“When you hear the word “billing” you’re like…snooze. We want to talk about why sales and RevOps should care about billing.” - Kate McCullough
Successful companies grow and evolve their pricing quickly. Before long, they find themselves mired in a hodge podge of CRM, CPQ, and billing tools. If your sales team has grown, you have more people to train, and you’ve expanded your GTM strategy and product portfolio, you might be ready for a billing system that can handle the entire customer lifecycle.
“It costs money to run things in the cloud. Usage billing can help offset these costs.” - Jake Romphf
The first generation of billing tools focused on subscription billing. The next gen focused on usage billing. That’s not even accounting for invoicing services and one-time fees. These stand-alone tools aren’t designed to work together and as usage/consumption based billing becomes more popular as a way to secure incremental revenue, you’ll need a tool that can handle both pricing models on a single pane.
“Sometimes, sales hopes that they got it right. This isn’t a great way to run a business.” - Jake Romphf
Once you’ve landed your new business deal, it’s time to think about upsells and renewal. When you add on new features and products, billing quickly becomes complex. Your quote-to-cash system should be able to help you identify whitespace in your customer accounts and easily onboard them into better packages with appropriate proration and co-terms.
The space between sales, customer success, and finance has shrunk considerably. Without a proper process and governance system, there are too many chances for late quotes, invoice mistakes, and upset customers. RevOps must get into the back office and act as a partner who understands the needs of sales, success, support, and finance. Centralization ensures that RevOps doen’t cater to one team at the expense of another.
“GTM strategy has gotten more complicated. You have to navigate a lot of different variables.” - Kate McCullough
In product-led companies, the engineering or product team might own the self-service billing engine. So what happens when you expand into direct sales that needs a CPQ and invoicing function? Hybrid channel strategies make it hard to see the end-to-end, granular details of your ARR. A consolidated billing tool helps you improve the way you bring products to market.
A system that harmonizes product-led and sales-led pricing strategies and data gives you end-to-end insights at your fingertips.Sellers can easily see how a deal will impact their quota and finance can view how well they’re performing against collection targets. Plus, you’ll have real time data on important metrics like ARR, MRR, and TCV.
“Sales drives the billing and pricing experience.” - Jake Romphf
Before you dive in to implementing a new billing tool, make sure you understand your approval processes, pricing models, and the amount of effort you can invest in a new system. If you need help, partner with your vendor to make sure you’re prepared.
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