMs a clear process to follow
Doesn’t help much:
- Overly complicated health scores
- Endless dashboard tweaks
- Piling in every possible integration “just because”
Ignore the hype: Planhat is a tool, not a silver bullet. It won’t magically fix churn or make renewals easy. But if you use it to stay organized, catch problems early, and actually talk to customers, it makes the job a whole lot less painful.
Keep It Simple, Iterate Often
Don’t get caught up trying to build the perfect Planhat setup on day one. Start with clean data, simple renewal workflows, and a handful of key metrics. Fix what’s broken as you go. The best teams use Planhat as a living system—not a set-and-forget dashboard.
Remember: The goal isn’t just to “manage renewals.” It’s to keep more customers, learn from every loss, and make churn something you can actually control. That’s what Planhat is for—if you use it with a little common sense.