Renewal outreach capacity planning decides how deep to cut the list

The order of operations in most renewal programmes is backwards. Somebody builds a risk model, somebody else ranks the book, and then a sales director looks at the ranked book and says we can probably get through the top three hundred. The three hundred is a guess made after the fact, by the person with the least time to check it.

Turn it round. Renewal outreach capacity is a number you can compute in an afternoon from things you already know, and it is the constraint that decides everything downstream: how deep the list goes, what happens to the accounts below the line, and whether it is worth building a more accurate renewal model at all. A model that ranks 2,400 accounts perfectly is worth exactly as much as a model that ranks the top 400 perfectly if you can only call 400 of them.

How many renewal conversations can the team actually have?

Start with the number of conversations your team can actually have in the renewal window, and be honest about all three terms.

Twelve reps. Six quality conversations a day, where a quality conversation means someone answered, you got through the agenda and you logged an outcome. Fifteen working days in the window between the show closing and the early-bird deadline. That gives 12 times 6 times 15, which is 1,080 slots.

Against a book of 2,400 accounts, 1,080 slots reaches 45 per cent of the book. Which means 1,320 accounts, 55 per cent, are going to renew or not renew without a rep ever speaking to them, and the only question is whether you decide that deliberately or discover it in March.

Six a day is the number people argue about, and it is where the plan usually goes wrong. Dials are not conversations. A rep making thirty dials a day in a B2B book with named contacts will connect on perhaps a quarter of them, and of those connections a good proportion are a two-minute deferral rather than a renewal conversation. Six is what I would plan on until you have measured your own, and measuring it is one query against the phone system.

The window is the other soft term. Fifteen working days assumes nobody takes leave immediately after the show, which is not true of any operations team I have met, and it assumes reps do nothing else, which is not true either. If your reps also work new business, halve it. UFI's Global Exhibition Barometer, in its 34th edition concluded in January 2025 with responses from 390 companies across 56 countries, found 46 per cent of companies planning to increase staff numbers over the following six months and 51 per cent planning to hold them flat, so for most organisers this is a planning exercise against a team you already have.

Where the line goes

Capacity tells you the maximum depth. Economics tell you whether you should go that deep.

A call is worth making when the expected saved margin exceeds the cost of making it. Both halves need a number.

Cost first. Take a renewal rep on 62,000 fully loaded, spending 40 per cent of the year on renewal calling. That is 24,800 of cost against 6 conversations a day over roughly 88 working days, which is 528 conversations. 24,800 divided by 528 gives 46.97, call it 47 per conversation. Multi-touch accounts consume two or three slots, so the cost per account worked is nearer 100 to 140, and I would plan on 120.

Now the benefit. The expected save from a call is the probability the call changes the outcome, multiplied by the value of the account, multiplied by contribution margin. Not the churn probability. The change in the churn probability, which is a different and much smaller number.

For an account worth 22,000 at a 45 per cent contribution margin, where a call moves the renewal probability by 4 points, the expected save is 0.04 times 22,000 times 0.45, which is 396. Against a cost of 120, that call is worth making four times over.

Run the same arithmetic on a small account. Worth 3,200, same margin, and because small accounts are harder to move by phone say the call shifts renewal probability by 1 point. That is 0.01 times 3,200 times 0.45, or 14.40. Against 120 of cost, you are burning 105 to make it.

The break-even is where uplift times value times margin equals 120. At a 4 point uplift and 45 per cent margin, that is 120 divided by 0.018, or 6,667 of account value. At a 1 point uplift, it is 26,667.

That single calculation is more useful than most renewal dashboards, because it converts an argument about who deserves a call into a threshold. In this book, at these assumptions, accounts below roughly 6,700 of value do not repay a phone call unless something specific makes them movable.

The two numbers you do not have

Everything above turns on uplift and margin, and most organisers have neither to hand.

Margin is recoverable with effort. Contribution margin on exhibition space, after venue, build, floor operations and the commission on the sale, is a finance question with an answer, and it varies enormously between a hall in Frankfurt and a hall in Birmingham. Get the real number for one show before you apply a portfolio average to all of them.

Uplift you almost certainly do not have, because measuring it means not calling some accounts, which nobody wants to do. Until you run that holdout, the 4 points above is an assumption and the whole calculation inherits its uncertainty. Which is fine for planning and dangerous for a board paper. State the assumption in the same sentence as the answer, and carry the same discipline through to the point where these probabilities roll up into a revenue forecast, which is G32's subject.

Reinartz and Kumar, in the Journal of Marketing in 2003, made the case that has aged best here. Working through a large customer database, they identified the factors under a manager's control that explain the variation in profitable lifetime duration, and showed a framework built on projected profitable duration outperforming the standard recency, frequency and monetary value approach. The lesson for a renewal window is that effort should follow expected profitable duration and not the size of last year's invoice. An exhibitor who has renewed eight times and is worth 14,000 a year has a longer expected tail than one who is worth 40,000 and is in edition two, and the second one currently sits higher on every list I have seen.

What do you do with the 55 per cent below the line?

Deciding the cut is only half the exercise. The accounts below it need a route, and "the marketing email goes to everyone anyway" is not a route.

What works is a tiered path that costs no rep time. A dated early-bird offer with a real deadline. The floor plan opened to renewing exhibitors before it opens generally, which is worth more than a discount to anyone who cares about position. A self-service renewal in the exhibitor portal with the same terms as last edition pre-filled, so the path of least resistance is signing. A single templated email from the named rep, sent in bulk but signed individually, that says the stand is held until a specific date.

The measurement that justifies the tier is straightforward and almost nobody runs it. Take the accounts immediately below the cut and split them at random into the automated path and no path at all beyond the standard marketing. The difference in renewal rate between those two groups is the value of the automated tier, computed on your own book, and it costs nothing but the discipline to hold a group out.

Recomputing the line when the window moves

Capacity planning is not an annual exercise, because the inputs move.

If the show moves from a March to a February slot, the window between close and early-bird shortens and the line rises. If two reps leave in the fortnight after the show, which happens, the line rises by a sixth. If you shift from a fifteen-day sprint to a rolling programme across the year, the arithmetic changes shape entirely, because 12 reps at 6 conversations across 200 days is 14,400 slots and the constraint stops being capacity and starts being how often it is sensible to call the same exhibitor.

The version I would build is a single sheet with reps, conversations per day, days, book size and the break-even value, where changing any input redraws the line and prints how many accounts are above it. Fifteen minutes of work, and it turns the depth of the list into a decision somebody owns.

Where the arithmetic runs out

The break-even calculation assumes uplift is a constant, and it is not. It varies by account in a way that is the entire subject of uplift modelling, G24 here, and some accounts have negative uplift, where the call prompts a decision the exhibitor had not got round to making.

It also assumes calls are the only cost. They are not. A renewal conversation that ends in a 15 per cent discount to close has a cost equal to 15 per cent of the account, which dwarfs the 120 for the call and never appears in the capacity plan. If your reps are closing renewals with price, your real cost per save is an order of magnitude above what this model says, and the line should be much higher.

The deeper limit is that capacity planning optimises the allocation of a fixed resource and says nothing about whether the resource is the right size. Twelve reps might be four too many or eight too few. Answering that needs the uplift number, and until you have it the honest position is that you are allocating well inside a constraint you have not tested.

Pull two weeks of phone system data and count logged conversations per rep per day, then multiply by your real working days in the window. Compare that number to the length of the list you sent out last cycle. The gap between them is how much of your renewal programme was decided by nobody.