What Is Subscription Management?

Subscriptions come with great promise: the promise to build customers for life, and drive predictable growth. But promises are not reality, and building a subscription business is no guarantee that you’ll realize its benefits. Enter subscription management. It puts your subscription business on a launchpad. Then it lights a flame.

Below we’ll look at how subscription management helps CFOs and CROs create world-class buying and paying experiences — driving loyalty, renewals, and growth.

Point yourself in the direction of your dream: a subscription business that hums with predictable growth. That only happens when customers continue to renew. Subscription management makes this possible. It helps you create easier and faster experiences — from buying the product to using it and paying for it — that keep your customers active.

In one-time sales, you hit your targets by acquiring new customers. But in a recurring revenue business — like those that run on subscriptions — revenue depends on retaining existing customers who pay on time and renew. That’s the goal of subscription management — keeping your customers engaged so you achieve top-line subscription growth.

Imagine this: A customer has to call up a sales rep every time they want to buy a subscription. Then, when they want to make a change request, they have to call up a sales rep again — who calls up finance. Clunky. In the background, the system is clunky, too. Teams wrestle with spreadsheets to manually update invoices and apply credits.

With subscription management, the scenario looks different. The same customer would buy and update their subscription instantly and online. They could also choose to engage with a sales rep to seek extra help. Updates like pricing changes are applied to the bill automatically. It’s a string of positive interactions that leads to happy customers and renewals.

There’s a lot that subscription management handles in the background to make this possible — bringing customer data into one place, replacing disconnected tools with one platform for every team, and running automation and AI-powered analytics throughout. But what it all comes down to in the end is experience.

Customer experience is everyone’s job now. As you interact with your customers constantly, not just here and there, subscription management helps you deliver delight from every corner of the business, so customers are happy to buy and pay.