What to Look for in Subscription Management Software for B2B SaaS Companies

Recurring subscriptions are the norm for SaaS services. They allow customers to manage costs by paying on a recurring basis as they continue to use the service. But billing can be a major pain point for business-to-business (B2B) SaaS companies. They have to manage subscriptions across different pricing tiers and customer lifecycles, while also collecting payment through a variety of providers. Fortunately, state-of-the-art management subscription software, like SaasOptics, Recurly, and Stripe, offer a solution to these pain points. Top notch subscription software not only allows your B2B SaaS company to manage and automate subscriptions, but also provides you with advanced analytics that can be used to assess your marketing and sales efforts. Here are what we think are the most important attributes to look for in a subscription management solution that will scale with your business. 

Automation and Efficiency: You Want to Set it and Forget It

The most important aspect of subscription management software is the ability to automate your payment processes. Automation eliminates the need for your accounting department to manually deal with subscriptions across customer lifecycles. This can be overly complex and subject to human error, particularly when you have a tiered pricing system that may include free trials. If your business is growing then you don’t want to wait to invest in a robust subscription management solution. The longer you wait, the more complicated it will be to migrate away from legacy software or spreadsheets, which can create bottlenecks in the migration process and efficiency of your billing system.  

The right subscription management software allows you to automate the entire billing process, while also customizing it so the software efficiently serves your business plan. 

4 Benefits of Automated B2B Subscription Management Software

1. It saves your catalogue and pricing, allowing customers to customize their subscription, including giving them the option to upgrade or downgrade their subscription. You can also use the software to test different price points and offer discounts and promotions.
2. It stores customer information and manages billing and payment, including integrating with different payment gateways. This also means the software automatically contacts customers for payment failures or declined credit card payments, which are a major source of lost revenue in manual processes.
3. It scales as you scale, avoiding the hassles that come with migrating data from legacy systems.
4.  It provides PCI compliance. Customer payment information data needs to be encrypted and protected in accordance with regulatory compliance expectations. With manual processes, encryption is both more complicated and more expensive. Most management subscription software is PCI compliant out-of-box.

Leverage Data for Marketing, Sales, and Investors

By automating the process, subscription management software let’s you take a hands-off approach to billing and payments. But you still want to keep your eyes on the data that is produced through the software and integrate it with your other management software, including customer relationship management (CRM) and other analytics software. By doing so, you can gain key data insights, including:

• How many subscribers you have
• Your churn rate
• How long subscribers are subscribing for
• How many customers are converting from free trials to subscriptions
• Basic demographic information about who your customers are

While the most common blocker to using subscription management software is the fees, consider this an investment. The type of data you gain is key when it comes to analyzing and assessing the success of your marketing and sales outreach efforts. Subscription data allows you to re-assess these outreaches and improve your conversion rates. Under the subscription model, subscribers are key and this data can help expand your subscriber base. 

Additionally, once companies start to grow, potential investors and other stakeholders want to look at key trends, like customer growth, before they’re willing to back your company. Subscription management software makes it easier to provide comprehensive subscriber data and growth projections to potential investors.

NOVAA’s B2B Subscription Management Software Solutions

As SaaS has exploded, so have subscription management software solutions. This presents the problem of figuring out what solution is best for you. Moreover, you need to customize the software to fit your needs. This is so the automating functions work without constant oversight and you continue to collect data that can help to assess your marketing and sales and have data ready for potential investors.

NOVAA provides experienced management consulting for precisely these purposes. Whether it’s SaaSOptics, Recurly, or Stripe, we have the expertise to help you figure out which solution is best for you based on your needs and the different feature sets they offer. Once we’ve helped you select your software solution, we set it up with customizations to fit your goals. This establishes a baseline for all of the automated features. Finally, we integrate the subscription management software with your existing software solutions so that all of the components of your organization are in communication with one another and providing you with the data that is necessary to help realize your business goals. 

Contact us for more information on how subscription management software can help you realize your business goals.