We talk a lot about how automating SaaS billing can save finance teams from the seeerious drudgery of manual and legacy billing processes. It’s a pretty big deal too. Automation often reduces the time spent on billing by 80%. That usually adds up to about 40+ hours a month.
And then, of course, there’s the improved accuracy. Getting that automated recurring billing solution in place eliminates the kinds of manual errors that cost SaaS businesses thousands of dollars in revenue leakage every year.
Maybe you already know all that. But do you also know the benefits of modern recurring billing software extend far beyond a business’s finance department?
Teams across your entire SaaS organization—from customer support all the way up to the C-Suite—can use your billing software to derive important insights and take strategic actions that make them more effective at their jobs.
Businesses that are driven by data are 3X as likely to make better decisions, according to a PwC study.
So, how can your business’s non-finance teams leverage your subscription billing data in their day-to-day workflows and decision-making processes?
Let’s take a look.
1. Fine-tune your subscription business’s marketing efforts.
A strong understanding of your SaaS business’s ideal customer profile (ICP) is key to your marketing team’s success. And what better way to hone-in on what that ICP really looks like than by digging into the data on your business’s current best-fit customers?
A third of elite marketers say having the right technologies for data collection and analysis is the most useful way to understand customers, according to a report by Econsultancy & IBM.
Using the reporting features in your recurring billing software, your marketing team can generate all kinds of useful information on your business’s top customers. They can:
- see which customers contribute the most in terms of sales and total revenue over time, and
- dig into the sizes and industry types of those top customers.
Your marketers can also review your business’s sales, total revenue, and recurring revenue by tracking codes to see exactly which of their efforts are leading to the highest returns. All of this helps ensure they’re focusing on the most effective efforts to target the right ICP.
Ultimately, this brings in more good-fit customers, keeps those customers around for longer, and encourages long-term MRR growth.
Let’s squeeze in another benefit here for your marketing team. They can also review your business’s sales, revenue, and MRR by product and plan. This will help them identify your top-sellers and monitor whether sales trends for a particular item change over time.
All of this is helpful for:
- determining which offerings deserve more marketing budget
- informing the creation of new offerings
- deciding whether it’s worth discontinuing certain products or plans, and
- seeing whether there’s enough demand to justify charging a premium on high-performing products or plans.
2. Create an SSOT for your sales team
Recurring billing software can act as a single source of truth (SSOT) for your business’s accounts receivables. Your catalog of offerings is a part of that. It’s where everyone in your business can turn to for the most up-to-date information on your product offerings and pricing.
Having this SSOT is incredibly useful for your sales team. When speaking with potential customers, they can easily and reliably pull accurate pricing and plan information to be more effective at putting together deals.
And once they close those deal? Your recurring billing software can be used to help your head of sales keep track of commissions for their team. In the Stax Bill system, up to five tracking codes can be assigned to a customer to keep track of which team member should be receiving commission. It’s useful not just for new business, but for upsells too.
If some sales team members are targeting existing customers, they can dive into the details to see which subscriptions and products each customer currently has so they can come up with a targeted strategy for creating expansion MRR.
Remember, the more details your business has on a customer, the easier it is to create targeted messaging to make the sale.
But that’s not the only advantage of having this in-depth customer data…
3. Enable your success and support team to elevate the customer experience.
Have you ever called or emailed a company’s customer service department only to feel like they had no background information on you or your history with the company?
It’s not a great feeling, and it certainly isn’t a positive customer experience.
Accessing customer and subscription details captured by your billing system helps your success and support teams avoid providing a similar negative experience when customers call in for help. They have all the historical information right in front of them. They can see:
- contact and payment details
- current, historic, and forecasted invoices
- subscriptions and purchases
- account standing, and more.
With all of these data points, they can minimize the amount of back-and-forth with the customer and focus on effective problem solving.
If your customer success team is also responsible for handling upsells or renewals, the ability to see a customer’s subscriptions, purchases, and lifetime value (LTV) also empowers them to have more relevant and strategic conversations.
4. Show your SaaS leaders the whole picture in real time.
While the higher-ups in your business may not want to get bogged down spending too much time digging through software and poring over reports, they do need a regular line of sight into the health of the business.
Up-to-date, detailed summaries on revenue, customer growth, and churn—as well as projected reports on metrics like MRR—are important for the executive team to have access to as they build strategies and make decisions about the future.
A clear, real-time picture of how your SaaS business is doing enables you to take informed steps, whether it’s for:
- day-to-day decision making
- long-term strategizing
- board presentations, or
- venture capital pitches.
The cherry on top?
In Stax Bill, all reports can be set up to be emailed automatically, so your executives don’t even need to go into the software to find this information.
Holistic recurring billing software means everyone wins
In the end, yes, recurring billing software means more efficiencies in your billing process. But if you use the platform right, teams across your entire organization can also become more efficient and effective in their day-to-day and strategic work.
It’s kind of like a superpower.
At Stax Bill, that’s exactly what we believe automated billing software is. We give you more than 40 auto-updating reports that your finance and non-finance teams can leverage for making data-driven decisions.
They can also gain insights into your:
- monthly recurring revenue
- aging accounts receivables
- popularity of products or plans
- sales cohorts, and a whole lot more.
And each user can customize their dashboard to have only the reports that are important to them at their fingertips.
If security of your financial data or your customers’ sensitive information is a concern, know that team members can be given different levels of access and permission, depending on what they need the software for. It’s the kind of customization, flexibility, and functionality that makes this a software solution your tech stack simply can’t do without.
