Go-To-Market Motions Need Unified Billing | Nue.io

Less is More: Don’t Let Billing Complexity Ruin Your B2B Multi-Channel Strategy

The Nue Team

If you asked someone in the B2B SaaS space why having multiple sales motions matters, there’s a good chance they’d say “offering customers flexibility.” Some people want guidance from a sales team, and some people prefer the open-ended product exploration afforded by demos, trials, and other product-led growth hallmarks.

Yet ironically, the process of setting up multiple go-to-market motions often robs companies of the behind-the-scenes flexibility needed to scale and evolve. Key insights into customer satisfaction and upsell opportunities may fly under the radar, as can the analytics needed to guide product improvements.

The problem stems from two common strategies for adding new sales motions:

• Adding a new billing engine alongside a new sales motion.
• Setting up self-service billing in parallel with a CRM like Salesforce, rather than connecting them together.

Here’s why these two strategies can end up costing companies in the long run, and why the better alternative is unified billing that connects to Salesforce.

Why Adding Billing Engines as You Go Doesn’t Work

Companies that are growing quickly will likely adopt multiple sales motions, and can’t afford to get tripped up by complicated billing infrastructure. To do this, they typically implement a billing solution that only handles the needs of their initial pricing model — and that ultimately comes back to bite them. Once they add a second model, they will need to add a second billing solution, and so on.

Setting up these systems one-by-one almost always means that they can’t “see” each other. The billing data for each motion exists in a silo — which has a ripple effect across the entire company:

• Sales reps and customer success teams can’t see outside of Salesforce, which means they don’t know what’s going on with self-service customers. This means they won’t know when to reach out for upsells or to help a customer showing reduced product usage. This lack of visibility can undermine otherwise mature and successful land-and-expand strategies.
• RevOps teams have to assemble data by hand in order to track the customer journey — an increasingly daunting task as channel complexity grows.
• Product teams can’t connect their view of product-led growth to direct sales, so they don’t have comprehensive analytics to guide future product development.
• Finance teams are forced to manually create invoices, reconcile multiple invoices across multiple products, or implement expensive BI tools that add more complexity.

“The billing data for each motion exists in a silo — which has a ripple effect across the entire company.”

How Unified Billing Pays Dividends Right Away and in the Long Term

As soon as you offer more than one sales motion, a unified billing engine begins paying dividends, through increased revenue, savings of time and money, and greater accountability. This is especially true if that billing engine can be integrated with your CRM, because that CRM can then serve as your single source of truth for customer data, and become a gateway to unparalleled revenue lifecycle intelligence.

• Right away, sales reps and customer success teams will be able to approach client discussions with a wealth of revenue lifecycle intelligence they didn’t have before. They’ll know how their usage has changed over time and can spot potential signs of churn.
• RevOps saves time because it’s now possible to trace the customer journey in real-time using the customer system of record.
• Product teams can track which features see the most use, in order to more effectively allocate development time towards those products (and the underlying needs they solve).
• Finance eliminates the risk of invoicing errors through instant, automated, always-accurate invoices that reflect mid-term change.

“Your CRM can become a gateway to unparalleled revenue lifecycle intelligence.”

It’s also worth highlighting the importance of integrating billing with CPQ as you unify billing motions. Separation between CPQ and billing creates a game of telephone that always takes time and often ends up with inaccurate invoices. Bringing the two together, on the other hand, removes data silos across the GTM motion, eliminates the need for a large order management team, and can prevent the need to create dozens of SKUs for different customer needs.

Conclusion

Ideally, no company would ever set up shop with the assumption it will fail. Startups need to believe that they will achieve product-market fit and grow over time. Obvious though this might sound, it has important implications for the billing infrastructure a company puts in place. Even if a startup currently employs a single sales motion, it needs to operate on the assumption that it will add more over time in response to customer demand. And as soon as that becomes the case, a single unified billing engine, ideally connected with your CRM, is invaluable.