Four Capabilities You Need in a B2B Subscription Management Software

What capabilities should you look for in B2B subscription management software? In this blog post, we’ll be taking a look at four essential capabilities that a great B2B subscription management software should have - capabilities that not only make billing easier and more efficient but also create greater accuracy and scalability within your business operations. Read on for more details!

1 . Agile Pricing

Pricing is a hidden and often forgotten superpower for a SaaS company, and any other subscription business. A big effort is put into to a new product release to keep customers happy with features, forgetting the fundamental effect of price. As pricing strategist Hermann Simon states, the most important aspect of price is value. Therefore, static and fixed price is often not the right choice.

The importance of pricing is amplified when times are a bit uncertain. If you want to read more check out: VentureBeat. They list some valuable insights into how pricing can be your savior and growth driver in 2023.

So, it is time really to consider other than Bronze, Silver, and Gold price plans and start to really align price and value together.

The challenge of SaaS pricing

In SaaS perceived value is measured constantly in a form of customer satisfaction and churn. In B2B SaaS perceived value is also often measured in sales every day: customer expects a discount and gives an opinion of the value. So, flexibility and agility in pricing are not only a nice-to-have option but more and more a requirement.

Without proper tools, agile and scalable pricing is difficult. If the volumes are low, it is easy or relatively easy to collect recurring revenue, even with a high variation in pricing. But when the volumes start to increase, any variation can quickly cause difficulties in collecting revenue.

2. Loosely coupled Product Catalog

Pricing cannot be discussed without digging a bit into products. A very typical combination of a product and price is a price plan. A set of features are offered at a certain price, often with a few different tiers like Bronze, Silver, or Gold. This works well to some extent but coupling product code and price together is not a very flexible idea, especially if your offering is versatile. Many necessary options, modules, and consumption-based elements create complexity in billing.

Customer needs are not often met with too tight packaging and customer-specific prices may cause maintenance and reporting chaos. So, opting for a solution that allows easily several prices and pricing models for a product may be a good idea: have for example a tier price for a product for one customer segment, and volume price for the same product for another without sacrificing operational efficiency. This will be amplified with a large offering and large customer base as we have seen with our customers: loose coupling of price and product is almost a must in B2B enterprise SaaS.

3. All goes to the Contracts

Your customer signs a contract and what then? Typically nothing, as the contract is often a breathless document on a hard disk somewhere. Unfortunately, this is where operational efficiency is lost. You really need to make the contract breathe and live.

This happens when the contract starts to steer billing, reporting, customer service, and your revenue operations (RevOps). But you need to have the contract in a digital form and with the ability to steer your operations. This means:

• products are coupled with contracts
• the agreed pricing models and prices are coupled with the contracts
• billing terms are coupled with the contracts
• entitlement and consumption data is coupled with the contracts

If the contract actively steers your operations, there is no more manual work in billing and reporting. The contract lives with your customer lifecycle, upsells, new products, and price changes, all in one place and as the center of your RevOps.

4. Connecting your SaaS Platform

No SaaS is an island, and that is more than true with consumption-based enterprise SaaS. Customer usage drives your revenue, profit, and growth. So, a capable and flexible way to connect data streams is a must. Connect your SaaS platform using files or API, but whatever the method, opt for automation. Connect your CRM to offer customer contract view for your sales and account managers.

Want to learn more?

A fast-growing Finnish SaaS company Heeros automated all their billing cycles and improved transparency, efficiency, and customer experience related to recurring service billing. Read more about how Heeros solved the challenges with Enterprise SaaS contract management and billing.

TAKE US TO THE TEST

Good Sign is an expert in pricing and billing. Our software, which is produced as a cloud service, is used by Saas companies as well as by IT service companies that provide various data center or consulting services. And in many industries in XaaS service models!

So, if you feel your billing needs will outgrow your current recurring revenue billing solution, or if you are just curious to learn how Good Sign does things differently, feel free to take us to the test! We will gladly take on your challenge and prove to you it can be done, and that the new world lies beyond just subscriptions.