You want to move to electronic payments for smaller orders
Cash Flow Your DSO effectively goes to zero when everyone is on credit card or ACH.
Merchant of Record There are payment services that take on the burden of being “MOR”. When you get some cash and history with your bank you want to take this on. Being the MOR has many advantages
Self-Service Many customers want to try and buy in a self-service manner. They have an expectation of being able to pay by credit card. If your average recurring payment is less than $500, you don’t want to bother with invoicing and collecting.
Your sales team can’t upsell & cross-sell customers because you can’t identify them
Renewals If you find out that a customer was up for a renewal after the renewal date, your chances of recapturing that revenue are low
Accurate Up-Sells and Add-Ons If you don’t know when subscribtions start and end, it’s impossible to create quotes that are pro-rated or co-terminate with other subscriptions the customer already has
Visibility of Customer Details in Salesforce If your sales people use Salesforce.com, that is where you need accurate details of what products and plans customers are currently subscribed
Try and Buy You should be able to do a trial that requires a credit card, or doesn’t require a credit card, have a time based trial, or have a product that is always free
Align to Value Most customers will align your products value with something – users, GB of Storage, documents, projects, etc. You should be able to price in a way that drives uptake
Trust and Commitment Monthly may be the low touch way to get customers to buy, but once they like it they should be able to pay for the year and get discount
You want to price in a way customers want to buy - and you can’t
Transparency Little things like showing the service period give customers the comfort that you know what you’re doing and that should pay.
One Document They Read! You know that your current customers all get an invoice, but you were told that you couldn’t put important new information on on the one document you know your customers read
They Should be Correct You face an uphill battle in “delighting” your customers if your invoices aren’t right. We especially see this in usage-based models.
Your invoices lack important details at best or worse, the amounts
are flat-out wrong
You treat price changes like a one time event, instead of a process
If you had MRR Contribution… Modern metrics like MRR help you decide which products are contributing the most revenue, and whether customers are upgrading over time…
Experimentation You would like to continually do A/B testing on how customers want to buy and pay. You can’t
Engineering Most companies have the product pricing baked deeply into their code and systems. You don’t change pricing often because you can’t
You delay your new subscription launch due to your systems
Disruptive market forces If you’re like most companies, you have a very small competitor that is pricing completely differently. You can’t technically even sell that way.
Your engineering team.. They are building your product. Anything you need to do around subscriptions can’t be touched until after the product is complete…
One time events.. The concept of a recurring relationship with the customer doesn’t exist in your systems. Everything looks like a SKU.
You can’t pass an audit because you can’t accurately track recurring revenue
Contracts are Different Your sales people are doing so many different types of deals that you can’t even keep track of how to treat the revenue and deferral schedule
Forensic Science You have to search in crazy places to find the details of what you charged who for what period of time.
No System of Record You did things differently every different year. There is not one place that houses all the definitive records of the relationship with the customer
Top Related