The Role of Subscription Management in Modern Revenue Operations

Subscription-based revenue models have taken center stage in a macroeconomic climate focused on efficient growth. Effectively managing subscriptions is more than a simple task—it’s critical to drive efficient revenue growth and ensure customer satisfaction. This article will discuss how subscription management is pivotal in modern revenue operations for Salesforce users. From streamlining processes to optimizing pricing strategies, improving sales workflows, tailoring customer experiences, integrating accounting systems, reducing churn, managing collections, and leveraging cutting-edge AI trends, we’ve got it covered.

Plus, we’ll explore how Chargebee seamlessly integrates with Salesforce to streamline and optimize your quote-to-cash workflows.

Automate Quote to Cash lifecycle

Subscription and revenue growth management platforms, like Chargebee, enable you to automate the entire quote-to-cash lifecycle. This automation streamlines generating quotes, managing subscriptions, and collecting payments. Integrating with Salesforce allows you to seamlessly manage your subscription-based revenue operations, reducing manual errors and improving operational efficiency.

Leverage Chargebee’s Salesforce Integration (Q2C workflows)

Chargebee offers seamless integration with Salesforce. This integration enables you to leverage Salesforce’s power for your quote-to-cash workflows. By integrating Chargebee with Salesforce, you can manage subscriptions, generate quotes, process payments, and synchronize data between the two systems, ensuring a unified and efficient revenue operations process.

Must read:

How Chargebee’s Salesforce integration provides complete flexibility based on business needs.

Use Chargebee’s Salesforce CPQ integration (Q2C workflows)

For businesses using Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote), integrating Chargebee with Salesforce CPQ further improves quote-to-cash workflows. This integration allows you to leverage Salesforce CPQ’s advanced pricing and quoting capabilities while seamlessly managing subscriptions and revenue operations with Chargebee. The integration ensures a streamlined and comprehensive quote-to-cash process for Salesforce customers.

You can get the best of both worlds: the power of pricing flexibility with Salesforce CPQ and the power of subscription management with Chagebee+Salesforce CPQ integration.

Helpful guide:

Navigating Quote-to-Cash: Best Practices for Enterprise Subscription Professionals

Optimize pricing strategies

Subscription management platforms allow you to optimize your pricing strategies. With features like dynamic pricing, you can experiment with different pricing models, offer discounts, and implement personalized pricing plans based on customer segments. This flexibility allows you to maximize revenue while catering to your customers’ needs.

Excellent resource:

Unlock how to implement pricing optimizations.

Manage Multi-Entity accounts

Managing subscriptions across multiple accounts can be challenging for businesses with complex organizational structures. Subscription and revenue growth management platforms offer account hierarchy features that allow you to manage parent-child relationships between accounts. This capability simplifies subscription management for companies with multiple subsidiaries, franchises, or reseller networks.

Chargebee’s account hierarchy provides complete flexibility in managing subscriptions, tagging payment owners, and consolidating invoicing against the parent account. 

Accelerate Sales-Led Growth (SLG) motions

Subscription management platforms empower sales teams by giving them real-time visibility into customer subscriptions, billing information, and usage data. This information enables your sales team to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, increasing revenue. Integrating with Salesforce allows you to align your sales-driven motion with subscription management, ensuring a seamless customer experience.

“Integration between Chargebee and Salesforce has been absolutely critical for us. Previously, our sales ops team had to navigate between platforms, causing data loss and lag. But now, with seamless connectivity, there’s zero data loss or lag. Everything flows instantly, allowing us to run reports and stay on top of things in real-time.”

– Vir Satyan, Head of Sales and Retention at RangeMe

Hear RangeMe’s success story.

Optimize Product Led Growth (PLG) & hybrid motions

Product-led Growth (PLG) & hybrid motions have become increasingly popular among customers who prefer managing their subscriptions independently. This self-serve capability reduces the burden on the merchant and improves the customer experience—a win-win.

Chargebee helps with the end-to-end journey PLG & hybrid motions. This could be right from 

1. Creating pricing pages using Atomic Pricing. This capability enables businesses to offer personalized pricing plans based on specific customer requirements, increasing customer satisfaction and conversions. Based on operational needs, the pricing or sales teams can create these pages with zero developer dependency.
2. An embedded no-code checkout experience which is optimized for SaaS/subscription business
3. Chargebee’s customer portal allows existing customers to manage subscriptions (upgrade, pause, cancel, etc.), manage payment methods, invoice management (view and pay unpaid invoices), account management, and many more, all through a self-serve portal.
4. At any given point, the merchant can request payment and collect payments using Chargebee’s “Pay Now” links. 

Integrate with accounting systems

Integrating subscription management platforms with accounting systems, such as Netsuite, Xero, Sage Intacct, or QuickBooks, ensures accurate and seamless financial operations. This integration automates the synchronization of subscription data, invoices, and revenue recognition, reducing manual effort and minimizing the risk of errors. In this case, the subscription creation journey starts with subscription creation from Salesforce and ends with the accounting system. 

Learn how Chargebee automates this process here

Retain more existing customers

Churn, or the rate at which customers cancel their subscriptions, is a significant concern for subscription-based businesses. Subscription management platforms provide tools to monitor customer behavior proactively, identify potential churn risks, and implement retention strategies, even using AI to create personalized offers. You can reduce churn and improve customer retention by leveraging data analytics and automated communication workflows.

Chargebee also natively comes with Chargebee Retention to handle involuntary churn by providing intelligent cancel experiences that can captivate customers with personalized design, messaging, offers, and surveys. Monitor your customer retention performance over time and understand the state of your customer retention in easy-to-digest reports.

Must read:

Navigating the Retention Landscape: Key Takeaways from Chargebee Subscription Data

Automate collections

Efficient collections and dunning processes are essential for maintaining healthy cash flow. Subscription management platforms automate collections and dunning workflows, sending automated reminders and notifications to customers with outstanding payments. This automation ensures timely payments and reduces the burden on finance teams.

Chargebee Receivables help AR teams recover revenue from failed payments. You can also automate the revenue recovery process based on various customer cohorts. 

Automate customer communication

Effective communication with customers is crucial for subscription-based businesses. Subscription management platforms enable enterprises to automate email notifications for various events, such as subscription renewals, dunning, upgrades, or cancellations. This automation ensures timely and personalized communication, mitigating negative customer experiences.

Chargebee’s email notifications support automated communication through the subscription lifecycle. 

Stay ahead with AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) revolutionizes subscription management by enabling you to leverage data analytics and machine learning algorithms. AI-powered subscription management platforms can analyze customer behavior, predict churn risks, recommend pricing strategies, and automate personalized communication. These AI capabilities help you optimize your revenue operations and increase customer satisfaction.

Compliant revenue recognition

Revenue recognition is a critical aspect of subscription-based businesses. Subscription management and revenue growth platforms integrate with accounting systems to automate revenue recognition processes. These integrations ensure compliance with revenue recognition standards, such as ASC 606 or IFRS 15, and provide accurate and auditable revenue recognition.

Chargebee RevRec helps with compliant revenue recognition and audit-ready reporting.

Subscription reporting & forecasting

Subscription management platforms offer robust reporting and forecasting capabilities, giving you real-time insights into your subscription metrics, revenue trends, and customer behavior. These insights enable you to make better data-driven decisions, identify growth opportunities, and optimize revenue operations. The flexibility to derive insights with data from Salesforce and Chargebee provides valuable insights for making actionable business decisions.

Chargebee Revenue Story supports over 180 metrics out of the box. You can further filter, drill down, export, or schedule to send these reports. Alternatively, you can build custom reports using the Report Builder capability in Chargebee. 

Conclusion

Effective subscription management within Salesforce drives growth and efficiency by automating processes, optimizing pricing, and integrating seamlessly with Chargebee for streamlined operations. 

Request a demo today!