Subscription Time at The Financial Times
Zuora, the subscription billing and payments company and the Financial Times of London announced a deal today in which the Times will use Zuora to help manage its subscription business. Two interesting paragraphs from an article in Computerworld UK stand out: “The organisation has invested heavily in its digital strategy in recent years amidst a […]
Using Feedback Loops to Manage Subscription Business
Measure, iterate, scale Everyone in business claims to want to listen to the voice of the customer; it’s a non-controversial issue. But the approaches are all over the map. There is little consistency and, truthfully, many vendors do a poor job of it. Capturing customer feedback has always been a challenge for conventional vendors because […]
The Order to Cash Subscription Process
Subscription companies face many of the same challenges that more conventional companies face but the nature of these businesses puts an entirely different spin on the challenges. All companies have to acquire new customers, make products and price them attractively without leaving money on the table. Also, once a product is purchased, a company needs […]
Zuora, Intacct Deal a Sign of Things to Come
We’re beginning to see an important differentiation, even a schism, in the enterprise software industry. It’s been building up for the last seven years and it will burst onto the scene tied in a bow this year. It’s the separation between conventional software suites and platforms and it is most vividly explained by front to […]
Subscriptions in the Enterprise
If this is going to be the year of the platform that I discussed last time, it will also be the year of the subscription business model. This is, I hope, the last time I drag out the “year of” phrase attached to anything significant unless it’s the year of MY Tesla and that’s highly […]
Re-imagining Business Processes Drives First Mover Advantage
It’s easy to be blinded by the obvious. It happens in business all the time, something is right in front of you but you attribute its effect to a different cause. I see this most typically when observing a paradigm shift — the reason for the shift is not always the obvious causative agent. For […]
The Subscription Culture
I have been writing about the subscription economy for five years and I have enjoyed my ringside seat following this latest and most important disruption of our time. The subscription business model, and not CRM per se, is the disruption that got Salesforce going and changed the front office software industry entirely. Today we’re well […]
Spend Matters PRO — Advancing Procurement Publishing Distinction with Tales From the Launch Pad
Roughly three weeks ago, we quietly launched Spend Matters PRO in beta. Frankly, we saw a large hole in where we believe research in the procurement (and related areas) needs to be going. To us, Spend Matters PRO contains the frequent,…
The Subscription Imperative Revisited
As often happens in evolutionary systems, availability precedes demand. That’s a complicated way to say that we build products then figure out what they’re good for. It’s not that innovators develop things willy-nilly, but no matter how well thought out an innovation is, the marketplace has the last word on its utility. When we speak […]
Zuora and NetSuite in Best-of-Breed Alliance
Yesterday Zuora, the billing and payment solution company for subscription businesses did a smart thing, at least I think so. At NetSuite’s user meeting, SuiteWorld, Zuora chief Tien Tzuo announced that his trademark product is now pre-integrated with NetSuite’s financials. But that wasn’t what’s smart, only the thing that enabled the thing that is smart. […]
