Lumen Rota × Falkstad Group — Contract Renewal

Everything here is fictional. Lumen Rota and Falkstad Group are invented companies and
every number in these files was made up for this example. Nothing in it comes from a real
client.

The case

Lumen Rota is a Berlin workforce-scheduling software company selling to European grocery and
hospitality chains. Falkstad Group, a Nordic grocery chain, is its third-largest account and
the contract is up for renewal — with a 20% discount ask on the table and a competing vendor
already holding a framework agreement with Falkstad's parent group. The candidate is
interviewing for a Customer Success Manager role.

What the interviewer asked for

No more than ten slides: a read of where the account actually stands; a recommendation among
three mutually exclusive paths, with reasoning that rules the other two out rather than
merely ranking them; a recovery sequence for the underlying problem, with what has to be
true to move from each stage to the next; and a three-year value comparison of the
recommended path against renewing flat.

What the deck argues

The account is contracting — €840,000 down from €890,000, net revenue retention below 1.0x,
and only 8,900 of 14,200 licensed seats actually in use. The activation gap is concentrated:
144 stores were never deployed, and eleven stores from the last deployment wave generate 61%
of all support tickets. Renewing flat leaves the churn threat live and does nothing about
activation; moving to self-serve concedes roughly two-thirds of the contract value and
forfeits the expansion surface. The recommendation is the third path: reset to per-active-seat
pricing, which prices the contract against what Falkstad actually uses, and rebuild from
there as activation recovers and the remaining stores come live. The recovery motion is set
out as a gated sequence with exit criteria rather than dates, because the customer refused
to commit to a calendar until the diagnosis is agreed.

What comes with it

The Excel model runs the three-year comparison. Three tabs: a summary putting the
recommended path beside flat renewal across today, Year 1, Year 2 and Year 3; a data tab
modelling the activation scenario behind those numbers; and an assumptions tab naming every
input and its source, including which figures were extrapolated rather than given.

The prep brief is the Word document for the renewal conversation: the theory of the deal,
the headline numbers, what you are asking the panel to endorse and what you are conceding,
and prepared answers to the hard questions — including why a smaller Year 1 number is the
right recommendation.