Explore Salesforce Subscription Management

Learning Objectives 

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe how Subscription Management drives efficient growth with self-service sales.
  
• Describe how Subscription Management delivers flexible customer buying experiences.
  
• Explain how Subscription Management fosters loyal customer relationships with easy self-service renewals, add-ons, and upgrades.
  
• Describe the challenges of using traditional, disconnected systems for each sales channel.
  

Grow Sales in a Changing Landscape

The landscape of buying and selling has undergone a tectonic shift over the past few years. Because of this, customers and businesses need new and more flexible ways of connecting with each other. B2B customers use more channels than ever to interact with their suppliers, from in-app purchases to chat to partner portals and everything in between. These options give customers the flexibility to make faster, more convenient purchases.

A recent survey found that 75% of customers say they actually prefer to buy using digital self-service and remote human engagement versus in-person sales. 

As the number of channels has grown, the interest in subscription services has grown too. In fact, subscription businesses grew their revenue six times faster than the S&P 500 from 2012 to 2020.

Salesforce Subscription Management, part of the Salesforce Revenue Cloud, helps businesses adapt and thrive during these major market changes. It lets customers seamlessly buy, upgrade, renew, and pay for products across self-service channels like ecommerce, mobile apps, or even partner portals. This means customers can start their journey in one channel and then easily change to another, picking up where they left off to complete the purchase. 

Let’s take a look at what a customer might experience when Subscription Management is used to unify the purchasing lifecycle, even as customers cross channels to buy and pay.

• Imagine a customer at a digital storefront, browsing services and pricing, putting a product in a shopping cart.
  
• They start up a chat through Slack with their sales rep to negotiate a discount.
  
• Happy with the new price, they check out and start using the new service.
  
• The following month they log in to the service portal to view their entire purchase history, and pay invoices.
  
• A few months later, after opening a service ticket, they buy an upgrade for their existing subscription.
  
• When they get near the end of the subscription term, they easily order a renewal from right inside the app.
  

Salesforce Subscription Management makes it possible to see all purchasing details across every channel because everything is consolidated on one platform. And by meeting customers on their channel of choice at any time, you can grow revenue across all channels.

Channel Surfing Challenges

As your business grows, it’s natural to incorporate new tools that let you buy and sell through new channels. But these tools tend to operate independently, making it tough to offer a seamless experience to your customers. For example, maintaining multiple price books and catalogs across multiple engagement platforms requires a lot of admin overhead, and may result in different pricing across multiple channels. 

Also, with separate tools you have no centralized view of transaction data or active entitlements, subscriptions, and contracts. Traditional tools like enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems were just not built with recurring revenue in mind. To make them work with subscription products requires expensive customizations. Finally, trying to keep disconnected systems in sync through manual data entry or complex processes is inefficient, expensive, and error prone.

The solution to this digital divide is to bring CRM, self-service channels, subscription management, billing systems, and revenue channels together. Salesforce Subscription Management, as part of Revenue Cloud, unifies self-service customer experiences and helps automate critical customer touch points across the entire customer lifecycle, including billing, collections, and approvals.

Bring Your Own B2B

Salesforce Subscription Management was built from the ground up on the world’s #1 Platform for Growth. We listened closely to our own customers as we designed Subscription Management, and it was clear they wanted performance and flexibility. The result is that Subscription Management uses an API-first model. That means it doesn’t matter if you use B2B Commerce or Communities from Salesforce, or build your own user experience, Subscription Management can be connected to each of them to create consistency and foster collaboration across your entire sales process.

The API-first model lets you deploy across multiple self-service channels almost immediately. Subscription Management also offers declarative setup for admins, and Lightning UI for internal end users that will be getting more robust with every release.

Now that you know how Salesforce Subscription Management can help your customers buy in their preferred channels, learn more by visiting the Revenue Lifecycle Management product page.

Resources 

• Product Page: Revenue Lifecycle Management
• Developer Documentation: Subscription Management
• External Site: These eight charts show how COVID-19 has changed B2B sales forever
• External Site: The six must-haves to achieve breakthrough growth in e-commerce D2C