Building a solid foundation for your subscription business to grow on

The goals for sustainable growth

Young businesses tend to be very busy. There's a lot to do, and even the most well funded amongst them need to think carefully about where and how to best allocate resources to facilitate sustainable growth.

Typically, for example, you want to make sure your tech team is focused on core product development in order to optimize the opportunity to win, serve and keep new customers. You don't want their time taken up with fiddly platform retrofitting and maintaining customizations.

Meanwhile, you want your sales team to be systematically and rapidly winning new customers. You don't want their time taken up trying to manually configure product options and prices. You want them to have the flexibility to tailor products to different customers without having to check every detail, thereby slowing down the sales process. However, you want them to do that within a controlled environment so they don't undersell to some companies or over-price products for others.

In this article, we explore the operational requirements to look for in your subscription platform to give your business a solid foundation on which it can grow.

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You need the right tools to scale your business in each department,
set within a connected platform where different teams can grow over time, rather than having to switch at a later stage.

A techstack for the big picture

The foundation for scalable subscription services

The key thing that every subscription business needs to start with when thinking about the platform on which they're going to build their organization, is connectivity.

While it may seem sufficient and cost effective on day one to let teams choose their own tools on which to do their job, in no time at all they will outgrow them and you will have a lot of data that needs consolidating into one, new place in order to move forward.

Although this is entirely possible, it does come with a lot of risk and can waste a lot of time and money in the interim as you battle with makeshift, workaround solutions. You need to consider your organization holistically, choosing a business system that’s designed for subscription based models.

What processes might I want to automate now and in the future?
How do I want teams to work together?
What do I want the user experience to look like for customers and team members?
How am I going to track information across the customer journey and across the customer lifetime?
How am I going to keep track of deals and individual customer subscriptions at scale?
What does the future look like for my business and how does my business platform facilitate that?

How to identify the right technology engine for subscription-based businesses

Choosing technology that scales with your business

One of the common mistakes people make when they are trying to be careful with their budgets is using tools that are not specifically designed for the job. Subscription businesses have very particular operational needs, which makes dedicated platforms a necessity for the long-term health and growth of the organization.

For example, while it's tempting to use a billing tool as the foundation of the business, it won't do the job well enough and in the long-term can be quite damaging to customer relationships because it isn’t aligned with the customer journey. Instead, you need a complete business platform that allows you to fulfill specific tasks without compromise, as well as provide connectivity between teams, data and functions.

By using the right holistic platform, you can make sure the integrations you need are in place as well as individual capabilities for optimum experience and productivity. Once you have set up your processes, it will make the running of the business better, easier and more successful. However, the platform’s benefits go further than that—it will also impact the perceived maturity of the business, making it appear more professional to staff and customers.

What to look for in a subscription system

Key capabilities to demand in your techstack

With all of that in mind, what are the core operational details to look for in a business platform for subscription operations?

Subscription customer journeys and automation are intricately connected with billing. However, a platform that's built for billing alone isn't capable of supporting different or evolving customer journeys—as is the nature of subscription businesses—without a lot of custom development. Over time, that custom development becomes slow to execute, difficult to manage and expensive to maintain.

Find a subscription platform that offers comprehensive, configuration-based and pre-built capabilities for the frontends, as well as automation within the customer journey.

Subscription management automation

Subscription contract processes can become complex very quickly once you start offering different plans and billing options for different customers. That's a natural part of subscription business growth that you need to be able to facilitate.

The answer is to find a flexible, event-driven and rule-based system that allows you to implement, track and tailor requirements for customers as their relationship with you evolves.

Payments

Reliable payment processes are not only functionally necessary for your business, but the sense of dependability that they provide when they work well is a significant part of developing trusting relationships with your customers.

Look for a system that enables trustworthy global partners and configuration-based capabilities to enable different payment methods for different customer segments.

Billing

While a good subscription business platform is complex in how it works, the hallmark of a good one is that it's simple for the user to engage with. Billing is a much less complicated task if the customer journey and user automation for management are well designed.

That means that you need a billing platform that's connected to the wider customer journey, so it doesn't simply send out the same invoice time and again, but adjusts according to any necessary changes seamlessly.

Revenue recognition

Keeping track of subscription revenue can involve a lot of complex tasks for finance teams, especially when it comes to contract modifications. For example, typically revenue is recognized at the moment it's earned but in subscription services it's recognized over time. This can mean there are delays between one and the other causing complexities in record keeping.

Staying on top of revenue recognition manually will lead to errors at scale, so you need an event-driven platform that automates credits, journal entries and handles payment reconciliation to simplify accounting workflows across systems. That includes features such as user logs and audit trails.

How keylight supports your growth

Empower your business withcomprehensive solutions

keylight has been designed with all these challenges in mind, seeing them not as problems but opportunities to help businesses supercharge their success from day one.

Thanks to key features, including connected, end-to-end processes, capabilities for a configurable customer journey, powerful automation and a comprehensive rules library, you have everything you need to build the business you want without compromise.

Furthermore, thanks to our full-access pricing, there's no need to limit your options just because your business is young. Our experienced teams can get you live within one month, with a price plan to suit you.