The Subskribe Blog

Insights and innovations in quoting, subscription billing, and revenue recognition.

Beyond Apex: Why Zeppa is the Future of Quote Customization

Beyond Apex: Why Zeppa is the Future of Quote Customization

Introducing Subskribe's intuitive, business-friendly coding language that puts custom quoting back in the hands of SaaS teams - no expensive developers required.

By
Subbu Nagarajan

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10 Key Capabilities to Look for in CPQ for SaaS
CPQ

10 Key Capabilities to Look for in CPQ for SaaS

Making sure your CPQ has the right features is critical to streamlining processes, reducing overhead costs, and improving the customer experience. In this post, we review key capabilities you should be looking for in a modern CPQ for SaaS.
By
Patrick Chen
The Biggest Challenges and Pitfalls of Traditional CPQ Solutions
CPQ

The Biggest Challenges and Pitfalls of Traditional CPQ Solutions

Despite the many compelling reasons for businesses to consider a CPQ solution, leveraging one isn’t without its challenges, especially when dealing with many of the legacy CPQ vendors in the market. Here are some of the challenges you’ll likely encounter when it comes to deploying, using, and managing legacy CPQ software.
By
Patrick Chen
4 Tell-Tale Signs You Need a Modern CPQ Solution
CPQ

4 Tell-Tale Signs You Need a Modern CPQ Solution

How do you know when it’s time to reevaluate your existing configure, pricing, and quoting process? If your team is experiencing delays in getting quotes to customers or finding errors in the sales quotes your team is generating, it may be time to consider a modern CPQ solution that can streamline your end-to-end sales process.
By
Patrick Chen
Subskribe CPQ Is A Game Changer for BigID, Slashes Costs by 90%
Customer Story

Subskribe CPQ Is A Game Changer for BigID, Slashes Costs by 90%

To accommodate the high volume and complexity of their sales deals, BigID needed a CPQ solution that was able to streamline sales and pricing processes quickly and efficiently. Read this post to discover how BigID went live with Subskribe in just 90 days and cut implementation costs by 90%.
By
Patrick Chen
What is CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote)?
CPQ

What is CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote)?

CPQ stands for configure, price, quote, and is typically used to describe a software system used to produce fast and accurate sales quotes for complex and configurable products and services. The overall purpose of implementing a CPQ is to make the sales process streamlined, faster, and easier to audit.
By
Patrick Chen
Why Has Revenue Recognition Become So Complicated?
Revenue Recognition

Why Has Revenue Recognition Become So Complicated?

Given the combination of contracts involving various products, terms, entitlements, and revenue recognition schedules, complications can always arise as to when revenue can be recognized. There are various ways to recognize revenue depending on the types of products that are sold and the nature of the industry a company operates in.
By
Patrick Chen
Thinking of getting Salesforce CPQ? Think again.
CPQ

Thinking of getting Salesforce CPQ? Think again.

From startups to enterprises, businesses are struggling with Salesforce CPQ implementations. Why this widely-adopted CPQ solution might be your costliest mistake.
By
Durga Pandey
Discounts: The Fine Line Between Establishing Value and Discounting Your Business
CPQ

Discounts: The Fine Line Between Establishing Value and Discounting Your Business

What customer doesn’t want a good deal? Discounting is as much of an art than it is science, especially in multi-year (e.g. ramp) enterprise deals. Used effectively, discounts can provide SaaS businesses with an effective way to respond to competitive situations and other cases where the perceived value of the solution to the customer is lower than the standard prices of the product. Put another way, discounts can alter a customer’s perception of the value of a product or service in order to generate customer interest, increase customer loyalty, or increase the number of units sold. But the dilemma for many is how much is too much? 
By
Patrick Chen
Buckle Up! Ramp Deals Are Fast Approaching
CPQ

Buckle Up! Ramp Deals Are Fast Approaching

The art of the sales deal goes through many paths, and one of those is the ramp deal. For SaaS businesses, ramp deals used strategically can maximize growth rather than leaving huge amounts of revenue on the table. However, as we well know, SaaS pricing is a pretty complex subject, and throwing in multi-year ramp contracts and discounting only further adds to the complexity. So, should you offer them? Well, like many things in life, it depends.
By
Patrick Chen
Sales Process Efficiencies: Driving Sales Through Seamless Quoting and Pricing
CPQ

Sales Process Efficiencies: Driving Sales Through Seamless Quoting and Pricing

Growing customer expectations of the sales process continue to rise, and business buyers expect seamless experiences even as consumption models continue to shift. Similar to their consumer counterparts, B2B SaaS buyers are savvier than they’ve ever been, showing a strong preference for frictionless, self-service experiences, from initial research through purchase to post-sale support. Many organizations know they need to make changes to deliver on customer expectations, but find themselves mired in resource-heavy, manual pricing and quoting processes that result in inefficiencies across the entire customer interaction.
By
Patrick Chen
Why Customers Love Subskribe
Quote-to-Revenue

Why Customers Love Subskribe

At Subskribe, we are inspired to make hard things easy for customers. Discerning customers can see that, and they love the customer obsession we bring to every interaction. So why do customers love Subskribe so much? Here’s a list of the reasons we hear most frequently.
By
Durga Pandey
Consumption-based Pricing: 4 Reasons You Should Think Twice
Quote-to-Revenue

Consumption-based Pricing: 4 Reasons You Should Think Twice

When it comes to choosing the right pricing model for your business, that golden rule holds true. You’ve heard plenty about SaaS companies evolving their pricing models from a subscription-based model to a consumption-based one. Regardless of whether your competitors are making the change or you’re simply caught up in the hype, the decision comes down to the impact on your revenue. But switching to a consumption-based model isn’t necessarily the right decision for every business. 
By
Patrick Chen
Best Practices for Consumption-based Pricing
Quote-to-Revenue

Best Practices for Consumption-based Pricing

While the consumption-based pricing model has gone mainstream, many companies are still in the early stages of evaluation. Whether you’re evaluating or testing, our primer can help determine if this approach is right for your business, highlighting the benefits and challenges it brings to the table.
By
Patrick Chen
Leveraging Postgres Advisory Locks for Distributed Consensus
Engineering

Leveraging Postgres Advisory Locks for Distributed Consensus

At Subskribe, we solve pretty hard engineering problems. One such hard problem is mutual exclusion of invoice generation. This blog post is the story of how we achieved this without spending a lot of engineering hours by utilizing the technologies at our disposal.
By
Subbu Nagarajan
Accelerating Development with Feature Flags
Engineering

Accelerating Development with Feature Flags

At Subskribe our velocity of feature development is high. Our development philosophy follows the model of Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD). Ideally, when releasing a feature to a specific stage of our environment, we want to isolate that release from the release of any other feature. This enables us to make functionality available only when it has cleared our quality bar. To facilitate this isolation we recently introduced Feature Flags into our environment, leveraging the AppConfig service from AWS.
By
Tim Bradley
Making the Case for an End-to-End Framework for SaaS Revenue Recognition
Quote-to-Revenue

Making the Case for an End-to-End Framework for SaaS Revenue Recognition

The speed and complexity of modern subscription deals have simply outpaced the traditional quote-to-cash tools that the software industry grew up with. Given the almost limitless combinations of contracts involving various products, terms, entitlements, and revenue recognition schedules, complications often arise as to when revenue can be recognized. Recognizing SaaS revenue is even trickier under rapidly changing market conditions and is particularly complicated when contracts get updated over the course of their term. 
By
Prakash Raina
The Large Hidden Costs Of Using A Patched-Together Quote-To-Revenue System
Quote-to-Revenue

The Large Hidden Costs Of Using A Patched-Together Quote-To-Revenue System

Too many companies fall into the best-of-breed trap of buying and patching together separate CPQ, billing, and revenue recognition systems. On the one hand, sales ops teams are tasked with evaluating, buying, and running the CPQ system, which is responsible for creating and managing quotes.
By
Durga Pandey
Adaptive CPQ Is Mandatory for Today’s SaaS Businesses
Quote-to-Revenue

Adaptive CPQ Is Mandatory for Today’s SaaS Businesses

If you’re a growing SaaS company, your pricing model is likely to be straightforward for SMB customers (e.g., $100 a month) but more sophisticated for larger enterprises. In today’s world, however, CPQ in action is much more complex with a number of variables to consider, especially as it relates to products and technology. 
By
Durga Pandey
Announcing Revenue Recognition
Product News

Announcing Revenue Recognition

Today we’re announcing the launch of our Revenue Recognition module, which completes the last pillar of the Subskribe quote-to-revenue platform. From day one, our promise to customers has been to provide a single, unified end-to-end system and we’re delighted to fulfill this promise today. 
By
Yibin Guo
A New Foundation for Post-Subscription SaaS
Quote-to-Revenue

A New Foundation for Post-Subscription SaaS

In a typical quote-to-revenue system, everything starts with the quote. In Subskribe, everything starts with the order. Almost like commits log in a database, orders in Subskribe record all the changes — and upcoming changes — in the financial relationship between a company and its customer.
By
Prakash Raina
The Post-Subscription Era
Quote-to-Revenue

The Post-Subscription Era

Until about a decade ago, software was sold using a license model. Think about buying Microsoft Word. You paid once and received lifetime access to that version of the software. Major updates, like the upgrade from Word 97 to Word 2000, cost extra.
By
Durga Pandey
A New Day for New Deals
Company News

A New Day for New Deals

Today we’re publicly launching Subskribe, and announcing our Series A and Seed funding led by 8VC and Slow Ventures. Subskribe is the Adaptive Quote-to-Revenue platform for the Post Subscription Era.
By
Durga Pandey

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