Renewals Specialist

This role engages early and frequently with customers and partners, together with the Renewals Manager, to help solve technology challenges, address competitive risks, evaluate multiple solutions to meet customer needs, and enhance the product experience, typically starting six or more quarters prior to renewal. 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 role collaborates with the Renewals Manager from opportunity identification to close, initiating engagement through a warm handoff from Sales and Customer Success, confirming roles and responsibilities early to ensure a smooth transition, aligned activation strategy, and unified customer engagement. The position collaborates cross-functionally with field sales, inside sales, channels, 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, ensuring the right expertise is involved to resolve specific customer issues, and conducts proactive risk assessments to identify and address potential risks early in the renewal process, collaborating with relevant teams to ensure successful renewals and customer satisfaction. The role assists in overall negotiation to ensure the integrity of renewal agreements related to assigned product lines and identifies upsell opportunities, leverages AI tools to provide actionable insights, streamline renewal processes, and enhance customer engagement, and applies deep technical expertise to execute product line-specific renewal contracts for products and services while identifying cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Additionally, it manages renewal quote creation, customer engagements, and on-time closure for assigned product lines, providing maximum value for customers, and oversees a high volume of transactional renewals, handling a range of strategic accounts and deal types.
What You'll Do:
•Manages consultative renewal engagements focused on lower-volume, high-value, and complex opportunities, often involving multi-product or multi-architecture solutions
•Demonstrates expertise in assigned architecture and working knowledge of Cisco’s broader portfolio, contributing to renewal planning and execution
•Aligned to select strategic or large enterprise accounts
•Plays a key role in discovery and consultative discussions with customers to uncover business priorities, beginning to integrate insights to inform a renewal strategy
•Applies customer insights, competitive intelligence and market trends to position Cisco’s capabilities and innovations that drive customer success
•Conducts proactive and strategic risk assessments across competitive, adoption, and technology dimensions, developing mitigation strategies in collaboration with sales and customer success
•Owns renewal quote creation and supports negotiation efforts, ensuring alignment with customer expectations and identifying upsell opportunities
•Applies advanced consulting tools and methodologies to optimize renewal outcomes and align with customer business goals
•Identifies and helps connect innovative solutions, using analysis and growing knowledge of Cisco and competitor offerings to inform renewal strategy
•Drives process simplification and automation across renewal workflows, improving scalability and consistency across accounts
•Collaborates closely with account teams to ensure renewal strategies deliver innovative and measurable customer outcomes
•Demonstrates technical expertise in assigned architecture and related portfolio offerings, supporting renewal execution and upsell opportunities based on customer needs
•Synthesizes customer feedback and renewal challenges to inform improvements to Cisco’s renewal frameworks, tools, and documentation
•Leverages advanced software, automation, and AI capabilities to drive innovation in renewal execution and support expansion opportunities
•Contributes to the development of renewal documentation and best practices, supporting continuous improvement and standardization across teams
•Facilitates collaboration across sales, customer success, and delivery teams to ensure unified execution of complex renewal motions
•Owns execution of strategic renewal motions, influencing internal and external stakeholders to drive customer satisfaction and business outcomes
•Mentors junior renewal specialists and contributes to team knowledge sharing to elevate capability and maturity
Minimum Qualifications
Bachelors + 5 years of related experience, or
Masters + 3 years of related experience, or
PhD + 0 years of related experience, or
equivalent relevant experience

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.