Years ago, businesses expressed a need for a tool that helped them manage customer subscription billing. Since it was founded in 2007 to solve this problem for organizations worldwide, Zuora has stood out as a leader in the subscription-based software industry.

There seems to be a piece of technology for everything these days, and businesses have grown frustrated with maintaining multiple systems on different platforms, like Salesforce for their CRM and Zuora for subscription management.

Businesses that implemented Zuora for customer subscriptions many years ago when there weren’t better options available are likely facing several challenges.

Product Catalog Proliferation

Product proliferation is an issue where the same product gets replicated in several ways, each way slightly different than the others to support combinations of charges, different billing frequencies, different pricing.

With Zuora as your customer subscription tool, when you need any type of customization on a product, things get a little messy. That product gets replicated and renamed to match the customization, creating hundreds and thousands of product items that are simply all the same item, just with a slight tweak. For example, if you are selling a shirt, Zuora would replicate that shirt to a red shirt, blue shirt, size small, size large, etc. At the end of the day, you are still just selling a shirt and your product catalog should represent that one shirt, not the countless of customizations of the shirt.

With Salesforce CPQ & Billing, that same item is still customizable, but without having to be replicated. This streamlines your product catalog and makes it easier for salespeople to generate quotes and find additional products to upsell and complement what the customer is already interested in. In the same example as above, if a customer is interested in the shirt you sell, Salesforce would recommend pants to go with it.

Technical Debt

Technical debt relates to any custom configuration between one set of applications and another to support the end to end integration between Salesforce and Zuora, for example.

Technical debt is introduced with Zuora when it is trying to relay information to Salesforce. In simple terms, Zuora and Salesforce do not speak the same language, and trying to get these tools to share information can be a very time consuming and manual process.

Businesses are now replacing Zuora with Salesforce CPQ & Billing because Salesforce CPQ & Billing accomplishes exactly what Zuora does, without the technical debt. Making this switch is a no-brainer for businesses to have their systems more connected, speaking the same language, and providing easier day-to-day experiences for sales managers and customers.

How Neocol Can Help

Many of the challenges described can be solved by switching from Zuora to Salesforce CPQ & Billing and Neocol would love to help you implement the proper software to simplify your business processes. Contact us today to get started!

Contributor: Sean Ralph, Principal Billing Architect, Neocol