Transforming Quote-to-Cash: Chargebee-HubSpot Integration Use Cases for Subscription Growth

Subscription businesses are experiencing a significant transformation. The days of easy funding and unchecked growth expectations have been replaced by a period of rigorous scrutiny, where investors demand strong financial performance and a clear path to profitability. In this challenging macroeconomic environment, you must prioritize product innovation and unique value offerings and address operational inefficiencies to improve your bottom line. One area that needs immediate attention is the Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) process.

Why Quote-to-Cash is important for subscription businesses?

A modern Q2C system is now a mission-critical investment for B2B subscription businesses, offering benefits like accelerated revenue growth and measurable ROI. Shortening the quote-to-cash cycle through automated approvals and streamlined workflows enables faster deal closures, resulting in reduced sales cycles, increased sales velocity, and a quicker payback period on customer acquisition costs, making it highly valuable to investors.

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Navigating Quote-to-Cash Best Practices 

In an ideal Quote-to-Cash process, sales and finance teams work together, and changes made in one platform are effortlessly synched and reflected in the other, as depicted below :

Despite appearing straightforward, subscription businesses face several challenges with Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) processes that affect sales efficiency and customer satisfaction, including: 

• CRM limitations: Many CRMs can only handle one line item or scheduled changes within a contract, leading to inefficiencies.
• Quote customization issues: Modifying unit prices, quantities, adding custom bundles to quotes, and offering discounts directly from the CRM is difficult, making it hard for sales reps to provide customized quotes.

• Manual renewal processes: Billing teams have to set up reminders and renew contracts manually, which is time-consuming and prone to errors.
• Customer self-service limitations: Customers usually can only schedule one change through self-service portals, reducing service efficiency and responsiveness.

To address these challenges and enable the ideal Q2C process, a comprehensive quote-to-cash integration between Chargebee and HubSpot has been developed.

Introducing the Chargebee and HubSpot Q2C Integration

The Q2C integration of Chargebee and HubSpot offers a promising solution to the traditional Q2C challenges. This integration is designed to automate and streamline the Quote-to-Cash process, empowering sales teams to prioritize deal closures over administrative duties. Enabling smooth data flow and minimizing manual bottlenecks expedites deal closures and improves sales efficiency.

Quote-to-Cash Success Stories

Many companies successfully leverage the Chargebee and HubSpot Q2C Integration to drive substantial improvements in their Q2C processes. By implementing the updated system, they reduced processing times and minimized errors in quote creation. Additionally, the improved collaboration between sales, customer success, and finance teams resulted in smoother operations, ultimately contributing to revenue growth and improved customer satisfaction.

Improved sales efficiency for sales reps by reducing quote preparation time by 50% at a global career development company

The sales reps at a career development company that offers personalized coaching services to its subscribers across four continents faced multiple challenges owing to an outdated Quote-to-Cash process that involved them collaborating with multiple teams to raise a simple quote to the customer with unnecessary delays and errors.

The company had various membership options and payment plans, including monthly, yearly and 2-year plans with multiple add-ons and bundles catering to its diverse customer preferences.

While the plans and discounts offered were advantageous for its customers, they posed several challenges for the sales reps. The sales reps primarily used HubSpot to manage contacts and deals. When a deal progressed to generate a quote for the customer, the sales reps had to collaborate with the finance team. The finance team, after consulting with the product team, prepared the quote, a process that typically took one to two days.

Subsequently, the quote was shared with the salesperson, who conveyed it to the customer. Following negotiations and the deal’s closure, the salesperson was responsible for creating checkout links for customers, a task that relied on the operations team. Once the checkout link was generated, it was shared with the customer. After the customer completed the payment, the salesperson had to engage with the finance team again to manually set up the subscription for the customer in Chargebee. This process could take an additional day or two.

This inefficient Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) process caused significant problems for the sales representatives. Generating a quote took around 2-3 days, involving coordination between multiple teams, including sales, finance, and operations. This reliance on manual processes led to delays and inefficiencies, wasting valuable time. Communication and data-sharing issues between these teams further compounded the problem, resulting in additional delays and errors in quote creation. Moreover, the sales team found it extremely challenging to generate customized quotes and offer personalized discounts, hampering their ability to meet customer needs effectively.

These challenges were resolved when it implemented the HubSpot Q2C integration with their Chargebee setup.

The integration facilitated a seamless two-way sync between HubSpot and Chargebee, ensuring that critical data was consistently updated across both platforms.

A vital aspect of this integration was the company-customer object mapping. Specifically, the integration mapped contact, deal, and deal line items objects in HubSpot to Customer and Subscription objects in Chargebee based on established Company-Customer relationships. This ensures seamless alignment of customer and subscription data between HubSpot and Chargebee, enhancing data accuracy.

The image below shows the relationship between objects in HubSpot and Chargebee. The arrows indicate the direction of data flow.

In this new Q2C environment powered by the integration, the sales reps operated primarily within HubSpot, where deals were created and progressed through the sales pipeline, and other teams, such as finance and operations, can contribute to the sales process without any delays, avoiding long waiting times.

Now, let’s explore how this revamped Q2C process transformed the essential tasks of the sales representatives.

1. Quote preparation: The sales reps used HubSpot to prepare quotes. The predefined product catalogue in Chargebee synced to the product library in HubSpot, enabled sales reps to easily select the appropriate product and plan type to add to the quote. This allowed the sales reps to raise customized quotes and offer personalized discounts directly within HubSpot, simplifying the process and making it more efficient. This streamlined process reduced the time spent on quote preparation by approximately 50%, allowing them to focus more on customer interactions.

2. Quote distribution: Once the quote was prepared, it was sent directly to the customer from HubSpot.

3. Checkout link creation: When the customer was ready to pay, the sales reps could effortlessly create a checkout link from within HubSpot using an iframe. An iframe embedded within the HubSpot deal page allowed the sales reps to select the plan, currency, and billing frequency directly from the Chargebee product catalogue. They could then generate and send checkout links to customers with ease. This capability reduced the checkout link creation time by 40%, further streamlining the sales process.

4. Payment and subscription creation: Upon payment, a subscription was automatically created in Chargebee and reflected in HubSpot, ensuring real-time updates and eliminating manual data entry. The synchronization reduced the subscription creation time by up to 60%, improving overall process efficiency.

By integrating HubSpot with Chargebee, the company achieved a significantly more streamlined, efficient, and error-free Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) process, benefiting both the sales reps and their customers. This powerful integration simplified workflows by automating key steps, reducing manual errors, and accelerating the entire sales cycle.

Additionally, it enhanced the sales reps’ ability to provide customized quotes and personalized discounts directly within HubSpot, further boosting overall sales efficiency. The improved process increased operational productivity and elevated customer satisfaction by ensuring quicker, more accurate, and tailored service.

Email security company reduced manual workload and turnaround time for customer success reps by 50%

The customer success reps at a South African-based company focused on email security, helping organizations implement protocols such as DMARC, SPF, and DKIM, frequently received customer requests to change their subscription plans, including upgrades and downgrades. Due to the nature of its offerings, the volume of these requests was high, consuming almost 40% of its time.

Customer success reps would first contact the finance team to adjust subscriptions according to customer requirements. This process typically took at least a day or two, depending on the nature of the plan and add-ons. After updating the subscription, the reps had to update the changes in HubSpot manually. The process took even longer if the customer had multiple requests, such as a plan downgrade combined with various add-ons and additional paid integrations.

Besides this, the disconnected data between HubSpot and Chargebee created several visibility problems for customer success reps:

• Limited customer context: Reps lacked a complete understanding of a customer’s subscription details, such as their plan, usage patterns, and upcoming renewals. This made it difficult to personalize support, offer relevant upsells, or proactively address potential issues.
• Reactive issue resolution: Without real-time insights into subscription health, reps might only become aware of problems like payment failures or declining usage after they occur. This reactive approach led to customer dissatisfaction and potential churn in many deals.
• Missed renewal opportunities: Lack of visibility into upcoming renewals led to missed opportunities to secure customer commitment. Reps didn’t have enough time to engage with customers, discuss potential plan upgrades, or address concerns before the renewal.
• Difficulty identifying churn: It was a challenge to identify customers who were at risk of canceling without access to relevant subscription data in HubSpot and take proactive steps to retain them.

To resolve these issues, the company’s sales and operations leadership revamped the Q2C process and embedded HubSpot with Chargebee through the HubSpot Q2C integration.

In this new setup, all the plans, add-ons, and one-time charges were synced from the company’s Chargebee setup to HubSpot line items, establishing a two-way sync between the two platforms.

The integration’s Subscription Amendments feature allowed customer success reps to modify customer subscriptions directly from the familiar HubSpot interface, eliminating the need for platform hopping or departmental handoffs for plan changes.

As reps could handle upgrades, downgrades, feature adjustments, and billing cycle changes without dependency on other teams, the turnaround time was significantly reduced by 50%. The company’s customers no longer faced frustration from lengthy waits or convoluted procedures. Furthermore, this direct control allowed for proactive customer engagement and retention. Reps could have real-time conversations about evolving customer needs, suggesting upsells or plan changes that prevented churn before it arose. Additionally, all amendments were automatically logged within HubSpot, providing valuable data for future interactions.

The integration also provided customer success reps with a wealth of real-time subscription data that went beyond basic customer information, offering the following benefits:

• Subscription details: Reps could see a customer’s current plan, including features, pricing, and applicable discounts. This allowed them to understand the customer’s commitment level and tailor support or upsell opportunities accordingly.
• Usage tracking: By integrating usage data from Chargebee, reps could see how customers were utilizing different features within their plan. This helped to identify potential underutilization situations, allowing them to proactively suggest plan adjustments or guide customers towards features that better suited their needs, reducing churn risk.
• Payment history: Access to a complete payment history, including successful payments, failed transactions, and upcoming invoices, allowed reps to address any payment-related issues promptly. They could also identify payment delays that indicate financial strain and proactively offer solutions.
• Renewal management: Automatic notifications about upcoming renewals ensured reps could reach out to customers well in advance. This allowed them to discuss potential upgrades, address concerns, and secure renewals smoothly, minimizing revenue loss.
• Churn risk identification: By analyzing subscription data like downgrades, payment failures, or reduced feature usage, the integration helped identify customers at risk of churning. This allowed reps to intervene early with targeted communication to address the dissatisfaction and salvage the customer relationship.

Simplified the preparation of sales commission reports and intricate commission calculations for the finance team in a real estate software enterprise

Apart from the usual sales-based Quote-to-Cash challenges that were mentioned above, one unique use case for a US-headquartered company that provides multi-listing service (MLS) for real estate agents and institutions was the calculation of sales commissions for their sales reps by their finance managers.

Calculating sales commissions was a tedious and error-prone manual process for the finance managers, as it had many components like commission class, contribution percentage, and subscription details (plan and amount). They relied on separate systems for calculating commissions, namely HubSpot CRM for sales data, Chargebee for subscription details, and NetSuite for financial data. This disjointed approach necessitated manual data entry and reconciliation across platforms, leading to delays and inaccuracies in commission payouts. This led to discontent among its sales team.

This issue was resolved when the company integrated its Chargebee and HubSpot platforms through the Q2C integration to improve its Quote-to-Cash processes.

Unique properties were created in HubSpot company records to capture relevant sales agent information, such as commission class, contribution percentage, and salesperson name; this data was then synced to Chargebee as custom fields in customer records.

Whenever a sales rep closes a deal in HubSpot, all the relevant information is passed and stored in Chargebee. Based on this, finance uses the customer report builder under Revenue Story in Chargebee to build the commission report for the sales agents.

Sample Commission Report with commission class

This report could also be sent to NetSuite for subsequent calculations to automatically export commission data for processing. The exported data included customer details associated with the initial sale, subscription specifics (plan and amount), commission category, contribution percentage, salesperson’s name, and the commission amount calculated based on the contribution percentage and subscription value.

With this data flow, the finance team could generate accurate and detailed sales commission reports based on contribution percentage and subscription value within Chargebee or NetSuite. This would enable superior analysis of sales performance and commission payouts, eliminate the need for manual calculations, and reduce the risk of errors.

Enhanced transparency was another advantage, where sales agents could easily track their commissions within custom reports in their HubSpot dashboards, fostering increased motivation and boosting sales performance. Finally, by eliminating manual data entry, the integration ensured data consistency and accuracy across all three systems (HubSpot, Chargebee, and NetSuite) in the company’s tech stack.

To ensure a smooth implementation, the company, on the recommendations of the finance team, took several additional steps. They had clearly defined the commission structure and reflected it in the contribution percentage field within HubSpot. They established and configured a commission payout schedule in NetSuite to automate commission payments. To safeguard data integrity, data validation rules were also implemented in both HubSpot and Chargebee. Additionally, it conducted regular reviews and updates to the integration configuration to adapt to any changes in the commission structure of the sales team.

This integration provided a robust solution to streamline sales commission reporting. By automating sales commission calculations for the finance team, it not only improved reporting accuracy and transparency but also significantly bolstered the company’s financial management practices.

Conclusion

An optimal Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) process, enhanced by the Chargebee-HubSpot integration, empowers subscription businesses. It fosters seamless collaboration among sales, customer success, product, and finance teams by synchronizing their tools in real-time. This enables teams to manage intricate deals effortlessly, such as price adjustments, plan modifications, add-ons, and discounts, with automatic and accurate billing and provisioning. The streamlined quote management workflow minimizes errors, accelerates deal closures, and elevates customer satisfaction. Automating the Q2C process results in heightened operational efficiency, consistent data maintenance, and a better experience for both go-to-market teams and customers. 

Don’t let an outdated Q2C process hold your business back. With its certified quality in the HubSpot App Marketplace, the Chargebee-HubSpot integration is designed to optimize your subscription business operations.

Get started with the HubSpot Quote-to-Cash integration today!