The Revenue Operations Evolutionary Framework for SaaS

The Payment Processing Stage

"What is the easiest way for the customer to pay?" is all you're concerned with. You have a decent enough API to manage basic recurring billing functionalities, which may or may not include a robust invoicing system.

What Growth Saturation looks like

When your customer base grows steadily, you realize you need more than just a payment gateway - like invoicing, proration, calendar billing, etc. This is the crucial build-vs-buy juncture when a business decides to either task a developer with building out their billing system or buy one.

Major Pains and Risks

• Poor customer experience
• Gateway-related risks

The Billing Automation Stage

At this stage, you have a robust invoicing system built on top of a scalable API layer with elements like checkout, scheduling, and proration. Customer-base expands as you find a deeper product-market fit.

What Growth Saturation looks like

Slowly but surely, your revenue aspirations are rising. But thoughts like "Should I be testing my pricing?" to "There has to be a way to recover revenue lost to expired cards" are haunting you. Your billing infrastructure is ridden with spaghetti codes - developers warn against touching it unless absolutely necessary. The lack of control and a long wait to execute these experiments shouldn't force you to defer doing what's best for your business right now.

Major Pains and Risks

• Inflexible Plans and Pricing
• Spreadsheet-dependent Finance Ops
• Spaghetti-ridden billing because of patchy codes

The Subscription Management Stage

You have control over the plan and pricing configurations and you are able to test them at will. The customer support and success teams don't have to handle billing-related queries because you have a Customer Portal in place. With Quotes, Custom Pricing, and Advance Invoicing, you're able to go after enterprise prospects. There's a semblance of a Quote-to-Cash system in place.

What Growth Saturation looks like

Your revenue-driving functions, as well as revenue-processing functions, are beginning to mature. Tools and processes are reconsidered. Efficiency improvements become significant drivers of the topline or bottom line - Quote-to-cash, Coupons, Segmented Marketing, Revenue Recognition. It all boils down to how business functions are interacting with the subscription management infrastructure. Forging these connections become the hurdle to sustained growth.

Major Pains and Risks

• Siloed subscription system
• Separation from revenue-driving functions

The Revenue Operations Stage

This is the promised land for SaaS revenue workflows. Business operations have scaled, so has the level of maturity within functions. The RevOps infrastructure layer seamlessly supports changes to top-level tools and processes and helps drive sound decisions on the back of 360° subscription analytics. Previously siloed functions come together - sales, marketing, success, finance - and execute on cross-functional initiatives - geo-expansion, market-expansion, revenue-model changes - that drive revenue with little oversight or operational bottlenecks standing in the way.