Modern business leaders are often in constant pursuit of finding the best ways to run their companies productively and efficiently. However, oftentimes no matter what strategies, tools, or practices are implemented, real efficiency cannot be achieved without proper control.
What does it mean to be in control of the business?
What does "proper control" look like? To us, it means ensuring that you can have a complete overview of internal processes and customers, with also the ability to drill down into your data, create or eliminate silos where need be, and have automated or at least completely digital methods for processing, analyzing, and comparing data.
For subscription model companies, having this control is crucial for the efficiency and success of the business for many different reasons: managing customer lifecycles, measuring progress and performance, forecasting results, and scaling. When data is fragmented, these areas become challenging, and/or require manual effort, highly trained specialists, or much greater time and resources.
Why are integrations imperative for control?
So how can companies achieve true control? The fundamental foundation for control of data is found in integrations. Each of your data input and output sources must be integrated into one solution. At Younium, we call this the "one source of truth."
When customer data, financial data, product usage data, and more, are unable to be compared and analyzed together in real time, are you really empowered to be making crucial decisions or prevent negative events like customer churn from occurring? When data is managed by internal gatekeepers rather than made accessible to all important stakeholders, how can you be sure that the ball won't be dropped?
Integrations ensure that your bases are covered. They ensure that you have the complete picture to add context to customer lifecycles, and get a better overview of what your data sets mean in relation to each other. See our integrations here.
What can you achieve with one source of truth?
When you attain one source of truth, you can open up incredible possibilities for your business. With full control over your data and customer lifecycles, you can:
- more accurately determine the best pricing and contract options that will maximize your revenue.
- identify at-risk customers who can be prevented from churning.
- discover opportunities for upselling, cross selling, and strengthening relationships with existing customers.
- see where your internal processes and teams may need more support, and better allocate resources.
Take this scenario: A company has fractured processes for control of individual customer usage of their service, and therefore have to manually check usage each month. To do this, they must use several spreadsheets with one person in charge of the process. The result is that human errors occur all the time. By implementing an integrated dashboard to their finance system, they can now achieve a proper process for how to control the usage, know they are charging the right price, and limit the time spent on manual tasks. The biggest benefit is that they can now invoice 20% more on usage next quarter as they took control of the process and pricing around product usage.
When integrations with services such as Younium are achieved, control becomes natural and automatic. Running a subscription company with one source of truth for data encourages better oversight and transparency that leads to efficient and scalable business.
