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How Bad Operations Make Progress Impossible   No one wants to fight a losing battle.   Or even worse, an invisible one.   As a subscription business owner, you have a million things to worry about. Attracting and keeping new customers. Knowing exactly what they want. Scaling when necessary. Keeping up with the competition. And innovating and future-proofing your business.   That’s a lot to handle all at once.   That’s why there's one aspect of your business that you can't afford to ignore: operations.   Disintegrating operations can be stealthy.   You often don’t notice that things get worse because it’s a little bit here, a little off there. Often everyone struggles to keep up with their own part of the process and aren’t sharing where the struggles are. They’re too busy putting out fires and doing damage control.   This is the silent killer of subscription success, and it's time to understand the impact it can have on your business.  Operations are the backbone of any subscription business model because of the absolute accuracy required in subscription management. Subscription operations must deliver the product or service to customers, manage customer relationships, and maintain the infrastructure that supports the business.     But poor operations? That’s lost customers. Decreased profits. And a damaged reputation that takes a long time to recover (if it ever does).    Complexity   One of the biggest challenges of operations management in a subscription business is the sheer complexity of all the processes involved.   You know as a subscription business decision-maker, that every single task has a domino effect on other tasks. So getting everything right the first time is essential.    For example, imagine that you run a retail subscription box service. You have thousands of customers who receive a monthly shipment of products. There might come a point where the operations team can't handle the volume of orders – or, even worse, they run out of stock.  It’s not their fault - they try but simply don’t have the resources to keep up.   Ever run down a hill and it’s fine at first, but then a few steps in you realise it’s much steeper than you thought? Uh-oh. But you keep going, faster, going even faster, and then eventually, suddenly, you hit that awful point where you know you can’t keep up anymore? That’s when you fall and break something (unless you’re very lucky).    Except in subscription management, trouble arrives more subtly. At least at first.   However little by little, things start going wrong. A customer might have the wrong subscription. Or deadlines might not be met. Perhaps there’s one, then two, then twenty invoicing errors. Manual recognised revenue becomes a mess.   Only then is it clear what you’re dealing with.   You get in trouble, you have to evaluate: Is it worth getting into trouble again? - Robert Iler   If your operations can’t cope with customer expectations, you will end up losing them, resulting in a damaged reputation and lost revenue. The Solution   The solution to these challenges is simple. It’s our LISA solutions for ERP, built on industry-proven, global-scale ERPs from Microsoft - Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Business Central.   LISA Business and BusinessPro streamline operations, improve efficiency, and increase profitability. Here are some of the benefits of ERP operations that will end that stealth damage:    Improved customer service. With LISA, you can manage customer inquiries and billing in one centralized location so that reps can access the information they need improve response time and make customers happy.   Common operational headaches ended. For example, LISA can automate the billing process and all the respective complicated IFRS 15 and ASC 606 financial transactions, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring that customers are billed accurately and on time.   Product management. LISA can also help businesses manage their products and track their fulfilment process, so they never miss opportunities or deadlines.   Increased visibility into the operations. With LISA, you can access real-time data on your business operations, including sales, customer service, and inventory levels. This means you can make informed business decisions and improve operations.  There’s no denying that operations are a critical component of subscription success.   Ignoring them can have serious consequences.   But you don’t have to keep up the struggle any longer. You don’t have to suffer nasty surprises that will be much more expensive to fix.   Implementing LISA BusinessPro or LISA Business will improve the management of your subscription processes, streamline operations, improve customer service, and increase profitability. It’s the smooth path to success.   Don't let the silent killer of subscription success destroy your business. Take control of your operations today with LISA. 

Scale Your Subscription Business AND Keep Your Money     Dream about More Growth and Less Overhead at the same time?   Is there any point in scaling your subscription business if you have to continually hire more people to manage it?   Probably not.   But it’s not as though you’re going to turn down growth, right?  Of course, you want to scale your subscription business.   You want your name on the map.   You want to future-proof your brand.   This means you’ve got a problem- subscription management while you are scaling is an intensive process. All these issues have to be optimal, and they have to keep ticking 24-7:   Offering customised pricing options to fit your business needs  Maximising sales potential through strategic cross-selling and upselling while providing transparent invoices and renewals  Ensuring financial compliance for peace of mind  Prioritising customer satisfaction and retention with exceptional service  Navigating the complex subscription landscape and cultivating valuable partnerships  Implementing price adjustments and indexing to reflect market trends  Streamlining the transition from outdated plans to new ones  Seamless system integration for a cohesive sales, finance, and customer service experience  That’s a tall order.   And the more transactions your business handles, the stronger the temptation to hire as many people as you can to keep up.   And that can result in overheads that bite into any potential profits that scaling your subscription business can bring.   So if you want to master the challenges of scaling, keeping subscriptions ticking over, and avoiding hiring any extra people, where do you begin?    #1 – Build transparent and clear pricing models  Your pricing model can make or break your subscription business.  It's not just about setting the right price. You’ve got to provide simple and specially-tailored discounts, upsells, cross-sells, and trials that entice your customers to subscribe. And they have to be offered at the best time in a way that encourages conversion. However, commercial flexibility can lead to inefficiency. Because all these offers for different customers are like plates you need to keep spinning in the air. You don’t want them to crash. We see too many companies limit their offerings because it’s just too difficult to keep up. So create a strong pricing model and implement it in a structured business application and customer portal to ensure transparency and accuracy. It can be hard work for your teams initially, but by sticking to your pricing model, you'll create trust with your customers. #2 – Walk a mile in the shoes of your customers and team members  In an ideal world, a subscription would be a "forever transaction" that runs on a strong relationship between your teams and your customers. And customer service is at the heart of this. But it must go beyond getting on the phone with them when they have a problem. It's about creating a balance between customer satisfaction and how much of an investment in time and resources you need for your team to keep customers happy.  This means you’ll need to figure out the best way to communicate with your customers. And it varies- a high-volume subscription with low prices at scale requires a different approach than a low-volume, high-value subscription. By building an omnichannel customer service approach, you can plan workloads and provide a personal touch at the same time. And if your customers have multiple ways to communicate with you, you’ll be able to funnel requests into a case workload and use smart elements to route cases to agents. This helps you gain more customers and keep control of your service level. #3 – Automate your subscription lifecycle Once subscriptions are in place, there’s a huge number of processes and actions that have to be (if we’re being honest) endlessly repeated.  And this not only drains you and your teams of time but opens up the possibility of mistakes that can cost you money and your reputation. No one wants to be stuck in repetition limbo and no one wants to be on awkward phone calls with angry customers. And what’s worse, when you’re scaling your subscription business but still hand-cranking the operation, you and your team don’t have the time to do what you’re good at - sales. Innovation. Future-proofing the business and expanding brand reach. And then you’re stuck with that temptation of destroying your profits by paying new people to try to keep up with everything. But this can be solved with one thing - automation.  Automating these tasks is essential to keeping your finance team focused and efficient. You'll save time and resources by automatically generating billing, revenue recognition, security deposit requests, purchase order lines, and cost recognition. Automating your renewal approval, price uplifting, and monitoring entitlements will also help you scale your subscription business faster and more efficiently. And because the end-to-end is automated, you won’t have to spend your time and money hiring an endless line of new employees to continue those old manual processes. Because our solution is perfect at scaling with the growth of your subscription business. You’ll always get what you need when you need it. By investing in subscription lifecycle automation, you'll build a foundation for growth and success. Mastering subscription challenges requires heart and dedication, but with the right approach, you can scale your subscription business with confidence. And you won’t have to increase your human resources overheads to do so.  Why struggle with challenges when you no longer have to?   Keep your money!   

Is your CAC too high?   Over the last number of years we have experienced a major leap forward for technology advances. On the business application side new digital selling tools have become available, so you can design digital lead-to-customer journeys, using inbound and outbound marketing activities. We have now reached a point where the availability of technology has become so immense, it is hard for companies to understand and implement the right solutions for them.   These days, business applications have become a lot smarter.   Business applications and technology do contribute to a better and smoother running sales and marketing process, but without getting the users and people involved engaged and ramped up, they will fail. Before we focus on digital sales and marketing applications and technologies, we need to define why we are even implementing these. In our journey providing applications and technology to subscription-oriented businesses, a key driver for transformation is customer acquisition costs (CAC). A quick search on Wikipedia gives us the following clarification: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the cost of winning a customer to purchase a product or service. As an important economic unit, customer acquisition costs are often related to customer lifetime value (CLV). CAC is an important metric to manage a subscription driven business, as it is not always certain what a customer’s lifetime span will be. The higher your CAC, the more lifetime run-rate of subscriptions are needed to absorb CAC.   Understanding your CAC   It does not matter if you are a B2B or B2C subscription business, or if you sell software, products, or services. You must get to grips with the costs related to acquisition of new customers. Let’s get down to the details. #1 — Continuously improve your sales and marketing business capability Subscription sales and marketing is not fundamentally different, but it does require you to understand customer relationships based over a longer period. That means we need to stay in touch with customers and not allow them to disappear from the sales radar, once the first deal is signed up. Creating a lasting relationship is critical. Making big shifts is risky, so building a continuous improvement roadmap is a better, more controlled way forward, resulting in reduced CAC and ultimately getting more customers through the door. #2 — Use your business data, all of it These days, business applications have become a lot smarter. It has never been easier to connect applications and mesh data into meaningful insights. With AI, we can interpret data and push out insight. Is this customer green or red? If red, what are the recommended actions? But without getting into a tech-overload discussion, how can such a level of business data usage be achieved? Here’s some directions: Select CRM and Customer Service solutions that integrate your communication channels to your customers. Automatically link emails and calendars to customer accounts and have all data from there linked to your customer account. Make sure you deploy intelligent AI services that can create insight, such as lead and opportunity scoring, and relationship health based on email content. Focus on time spent per lead or opportunity and benchmark the data. Setup continuous workshops and sessions with sales and marketing teams and create understanding and awareness about how these applications and technology can make their day better and more effective. Facilitate application and data management. Often businesses think that this is all done by a tech partner, but the results are best if data ownership and management is performed as part of operations, in-house.

Why are your customers taking a hike?   In recent years we have seen a massive move forward in terms of digital transformation. For many customers in both the B2C and B2B space this has led to higher levels of digital interaction. For example, customers can access apps, social media, commerce sites or portals that help them to get things done with the company they are dealing with. How can this help stop your customers taking a hike? Your world is about delivering a recurring offer for the long term, ensuring your customers stay in love with your offering.   Connecting your subscription model to your customers’ needs   It does not matter if you are a B2B or B2C subscription business, or if you sell software, products, or services. Your world is about delivering a recurring offer for the long term, ensuring your customer loves your offering. Let’s get down to the details.   Managing your subscription master data Being able to define your subscription offering into clear and understandable master data is crucial. As a subscription provider you must be able to define the following data elements:   #1 — Definition of a subscription product To define a product means to set up a clear identification of the subscription product. It requires a name, description, variants, and a definition of how the subscription is consumed or bundled. #2 — Clear pricing model reflecting the value of the subscription product Customers need to understand your subscription pricing and what they are going to get. Being transparent is key. Customers must be able to calculate and understand pricing on their own, unless your model is more intricate. Build models, like gold, silver and bronze plans with attached pricing and entitlements. Allow customers to choose. When your sales team offers a price, or when customers review pricing online, simplicity is key. #3 — Terms and conditions for the subscription product Subscription is about defining what the customer is going to get, often called entitlements, and when they can consume these entitlements. Definition of terms and conditions is important. Can customers who have bought a yearly subscription cancel mid-way? What if they upgrade to a new plan or offering, what happens to the payment and changes to the subscription model? All possible real-life situations should be captured as terms and conditions, and made clear during the buying process. #4 — Financial and compliance aspects Once the aspects above are all defined, the financial ramifications and compliance aspects must be assessed. Can we deal with the right financial postings? Are we compliant with, for example, IFRS 15 or ASC 606? Once subscriptions are rolling, financial postings, VAT or Sales Tax and other aspects, like revenue recognition, must be defined and automated. #5 — Operational and supply terms and conditions Lastly, once finance and sales are set, we need to deliver our performance obligations. This operations aspect is critical for the customer experience. Your ability as a subscription provider to slam dunk services delivery, ship your product or supply licences must connect to the customer experience at the moment of buying. Failure to do so leads to an increase in churn and a decrease in customer satisfaction.

Are you still struggling with customer churn?   You have created a subscription offering, and you’re running your business and encounter a lot of churn. What’s happening? As Bill Gates once said “Your unhappy customers are the best source of learning”.   The challenge is to keep your subscription offering fresh, resulting in lifetime customers. It is unlikely all your customers stay onboard forever, but in this article, we outline strategies to keep churn to a minimum. Create excitement and interaction and continue the relationship your customers are used to.   #1 — Customer chemistry Customers like to be treated with royal service. Ensuring you offer adequate and prompt service along the customer journey is paramount. Every part of your customer support services needs to be running effectively: from responding to questions and taking calls to delivering product and scheduling services. Welcoming, efficient, and caring are the adjectives to keep in mind; create a list of best practices and train your employees extensively. Use easy to run customer service apps to allow self-services and drive initiative-taking responses to outstanding queries. These aspects will ensure that your customer satisfaction stabilises based on great customer chemistry. #2 — Listen to your employees and customers Loyal customers grow a business faster than sales or marketing. If we never ask for customer feedback, we'll never understand what drives customer satisfaction. If we don't know what drives satisfied customers, it will be impossible to create customer loyalty. The same counts for your employees that collaborate daily with your customers. Developing a feedback loop,and gathering feedback in the moment of need is crucial to drive business improvements and innovation initiatives. Tactically, it is also a rather easy step to take, here are some ways to get going: Use a tool to send out relevant and in-the-moment surveys using NPS style feedback questions. Microsoft Forms is an example of an easy tool to trigger a survey, for example after billing the customer for their subscription. Setup customer meetings in a defined frequency and listen to their input and feedback, document where needed and act promptly on any items pending. Run frequent debriefing or retrospectives with your teams and capture what went well and what did not go well. #3 — Stay in touch with customer teams Every customer interaction is a people business. Knowing your customer’s teams and staying in the loop is a wonderful way to ensure you are on top of your subscription services and how the people at the end perceive your performance. When teams or people dynamics change for the customer, help new people onboard and ensure they see the value of your subscription services. Explain what has been achieved and what is on the roadmap in the next months to come. Create excitement and interaction and continue the relationship your customers are used to. #4 — Be transparent about any shortcomings Your subscription is not perfect. Customers might figure out elements of your subscription service that are not meeting their requirements. No worries, it happens to the best of us. Dealing with shortcomings is part of the job. Here’s a few ways to deal with it: Schedule a meeting addressing the issue(s) with the customer and stakeholders Learn and understand the issues at hand and ask questions to get deep insights into what your customer is expecting from your subscription and service Decide an action plan quickly and stay in communication on every item of the plan Decide if you can resolve the shortcoming or not. In case you cannot overcome it, explain why, and figure out if your service or product is still bringing enough business value for the price paid If your customer perceived the value to be too low to continue, formally close the relationship in a friendly manner.

Do you know how to manage the costs of developing in-house subscriptions?   Are you reselling and purchasing subscriptions? These questions are extremely important to determine your subscription cost of sale and ultimately your profits.   Whether you are in SaaS subscription or running other subscription models, it is common to deal with subscriptions you need to acquire before you can sell yours. Dealing with 3rd party subscriptions means you would need to track your purchase obligations either directly related to your sold subscription, or as part of your own supplier subscription expenses. Managing in-house subscription research and development is a different ballgame. Using internal project costing to capture all related costs, both direct and indirect, is key to understanding your profitability. Yes, selling drives the revenue and ARR stream, but without strong cost control you might end up with very low profitability. The importance of process understanding is to find process activities you can automate and streamline.   Safeguarding your profitability:   Let’s investigate the details that your subscription business runs on to establish profits in light of two core aspects, cost structure and efficiency.   #1 — Understanding your cost structure In most cases, costing your subscription offering and aligning the financial dimensions per cost driver is a key starting point. The main process elements consist of subscription procurement and internal cost for research and development to provide the subscription. Each financial dimension requires cost control. Key cost control drivers often capture expenses related to: 3rd party software or services procurement Internal R&D projects Customer success or support delivery Maintenance and updates Hosting or other services Hardware and/or equipment Subcontracted services Warehousing Sales commissions Marketing Once you establish the business capability to capture and report costs using the financial dimensions that are explained above, you then need to determine your subscription product structure. Each subscription offering needs to be defined as a dimension as well, so that you, next to assigning cost to the above cost elements, assign costs to a subscription product. This can be done as direct cost via e.g. purchase orders, or indirectly, using for example allocation of costs. With the above financial costing structure, you can rely on a clear understanding of costs and their origin as well as how they are assigned to the costs of a subscription item. #2 — Streamline your processes To ensure you are not losing out on profits, you must review your processes and ensure they run simply and smoothly. A great way of recording your processes is mapping the customer journey to your internal touchpoints. See an example below: The importance of process understanding is to find process activities you can automate and streamline. Let’s review a few examples: Customer orders your subscription resulting in a first cycle invoice. In this case, it is most streamlined if your salespeople creates the quotation first and upon signing the agreement click on won, resulting in an active subscription and automatically invoicing the customer for the first term. When a subscription needs to be renewed, your automation should create all subscription renewals for the upcoming week and you just approve the process of sending a renewal invoice, or even better, fully automate the process of sending out renewal invoices. You need to order 3rd party subscriptions to accommodate your sold subscription. Automation should create a purchase order for you, so that you can send them to the supplier automatically. You want to index subscriptions with 3%, offsetting inflation for example. Automation should run a process that uplifts the prices with that index automatically. Provide customers with a self-service portal, so they can order or ask questions themselves. Although automation requires initial CAPEX investment, and perhaps OPEX expenses as well, ROI is proven, helping you to reduce your costs and increasing profitability.

Driving your sales through subscription.   Building a new subscription offering is tough. Selling subscriptions and continued services resulting in ARR is extremely attractive, but what is the enabler to grow? Sales is the key, as it has always been. But selling subscription-based offerings is not the same as selling one-time services or offerings.   Besides all the work you have done to get your offering out there, building a sales and marketing capability is likely to be even more important than the offering itself. So how can you blow your sales through the roof? Attaching the right price model is a crucial step in powering sales.   4 Ways to Accelerate Subscription Sales:   #1 — Build successful channels to your end customers Building and maintaining a strong partner channel is a core activity for all subscription and licence businesses that operate one. The driver for a healthy relationship between your business and your partner channel is to generate successful end-customer relations and revenue. That revenue will create subscription-based commissions for partners and will give you more market reach to end customers. However, maintaining a solid flow of events in the administration of your business does have a myriad of activities to take into account. Let’s have a look at the flow of information. You sign-up new partners with a partner plan providing commission; Your partner drives a sales cycle for your licence or subscriptions to an end-customer; Your partner closes a new deal and re-sells your licences or subscriptions; Your partner upsells additional licences and subscriptions; You change your licence and subscription plans on renewal (indexing or price changes) and need to inform your partners and end-customers; Your partner has an end-customer that stops using the licences or subscriptions. Establishing strong partners, marketplaces or affiliations empower your sales teams to take your subscriptions to the end-customer, driving new revenue streams and success. However, do keep in mind that there is a cost attached to recruit-to-sell with partners. #2 — Develop a simple and effective price model Attaching the right price model is a crucial step in powering sales. Simple and effective models that match with your value proposition will provide transparency to your partners and end-customers, making it easier to buy. Depending on what type of subscription you provide, consider the following capabilities: Support pay-per-use, pay-per-unit, or hybrid models Allow for discount options Support the plan approach (for example bronze/silver/gold). Allow for indexing of prices and discounts on renewal The pricing might be transparent and easy but calculating underlying costs to offer subscriptions is mission critical. Understanding cost and margin must underpin pricing models. #3 — Make your customer additional offers Subscription companies must keep innovating. Lack of innovation will lead to churn, therefore innovation is crucial. This does not need to be a cost centre. If you focus on developing value-added capabilities and services, you can upsell them to existing customers. Here are some examples of innovation you can upsell, extending existing subscription plans: SaaS e-Learning access to your solution and services Extended support options, with live support agent access Additional business process outsourcing capabilities Add-on solutions enriching the present capabilities Training sessions every year There are many more options that will drive your capability to upsell, the key is to monetize your innovation, whilst ensuring customer value. #4 — Introducing AI in Subscription Sales Using artificial intelligence, your sales team can create predictive models that tell you more about your customers' behaviours, market trends, and new sales opportunities. Predictive analytics is an incredibly powerful sales tool that uses historical data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning to anticipate outcomes based on historical patterns. Predictive analytics have proved to be an important tool for sales, not only improving sales estimating but adding insight into structuring sales teams: More accurate sales quotas—Incorporating reasons in addition to sales rep performance makes it possible to create more accurate and more aggressive sales quotas that are still achievable. Optimising sales territories—Whether you are selling by territory or vertical, analytics can help you align sales expertise and resources to deliver optimal results. Realigning sales policies and compensation—Predictive analytics can also point to new selling models, including revenue distribution. For example, Microsoft restructured its sales compensation by rewarding levels of service consumption rather than straight commissions. Revising staffing—Predictive analytics can point to likely changes in staffing demands in the coming quarter or year. Because it takes time to find new sales resources, anticipating demand can guide hiring strategies, providing enough time for hiring and training to optimise sales productivity. Projecting the impact of product changes—New products, releases, features, and pricing models will have a direct impact on sales. Predictive analytics can help uncover the potential impact of product changes and minimise the impact on sales.