If you’re an MSP and moving more of your sales to a recurring revenue model, you will already know that it’s an attractive business model that can help you sustain and grow your business. Despite the recessionary effects of the pandemic, it’s a model that has been responsible for ensuring the survival and continued prosperity of many companies.
When moving to a recurring revenue model, it may seem a daunting undertaking, especially if you provide a wide range of services, from many different vendors. The amount of data to be processed can make the management and billing a complex and onerous operation.
The processes of pricing, contracting, provisioning, billing, and vendor reconciliation all need to be connected, automated, and reported on, both to your internal teams and customers to enable scale and growth across vendors, services, and customers. Failure to automate, with the increased set of metadata related to recurring services, will eventually reach a point where the manual processes collapse, resulting in billing errors, unsustainable manual processing costs, and customer dissatisfaction.
Cloudmore is a simple and efficient solution to all the challenges mentioned above. Here’s how Cloudmore can help you navigate the complexities of implementing a recurring revenue model to sell cloud services.
A Single Pane of Glass
Cloudmore is a multi-tenant solution, delivered as a service that gives you a unified view of your customers, products, and the transactional billing of services. Cloudmore becomes a central part of your technology stack, sitting in the middle of ERP, Support, PSA, and vendor control panels. Cloudmore can be used to manage all your service subscriptions, for all of your customers, in one place.
Automated, Accurate Billing
Providing an accurate bill to your customers in a subscription or recurring revenue world is the last part of a process flow that includes –
- Digitally defining your product catalog
- Creating a pricing strategy and plans
- Having automated provisioning flows where nothing slips through the cracks
- Using a billing engine that takes account of real-time adds, moves, and changes
When you have mastered the above processes in a platform like Cloudmore even complex invoicing routines will be reduced to minutes and customer invoices can be reduced to summary values as the detailed information will be available 24/7 in the customer portal. Vendor invoices will also be reconcilable against your usage invoices, accounts, and reports. With automated billing, Cloudmore eliminates the need for manual analysis and invoice preparation, invoicing your customers in minutes. This alone could save your finance and operations teams hours or days of work every month.
Customer Self-Service and Discovery
Presenting your services and offers to your busy customers has become a real challenge, customers are now used to procuring new technologies online, preferring to self-educate than be ‘sold’ to. The customizable e-store can showcase your products including descriptions, marketing messaging, FAQs, and more. This information encourages cross-sell and upsell.
Cloudmore helps you sell and support your customers while also relieving the burden on your customer-facing support staff.
A Self-service portal now attracts significant weighting in tenders and supplier comparisons.
Regain control of your pricing
Cloudmore supports a range of different pricing plans and billing methods and allows you to set and manage your global pricing, as well as specific customer prices. Beyond that, Cloudmore handles different options of pricing models – with flexible and customizable subscription periods and payment frequencies. Cloudmore also supports one-time transaction sales and free trials alongside your subscriptions.
For metered-based services, you have the option of charging based on consumption, which is perfect for products like Microsoft Azure or telecoms products that you charge for based on usage.
Flexible pricing can also be controlled. Using the user permissions functionality, alongside the full audit log, there is never any question of who did what and when. Prices can be automatically increased at renewal and you will have full visibility and transparency at all times.
Hassle-Free Subscription Management
More subscriptions for more customers soon becomes an overwhelming task to manage using existing support or service management solutions. Cloudmore was designed to make it simple for you to manage upgrades, downgrades, renewals, and add-ons.
You can track cancellations so that you can follow up to ascertain why a customer might be unhappy. And you can set up renewal and expiry notifications so that you can be sure to make the most of opportunities for recurrent subscriptions. This functionality in Cloudmore lets you keep a close eye on your customers’ activity, ensuring you make the most of upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
Intelligent Insights
Cloudmore incorporates a range of reporting that provides useful intelligence for both your customer and your teams.
Your customers access and view billing reports directly in the portal. And your staff can see and download data that shows a single, consolidated view of utilization, costs, and charges.
Data from across your product portfolio is aggregated into reports and billing views that give you a complete view of your subscription data. You can easily access sales, and customer data, with full breakdowns by subscription. All data within the platform can also be exported or directly connected to other business systems via API so that you get end-to-end automation across your business.
Recurring Revenue is the Future
The subscription-based economy is growing and maturing. Changes in working practices towards more distributed working are now driving that change in the IT B2B world. The subscription model is becoming the norm, and those that can offer their solutions in this way will grow quickly in a rapidly changing marketplace.
And while there are certainly many considerations when it comes to switching business models, by selecting Cloudmore, the choice of platform should be one of the easier ones.
If you are eager to sustain and grow your business during the pandemic, discover more about how you can benefit from switching to a recurring revenue model in our series of webinars for MSPs.
