It was a bit daunting to approach our annual clients with the renewal conversation for the first time. We knew that it might be difficult to get clients to buy into our second year.

Our platform, Motivii, is a weekly update employees send to their manager to let them know how they're doing at work & surface insights like engagement & motivation. For a couple of clients who were going through some big people change challenges, we weren’t exactly sure how these meetings would pan out.

We knew we had to step it up and offer something a bit special to guarantee happy clients & renewals.

And step it up we did.

So how did we get 100% renewal?

Well, we pulled back the curtain and revealed... an Excel doc, but with all the insight we had available to us on the engagement, motivation & sentiment for each client.

Most of this information was displayed on our platform, however, we hadn't built in the functionality to make the data work hard. At the time it was difficult to see how team data changed from week to week and quarter to quarter.

From anonymously answering a couple of pulse questions at the end of each week as part of the Motivii Update, we had thousands of answers to engagement-style questions each week.

Everyone's weekly response to the question 'How Motivated Are You?' meant that we could see how the company & individual teams had been feeling from week-to-week.

And they could see more too: things like how the sentiment of what people are saying each week.

Working from Excel meant that we could do some other fancy things like look at the standard deviation of responses, so each person in the team can see what the spread of responses is to any particular question, from within any particular team.


Clients sometimes had no other way to get this information.

After we showed our five annual clients the Excel report, their ears pricked up. Although we were working from an Excel doc, rather than from our product's analytics interface, our clients couldn't ignore how useful the information was.

When they can see the capability of teams from week to week and quarter to quarter, they instantly understood how their people strategies and HR objectives had worked over time, and could see the impact a difficult time at the company was having on staff.

They were suddenly more interested in the analytics capabilities of Motivii: for them it was no longer a tool for helping managers lead their team better, or a tool for HR to check on teams' engagement scores. Motivii was also a heavy -duty analytics platform that they could use to report to senior management on the health of the organisation.

The data in our platform became the basis for KPIs that our clients would work against each quarter, which is an awesome way to be embedded in a business.

You've got to show your clients everything you can do.

An Excel doc will probably never be what a founder dreams about when they think about how they're going to win over a client.

As much as we had a great platform for managers to keep track of how their team are doing, we still had some work to do to display in-depth analytics.

What we did have was a pretty great way of collecting really useful information for our clients from week-to-week.

It doesn't matter how much you have access to: when it comes to renewing clients and keeping that revenue stream flowing, you've got to give everything you've got. Showing your paying customers that you and your effort is worth more than your competitors is well worth it.

It also is a good way of demoing your data, finding out what your clients like, and putting that initial mental work before you start building stuff into the platform.


Coding is sometimes the long way round.

If our platform was completely built on Microsoft Excel it would go down like a lead balloon. UX is our core focus because we need managers and employees to enjoy using Motivii, and find it simple and easy to use.

When we’re reporting back these insights to our clients, we’re speaking to about 2% of Motivii users, and they’re usually our buyers. These people spend most of their day using Office suite products like Excel, so we’re communicating with them in a way that they know and expect.

Our developers were pretty impressed with our responsive Excel analytics, too: they saw it as a form of coding. They were also grateful: the analytics would have been a big build if we wanted to add them all to the platform.

Sometimes marketing & client people feel they depend on developers to build into the platform, and sometimes developers feel like they’re the only people in the office that can handle & present data.

That’s just not true. There are loads of cases where non-coders can use tools like Excel to build prototypes or reports of what they’re looking for.

The first step is realising that you’ll probably be able to solve the problem yourself.