As the subscription economy turns its focus to Profitable Efficient Growth (“PEG”) rather than Growth at all Costs (GaaC), the amount of growth motions to drive growth, reduce churn, and increase profitability present the potential for significant returns and obstacles alike.
The most common motions to address growth, churn reduction, and profitability gains in subscription companies remain Product-Led Growth, Sales-Led Growth, and Subscription Management. With results like a 60-80% increase in win rates, a 5% increase in revenue per person, and a 33% increase in top-line bookings without additional overhead, it is easy to see why subscription companies are trying to solve all three motions.
However, each motion requires a different set of business processes, technologies, and internal functions that often lead to siloed systems per growth motion, an inability to track and measure the subscriber journey, and organizational redundancy.
Sales-Assisted / Sales-Led Growth
Salesforce Revenue Cloud is the market-leading solution for product-to-cash processes that are sales-assisted. Revenue Cloud offers a robust solution across the product-to-cash landscape for Sales, Revops, Order Management, Billing, and Revenue Recognition.
Self Service / Product-Led Growth
Subscription companies undertaking self-service initiatives typically leverage their engineering team to select their subscription management solution. They are typically selecting API-first solutions that are easy to integrate into their Product. Usually, they focus on the availability to easily display pricing, place orders, and manage payments, all via APIs.
Partner Quoting / Partner-Led Growth
Partner teams typically purchase solutions (like portals or traditional PRM solutions) that have great functionality for managing partner onboarding, lead registration, quoting, and order placement. These solutions also come with their product, pricing, and order management technologies.
The challenge with having disparate solutions for the three motions mentioned above is customers face the following challenges:
No single source of truth for product and pricing
The need to administer and enhance multiple technologies
Integration from each solution into fulfillment, ERP, and other back-office solutions
Lack of ability to gain a complete 360 view of the customer. For example, self-service subscriptions may be stored in Stripe, while enterprise subscriptions may be stored in Salesforce Revenue Cloud. This causes difficulties like limiting the ability to convert individual plans to enterprise agreements.
Overcoming these challenges is imperative in the “new normal” moving toward profitable growth. Insert Salesforce Revenue Lifecycle Management (“RLM”).
Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM) has been developed from the ground up in an API-first, componentized architecture. It includes an extensible user interface and APIs that can be configured to support organizations as they implement product-to-cash initiatives across Sales, product, and partner-led motions. Salesforce Revenue Lifecycle Management is both a product and a platform to empower organizations product-to-cash processes.
In addition to being the leading product-to-cash solution, we believe additional use cases will be unavailable in the Salesforce Revenue Cloud “managed packages.” These use cases will be possible due to the modular nature of RLM. An example of this is when a customer is using their homegrown support system and would like their agents to be able to provide pricing guidance to an existing customer inquiring about the price of upgrading their existing plan. This becomes possible by calling the APIs of the product and pricing components in RLM from within the homegrown support system. With little change to a customer’s user experience, we can shift a manual multi-step process into immediate value.
“Revenue Lifecycle Management possesses the potential for customers to leverage its components à la carte, or in its entirety, to empower organizations to scale and grow unlike ever before on the Salesforce platform” Ryan Lott, CEO / Founder Neocol. “A company can solve traditional quote-to-cash use cases across multiple sales motions. But what excites me is that based on the modular componentized nature of RLM, we will see new game-changing use cases across their business, i.e., embedding the product and pricing APIs in line with business applications. It’s an exciting shift.”
Salesforce Revenue Cloud remains a robust set of components and functionality built to ignite sales-assisted motions within subscription companies. If your organization is doubling down on advancing sales-assisted growth, Salesforce Revenue Cloud is still a great fit to drive your desired transformation.
The innovation happening with the Revenue Cloud and Revenue Lifecycle Management roadmaps showcase that Salesforce, alongside a strong industry expert partner like Neocol, are proactively creating purpose-built technology solutions meant to help subscription companies drive profitable, efficient growth.
Moving forward, you can expect to view and read more on Neocol’s perspective regarding Salesforce Revenue Lifecycle Management, its use cases, and benefits consistently through articles, technical explanations, and demo-shorts.