SaaS pricing models aren’t getting easier to manage. With the introduction of usage-based pricing and product-led growth, it’s more important than ever to embrace a flexible pricing structure.
Unfortunately, the big incumbents in the CPQ and billing market literally weren’t made for the unique SaaS pricing models of today or the amount of upsells and changes required to grow customers.
Nue.io is part of a newer, different generation of vendors solving the quote-to-revenue conundrum with a fresh customer and seller-first approach with fully integrated Salesforce functionality.
“Pricing experimentation is the business requirement right now. You can’t wait 6 months to roll out a price change today.” Kate McCullough
Steelbrick CPQ (now Salesforce CPQ) was a great product, originally developed fifteen years ago for manufacturing companies. It’s meant to handle physical product orders (hardware, shipments, etc.) and is ok at handling vanilla subscription terms
Likewise, Zuora billing was built for more simplified subscription models but struggles with flexibility for modern pricing. When licensing tiers, usage-based pricing, in-product ordering, and the demand for flexibility increased, implementation teams have tried to custom code around and force the products to fit their customers’ needs.
Nue.io co-founders identified major gaps in the market and purpose-built a quote-to-revenue tool to help modern SaaS businesses quickly design and roll out pricing models (across both self-service AND direct sales motions) while reducing SKU proliferation and maximizing reporting capabilities.
Nue.io is a Salesforce-native tool that leverages standard objects and minimizes custom objects to create quotes,orders and invoices which cna be seamlessly integrated with your ERP. The product is structured so your end users (Sales and CS/account management) never have to leave Salesforce. hey can see a customer’s purchase history in an easy-to-understand UI. From a single page, end users can see past orders, subscriptions, usage, invoices, and billing history. They can also quickly create upgrades, downgrades, or cross-sell quotes – with a full view of product usage and what’s been invoiced.
“We’re solving way beyond Quote to Revenue - which is how people typically think of the revenue stack. One of the things that we found when we were researching several years ago when we were looking at the space is that companies were dealing with different go-to-market motions, different pricing, and also different land and expand motions that were related to them. This was causing a lot of grief for companies because, to-date, there hasn’t been a holistic solution to encapsulate all of them. Companies are challenged to keep up with the dynamic pricing they need in today’s market.” Kate McCullough
Because all of your data is generated and stored in your CRM, reporting is simplified. Within the Nue platform, users can generate ARR trend reports.
You read that right.
End-users have out-of-the-box ARR trend reporting. This means you can see which customers upgraded, downgraded, churned, or were newly signed without doing a bunch of calisthenics in Excel.
Nue allows API connections, including a connection to your product and its usage data. This means that usage-based pricing is possible in Nue, as well as in-app purchases or user-led expansions. Because the quote and pricing options in Nue are highly customizable, you can present customers with a curated list of possible upsell options. Because these quotes and purchase approvals are managed in Salesforce, companies no longer have to scramble to update monthly or quarterly usage calculations or in-app purchases at the end of the month.
Because Nue was designed to allow quick iterations on pricing models while minimizing SKUs, your finance team can trust the sales and product team to design a pricing model that doesn’t destroy revenue recognition. This also means RevOps will spend less time researching discrepancies between your core systems and trying to figure out quarter-end results.
Nue can handle physical product orders and standard annual SaaS subscriptions, but it’s also designed to handle co-terms, upgrades, downgrades, and cross-sells. However, it really shines with more complex pricing models like:
Because all of this data is stored in your CRM, Nue can write complex product and invoicing data over to tools that historically couldn’t support sophisticated SaaS billing (we’re looking at you, Quickbooks).
“Your Finance team can stay wherever they’re most comfortable.” Kate McCullough
Because the app generates and stores the information, it has several out-of-the-box dashboards to give your team visibility into product usage, ARR trends, invoices, and billing - to name a few (with options to build out custom reporting).
Did we mention you get to keep all of the functionality you actually like about Salesforce? Approvals are still an option, along with the object and field-level security you’ve come to expect from Salesforce.
There were quite a few features we liked, but we really 🤓 nerded out 🤓over Nue’s ability to flex across various pricing models while still providing the reporting capabilities we have hoped and dreamed for since we started in operations years ago. ARR trend reporting is difficult in Salesforce (SFDC reporting snapshots 🤢), and being able to slice and dice that data by expansion, downgrades, and cross-sells is unheard of. They even have the ability to drill into product details for discount historicals.
I can almost hear my past CFO screaming with glee…
The app has a sleek design that is Salesforce native, so opening an account’s Nue records is as simple as a click. We liked the interface that allows users to research a customer’s history, view invoices, examine their billing history, and create quotes easily. If you’ve ever worked in an early-stage startup and had to scramble (and fail) to find a customer’s contract, you know how powerful a thorough history of a customer’s transactions can be.
We also appreciate Kate’s promise that the sales team will demo the product on their first call.
Nue can handle just about any combination of subscriptions, self-service ordering, and physical orders.
“If you have a snowflake of a pricing model, we want to see it.” Kate McCullough
Nue’s goal is to be able to grow with small startups as they evolve into enterprise companies. Their most common customer profile is a growth-phase SaaS company with Salesforce as their CRM. They’ve also succeeded with enterprise SaaS companies that have failed CPQ implementations or are looking at a complete redesign.
Nue integrates with NetSuite, Quickbooks, Stripe, Avalara, RightRev, and Netsuite ARM. They also state they work well with any Salesforce integrated partners.
Nue is not a fit for companies that have adopted HubSpot, Dynamics, Sugar CRM, or any other CRM outside of Salesforce.
We weren’t able to get pricing details. Kate did say their pricing model is as flexible as the customer pricing models they support.
Nue’s implementation timeline starts at 6 weeks. The factors that impact the timeline include the process customers go through to decide what they want their future pricing strategy to encompass.
“The hard part is understanding whether you’re trying to replicate the way you do things today or if you want to design it like you wanted to on day one.” Kate McCullough
To get your very own demo of Nue, click here and tell them the RevOps Co-Op sent you.
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