When it comes to the elements of successful subscription management, we've talked about control and one source of truth as being a major component. But in order to achieve one source of truth, and have a complete overview of all pertinent data to manage subscriptions effectively, you must have integrations and connectors.
These are the most important ones for SaaS and subscriptions, and for Younium customers:
1. The most important subscription connectors for growth:
Tracking data for business growth is important for all types of businesses, and ensuring your customer database and sales enablement are connected to your product and subscription information is crucial.
Customer Relationship Manager (CRM)
CRMs have become a business mainstay as being more than just a list of contacts and customers. CRMs are now powerful tools to track activities and information about all stages of the customer lifecycle.
In regards to Younium, a CRM connector is important for two reasons: The first is to bring insights to individual customers in the CRM from Younium, and to enable Quote2Order from the CRM to Younium.
Online sales
If you have an online self-service option for customers, you need to ensure that the process is smooth and automated for those converting customers to pay and be registered in your systems, and/or be added to the proper billing cycle. A connector that enables the online sales channel for your subscription services is crucial.
In-app self service
A good subscription service should at least have some component of self-service to ensure customers don't need to rely on your representatives to complete simple tasks.
Connectors for self-service are important to the user experience. Self service extensions can include in-app ticketing for support questions, but also are valuable when it comes to updating account details like billing information. When a customer makes these updates, the connector must relay the information back to the CRM, the invoicing service, etc.
Partner sales
Lastly, an important component of business growth is partner sales. Enabling partner portals as a channel for sales can have a great impact on your business, but using a connector is necessary for this data to be tracked and measured with your other sales and customer information.
Younium connectors for Growth: Salesforce, Hubspot, Dynamics CRM
2. The most important subscription connectors for operations:
Product usage
Especially when it comes to some specific pricing and monetization plans, it's important to connect your services with information about end-customer usage. Usage data is necessary in some cases for direct billing, and analysis of contracted versus live usage.
Production systems
Your customers may have varying access to the actual feature sets within your product. Connecting production systems with subscription data must be done in order to provision these features, regulate limits and more, for each individual customer.
Collaboration
Especially with cloud SaaS platforms for businesses, it's likely onboarding will be a component, and several people in a customer team will be using your product. Connectors that can help streamline handovers and sync in-app usage between teams to facilitate collaboration can be very important in these instances.
Customer Success
Often SaaS companies are heavily concerned with in-app retention and reducing customer churn. A customer success component is likely important for your business, and helps to control the customer lifecycle. You can connect Younium with customer success platforms to enable the shared common truth of both customer health and customer financials, to get a better overview of all of your customers' success.
Younium connectors for operations: Slack, Startdeliver, Planhat, Zapier
3. The most important subscription connectors for financials:
Maybe most important of all the subscription connectors are ones for financials. Without having a handle on your subscription data, customer data, and financial activities together, you can struggle with regular invoicing and billing, and proper financial reporting.
ERP / Financial systems
You may think your own business' ERP or financial systems are something separate to your subscription management, but you should rethink this. Having a connector for your ERP or financial system to your subscriptions ensures that you can reconcile the subscription business. You have a better handle on reporting for things like cost to acquire a customer (CAC), customer lifetime values (CLV) and annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Payment gateways
What would a subscription business be without the ability for payment gateways to integrate into your actual platform? But more than that, your payment gateway needs to connect to your other data sources to have smooth processes for billing cycles, self-service, and usage data as it relates to billing and payment processing.
E-Invoicing gateways
If, on the other hand, you are using an invoicing system, they need to also connect to your subscriptions, especially for automating the billing cycle. You e-invoicing should also alert your other systems when a payment hasn't been made or an account is delinquent in order for service to stop or access be restricted, or for customer support to be alerted and an intervention be made.
Younium financial connectors: Microsoft Dynamics 365, Stripe, PE Accounting, Fortnox, PowerOffice Go, Exact Online
Connectors are imperative for the success of a subscription business, and all the elements needed to run together efficiently can become overwhelming. Especially for enterprise market and more complex subscription businesses, legacy systems and customizations tend to be the answer. However, there can be a huge benefit in using a standard off-the-shelf product with connectors instead of customizing the platforms or building custom integrations, because then you can rely on straightforward support and set up.
Younium is the one source of truth for all of your important subscription business connectors. Obtain all the information from growth, operations, and financials together in one place to have true control over your subscription management.
Want to talk to us about the programs you're using and how to build connectors with Younium?
