If you are like many leading large enterprises today, it is probable your earliest and most intense cloud-based experience has been reliant on Salesforce.com (News - Alert). Many a C-level will tell you it is hard to imagine how their organization functioned or functions without it.  

With a nod to the reality that making the sale is critical equally important is driving recurring revenue. This means keeping customers coming back for more in an age where customer disloyalty is increasing and the competition is only a click away.  And to achieve predictability of revenue, it means moving more and more of your transactions not just online, but to a subscription-based services model. Indeed, as we progress further into the “E”verything as a service era (aka XaaS), reliance on subscription-based capabilities is only going to accelerate. 

This means you need robust capabilities that not only can provide the business intelligence required to move as fast if not faster than the market —gathering, analyzing and monitoring data that is relevant to the entire sales lifecycle of your customers — but also is extensible, scalable, high-performance, secure and cost-effective. We are living with a rather complex “new normal” when it comes to the types of technology bets that must be placed in order to please and keep customers.    

This new normal transactional/customer relationship management (CRM) environment places a premium on such seemingly mundane but hardly trivial or insignificant things as:

• How well you communicate price quotes
• Implement new billing strategies
• Analyze customer usage
• Roll out promotional discounts
• Track payments

The good news is that you can now manage your entire subscriber lifecycle – from customer acquisition to recurring billing to ongoing customer care – directly from Salesforce.com.  As discussed in a recent webinar, “Billing for Salesforce.com: Managing your Entire Subscriber Lifecycle within Your CRM,” Jenny Victor, VP Marketing, and Jeff Priest, Senior Solution Engineer of Aria (News - Alert) Systems and I discussed the challenges enterprises face for moving to a subscription model, and an Aria solution for enabling customers to thrive in the new normal world by enabling them to have a single dashboard into the entire customer profile and their subscription lifecycle.

As noted, discussions of the technology that allows for recurring revenue to be generated, monitored and turned into actionable insights (to assure great customer experiences and the ability to quickly capture revenue and be proactive) and profits, don’t usually grab headlines. Part of the reason, as depicted in the above is that there are a lot of moving parts to get right.

Aria Systems new Dynamic Systems Management (News - Alert) (DSM) solution addresses all of these critical touchpoints and gives enterprises a single view from a familiar dashboard to make the extraction of business critical insights easy and economical. It provides:

• Seamless Salesforce.com integration and immediate deployment
• A single, real-time view of all sales and billing activities
• The ability to track customer activities from initial quote through inbound revenue
• Valuable customer usage information to hone support and planning
• Support for fast rollouts of new services, packages and promotions
• Flexibility to instantly adjust billing packages for any number of customers

It starts with the back office, where traditionally billing systems have focused on the back-end systems of invoicing/payments and service management. Built to support business needs ranging from the simple to the complex, the invoicing and payment capabilities support core monetization strategies and help companies iterate and expand those strategies to support business growth through active process orchestration. This means that key processes are fully automated reducing manual actions saving time and reducing errors. Processes such as dunning, entitlement management, event notifications, etc are all managed automatically.

As can be seen in the graphic below, with recurring revenue, the front office has been brought into the picture. Managing product and pricing to optimize for revenue growth is essential. And the ability to analyze the various actions is key to finding the optimal product-price mix.