Category: Usage-Based Pricing

You Don’t Need Another Billing System—You Need a Better Approach

Posted on April 30, 2025 by - Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, standalone billing, Usage-Based Pricing

Recurring billing vendors promised simplicity. As businesses shifted toward what became known as the “Subscription Economy,” CRM, ERP, and customer-facing (front-office) systems lacked native support for recurring revenue models, creating operational gaps that gave rise to specialized vendors—”SaaS Recurring Billing“—to bridge the divide.

Today, customer expectations have evolved dramatically. Businesses now face greater complexity as customers demand flexible, personalized options for consuming and paying for products and services. This complexity significantly impacts front-office sales processes and drives downstream billing and reporting challenges.

While CRM and ERP platforms like Salesforce and NetSuite have responded to these evolving demands by continually innovating and enhancing their capabilities, the standalone billing vendors—both legacy providers and new entrants—have largely failed to keep pace. Instead of true innovation, these vendors have continued promoting a “third cloud” model that positions standalone platforms between CRM, ERP, and front-office systems. This outdated approach results in operational fragmentation and duplicated efforts, rather than genuine improvement.

Before exploring why standalone billing platforms inherently struggle, we must first clearly understand the essential pillars of every modern B2B organization’s revenue infrastructure:

CRM, ERP, and Front-Office Systems: Essential Pillars of Revenue Infrastructure
Effective revenue operations depend on three interconnected core platforms:

CRM Systems: Excel in managing customer relationships, deal structuring, quoting, and flexible pricing management. Salesforce provides robust examples of integrated quoting and subscription management directly within CRM workflows.

ERP Systems: Focused on financial accuracy, compliance, revenue recognition, and accounts receivable. Platforms like NetSuite integrate comprehensive financial management aligned closely with accounting processes.

Customer/Front-Office Systems: Include platforms such as e-commerce, self-service portals, and internal product systems that manage customer engagement, subscriptions, credits, and prepayments, capturing the precise usage data critical for billing and monetization.

Additionally, specialized capabilities such as tax calculation engines, payment gateways, and specialized usage management systems can provide significant value if effectively connected to the core revenue stack. For companies already invested in specialized usage management solutions, leveraging these systems within a unified revenue infrastructure is crucial to ensure seamless interoperability and to avoid redundant or fragmented processes.

Together, these core systems should form a cohesive and unified revenue infrastructure. Effective monetization solutions must complement and enhance these systems—not duplicate or disrupt them.

Why Standalone Billing Platforms Fail to Deliver

Standalone billing platforms typically fall into three categories, each with inherent limitations and a critical shared flaw:

Quote-to-Revenue Platforms: While these newer entrants accurately recognize the importance of cohesive front-to-back-office collaboration, their strategy of replicating pricing, configuration, quoting, billing, revenue recognition, and collections capabilities within a single solution proves impractical at scale. Inevitably, they cannot match the depth and flexibility of dedicated CRM and ERP systems.

Legacy Subscription Management Solutions: Initially built for simple subscription models, these systems struggle significantly with complex usage-based or hybrid monetization strategies. Attempting to address complexity, many legacy vendors developed their own CPQ tools around their proprietary billing catalogs, which are inherently limited compared to modern CPQ systems.

Usage-Based Billing Platforms: These specialized platforms excel at usage rating but struggle to clearly define how their capabilities seamlessly integrate into broader CRM, ERP, and front-office ecosystems, often resulting in redundant configurations and operational friction.

The fundamental flaw shared by these SaaS Recurring Billers is their reliance on multiple disconnected product catalogs. Defining sales rules in CRM and separately redefining them in billing systems inevitably introduces complexity, data discrepancies, and costly integration challenges.

Symptoms Your Revenue Infrastructure Is Breaking Down

How do you know if your revenue infrastructure is failing to support your business effectively? Look for these recognizable symptoms:

  • Forced Manual Handoffs: Sales and finance teams repeatedly re-enter or manually adjust data because your sales and billing systems don’t talk to each other efficiently.
  • Slow Pricing and Packaging Changes: Launching new pricing strategies or monetization models requires extensive IT projects and lengthy configurations.
  • Billing Inaccuracies and Revenue Leakage: Persistent discrepancies between quoted prices and billed amounts cause customer frustration and lost revenue.
  • Internal Team Frustration: Sales, finance, and revenue operations teams are misaligned, each blaming the other for process inefficiencies and delays.
  • Engineering and IT Overload: Significant resources are spent maintaining fragile custom integrations and resolving data conflicts rather than focusing on strategic initiatives.

These symptoms aren’t just operational headaches—they’re clear indicators that your revenue infrastructure needs immediate attention.businesses to build complex integrations, making it harder to achieve a seamless sales-to-finance workflow.

The Future: Introducing Embedded Revenue Infrastructure

The true issue is not any single billing solution but the outdated concept of a standalone “third cloud.” Originally necessary when CRM, ERP, and front-office systems were immature, this approach now struggles under modern monetization demands.

The future of revenue management demands Embedded Revenue Infrastructure—an innovative model that integrates advanced pricing, usage tracking, billing, and revenue logic directly into existing CRM, ERP, and front-office systems. This approach eliminates redundant catalogs and complex integrations, creating a unified, agile, and scalable foundation for revenue operations.

In our next blog, we’ll dive deeper into Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, explore its transformative potential, and show precisely how it addresses these critical operational challenges.

Ready to simplify your sales and finance processes?

Stop juggling fragmented systems and costly integrations. At Continuous, we unify your sales and finance workflows by building on the trusted CRM and ERP platforms you already use.

Request your free Revenue Operations Assessment from Continuous and get expert insights tailored specifically to your business—no cost, no commitment. Simply fill out this quick form, and one of our experts will reach out with your assessment survey.

Is Your Business RCA-Ready? Five Questions to Ask Before Making the Leap

Posted on April 24, 2025 by - Consumption-Based Pricing, Salesforce Revenue Cloud, Uncategorized, Usage-Based Pricing

Part 3 of our RCA Series

In Part 1, we introduced Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA) and its vision for end-to-end monetization. In Part 2, we explored how RCA supports usage-based pricing—and how Continuous enhances it for scale. 

Now, in Part 3, we’re focusing on readiness. For some companies, RCA is the clear next step. For others, continuing to optimize legacy CPQ and/or Billing may be the right call for now. We’re sharing what we’ve learned from working with our customers: the most common readiness gaps that hold teams back from realizing RCA’s full potential—and how to close them before making the move.

You’ve implemented Salesforce CPQ—or even CPQ + Billing. You’ve standardized quoting, brought pricing and approvals into Salesforce, and made major strides toward scalable revenue operations. But as your business grows and your pricing models evolve, you may be asking: What about RCA?

For many organizations, the next step is Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA)—and the opportunity to modernize monetization even further.

Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA) introduces a fully native Salesforce architecture purpose-built for modern revenue operations. It supports more flexible pricing models—including usage-based—and brings quoting, contracting, and billing closer together within a composable, API-first framework. 

But the move to RCA isn’t right for everyone and some may benefit from continuing to optimize their current CPQ or CPQ + Billing investment. At Continuous, we help customers navigate these decisions every day, providing scalable solutions that bridge the gap between CPQ and RCA.

Not Everyone Needs to Move to RCA (Yet)

Moving to RCA now isn’t the right fit for every organization. If your organization recently invested in Salesforce CPQ (with or without Salesforce Billing), the last thing you want is to disrupt that deployment. Instead, your goal is likely to get even more value out of your current investment.

That’s exactly where Continuous comes in. Continuous enhances Salesforce CPQ by seamlessly adding support for complex usage, consumption, and credit-based pricing scenarios—all without introducing new billing silos. Even better, Continuous enables you to fully leverage NetSuite as your financial system of record, allowing for streamlined payments, collections, invoicing, and revenue reporting directly within your existing ERP environment.

With Continuous you can:

  • Support advanced usage, consumption, and hybrid pricing models directly within Salesforce CPQ.
  • Fully leverage NetSuite for financial reporting, invoicing, collections, and revenue recognition.
  • Extend—not replace—the significant investment you’ve already made in Salesforce CPQ.

If your team is feeling pressure to move to Revenue Cloud Advanced but wants a more strategic path forward, start by requesting a free RCA Readiness Assessment. We’ll show you how to enhance what you already have, so you can move to RCA (or any advanced solution) only when—and if—it truly makes sense for your business.

What We’re Seeing In The Market: Success Meets Operational Reality

At Continuous, while we work with companies who are deep into CPQ or CPQ Billing, five patterns consistently emerge:

Your Customer Experience Shouldn’t Depend on Support Tickets
 → Most customers can’t see their usage, credit balances, or contract details—so they open support tickets for basic questions. This reactive model frustrates users, burdens internal teams, and erodes trust—especially in usage-based models where real-time visibility is expected.

When SKUs Don’t Map to Value, Trust Breaks Down
 → Workarounds that helped get CPQ live or bring a new product to market—like placeholder SKUs or loosely defined product hierarchies—create quoting confusion and billing disconnects, leaving customers unsure of what they purchased or why they were charged.

Governance Gaps and Swivel Chair Handoffs Create a Loop of Rework and Risk
 →What began as flexible CPQ configuration has evolved into a patchwork of overrides, manual workarounds, and uncontrolled customizations. Even after deals are signed, corrections are still required before revenue can be recognized. The result: delayed deals, inconsistent data, and ongoing rework across Sales, RevOps, and Finance

Unstructured or Manual Consumption Data
 → As businesses shift and are eager to monetize consumption— the supporting data simply isn’t there. Usage data is often captured inconsistently, defined differently across products, or manually maintained in spreadsheets—if it’s tracked at all. Sales teams miss clear signals for upsells or expansion, Finance can’t reconcile revenue, and customers are left in the dark about what they’ve used or why they’re being charged—limiting revenue growth and customer trust.

Fragmented, Disconnected Lifecycle Events Derail Growth
 → Renewals, amendments, and cancellations are often managed through manual workarounds or outside systems—like spreadsheets, net-new quotes, or support tickets. This leads to duplicate records, conflicting contract data, customer confusion, and unreliable revenue and renewal reporting.

Recognize these challenges? Let’s talk about how Continuous can help your team tackle them today, before they stall your growth.

Is Your Business RCA-Ready?

RCA assumes a strong foundation—but that’s where many teams struggle. Before diving in, ask yourself:

  • Is our product catalog standardized and enforceable?
  • Do our SKUs map to value—for us and our customers?
  • Is our usage data reliable and available in real-time?
  • Are renewals, amendments, and cancellations governed and aligned?
  • Can Sales, Finance, and Customers all see the same thing?

Without that foundation, even the best RCA implementation can fall short of expectations.

How Continuous Extends RCA

Continuous doesn’t replace RCA—we make it stronger. We embed directly into your Salesforce environment, working alongside RCA to:

  • Extend RCA to NetSuite or any ERP—no middleware required
  • Standardize SKUs and Rate Plans across sales and billing
  • Mediate and rate usage data at scale, in real time
  • Enable enterprise credit pools, prepayments, and true-ups
  • Align lifecycle events (renewals, expansions, cancellations) across Salesforce and ERP

And because Continuous is Salesforce-native, your teams stay in the systems they already know. No duplicate catalogs. No disconnected workflows.

RCA opens the door to modern revenue operations—but the difference between deploying it and unlocking its full value comes down to readiness.

Request a free RCA Readiness Assessment

Request your free RCA Readiness Assessment from Continuous and get expert insights tailored specifically to your business—no cost, no commitment. Simply fill out this quick form, and one of our RCA experts will reach out with your assessment survey.

How Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced Powers Modern Usage-Based Pricing—And Where Continuous Makes It Even Stronger

Posted on April 1, 2025 by - Consumption-Based Pricing, Salesforce Revenue Cloud, Uncategorized, Usage-Based Pricing

What is Salesforce RCA?

Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA) is redefining modern revenue lifecycle management by unifying quoting, contracts, billing, and order management into a seamless, native Salesforce experience. Businesses adopting RCA benefit from enhanced automation, flexible pricing models, and streamlined collaboration across sales, finance, and legal teams.

But, as businesses evolve beyond traditional subscriptions toward usage-based pricing, they’re discovering powerful new opportunities—and equally complex challenges. Usage-based pricing, now the gold standard in SaaS, cloud, telecom, and technology industries, directly ties revenue to the actual value customers receive, creating stronger customer relationships and more dynamic revenue streams.

Building upon our previous primer on Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced, this deeper dive explores how RCA supports usage-based pricing and rating, highlighting areas where Continuous significantly enhances RCA capabilities including:

  • Advanced rating and high usage volumes
  • Real-time usage mediation and aggregation, ensuring timely and accurate handoff to finance systems for comprehensive visibility across sales, customer service, finance teams, and customers.
  • Credit balance, prepayment, and enterprise savings plans

We’ll outline RCA’s strengths, identify critical considerations, and illustrate how Continuous enhances RCA capabilities—particularly around scalability, compliance, financial accuracy, and seamless ERP integration.

Whether you’re currently using Salesforce CPQ & Billing, considering RCA, or exploring consumption-based pricing, this guide provides essential insights for mastering usage-driven revenue models.

How does Salesforce RCA simplify usage-based billing?

Salesforce RCA differentiates itself through several core features:

Unified Salesforce-Native Architecture: RCA is fully built on Salesforce’s core platform, eliminating the previous reliance on managed packages inherent to Salesforce CPQ & Billing. This architecture leverages Salesforce’s robust scalability, security, and integration capabilities as well as enabling easy upgrades using Salesforce’s seasonal release schedule.

API-First Composable Architecture: RCA offers an API-first, composable approach, empowering customers to selectively deploy the elements of RCA they specifically require—including complex configuration, dynamic revenue orchestration, contract lifecycle management, and usage-based selling and billing. This modular flexibility enables rapid adaptation to evolving business models without the need for wholesale system replacements.

Real-Time Visibility via Digital Wallet: RCA’s digital wallet provides immediate, transparent tracking of credit balances and usage commitments, forming a robust foundation for credit and commitment-based pricing models. This visibility empowers sales, finance, customer service teams, and customers themselves to proactively manage usage, ensure contractual compliance, and adapt quickly to changing consumption patterns.

How Continuous Complements Salesforce RCA

Continuous builds on the already robust foundation provided by Salesforce RCA, empowering companies to confidently evolve their pricing models without needing to replace their existing sales or billing systems. By enhancing RCA’s capabilities, Continuous addresses complex scenarios and enterprise-scale challenges:

Enhanced Scalability for High-Volume Data

During peak periods, usage data can significantly exceed typical volumes. Continuous provides an off-platform rating engine optimized for large data volumes, preserving Salesforce’s responsiveness and efficiency.

Support for Real-Time Usage Mediation and Rating

Customers benefit from immediate insight into their usage. Continuous complements RCA’s periodic data aggregation with real-time mediation and rating capabilities, ensuring accurate, up-to-the-minute visibility.

Advanced Credit Balance and Enterprise Management

Visibility into commitment progress is crucial for sales, customer service, finance teams, and customers themselves. Continuous ensures synchronized visibility across Salesforce, ERP, and other platforms:

  • Enterprise-Wide Credit Pools: Centralized credit management across multiple departments or subsidiaries.
  • Automated Credit Rollovers and Replenishments: Seamless, automated credit management aligned with contractual agreements.
  • Complex True-Up Calculations: Real-time monitoring and adjustments, ensuring billing accuracy and compliance across all systems.

Streamlined Financial Integration and Compliance

Continuous seamlessly integrates RCA’s sales-driven rating processes with ERP and accounting systems, including a productized integration specifically for NetSuite, while remaining flexible enough to support any downstream financial application. By embedding the Continuous Revenue Fabric within RCA, Continuous ensures an optimal handoff tailored to the specific needs of revenue operations and finance teams. This approach provides finance teams with a complete and reliable financial system of record, delivering comprehensive visibility and significantly reducing manual reconciliation efforts.

Advanced Pricing Insights and Analytics

Continuous provides advanced analytics and pricing capabilities, enabling customers and sales teams to more accurately estimate and price usage-based offerings. This facilitates precise determination of prepaid credit amounts and commitments required upfront. Additionally, Continuous can leverage actual customer usage data to deliver powerful insights through integration with leading analytics tools like Tableau or Snowflake, driving informed decision-making and enhanced revenue growth.

Real-World Scenario: Cloud Infrastructure Company

Consider a cloud infrastructure company offering platform subscriptions paired with usage-based, pay-as-you-go charges. They manage highly complex rating scenarios involving millions of usage records that need to be assessed across multiple attributes to accurately reflect how the platform is used.

Initially, customers utilize a pure pay-as-you-go model but the company aims to transition them toward prepaid commitments using virtual currency credits. RCA provides foundational support through robust rate cards and digital wallet visibility, enabling the sales and customer success teams to track usage effectively.

Continuous further enhances RCA by managing extremely high usage volumes off-platform, providing real-time mediation and aggregation of billions of records without impacting Salesforce performance. This capability allows precise, multi-attribute rating essential for accurate billing.

Moreover, Continuous ensures seamless integration with their ERP, NetSuite, ensuring that detailed usage data and credit consumption are fully visible for critical financial processes including Accounts Receivable, Revenue Recognition, and Financial Reporting. Additionally, by utilizing actual customer usage data, Continuous facilitates accurate cost estimates that help customers confidently transition to prepaid commitments.

Finally, the enriched usage data integrated into analytics tools like Tableau or Snowflake empowers broader business insights, influencing strategic decisions beyond billing—such as product development, customer retention strategies, and marketing initiatives.

Ready to Optimize Your Usage-Based Pricing and Billing? Talk to Our Experts Today

Together, Salesforce RCA and Continuous provide a comprehensive solution optimized for complex, consumption-driven scenarios. This combined approach ensures scalability, real-time accuracy, advanced credit management, financial compliance, and actionable analytics, empowering businesses to confidently scale their usage-based revenue models.

Whether you are a current Salesforce Revenue Cloud user, considering an upgrade to Revenue Cloud Advanced, or simply navigating challenges operationalizing usage and credit-based pricing, Continuous is here to help. Reach out to us today to discuss —Connect with our consumption-based pricing experts

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What types of businesses benefit most from Salesforce RCA and Continuous?
Any business using complex pricing models, particularly in SaaS, cloud services, telecom, or technology, will greatly benefit from RCA combined with Continuous.

Can Continuous work with other Salesforce applications such as CPQ & Billing?
Yes, Continuous extends any Salesforce application including Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce CPQ & Billing.

Can Continuous integrate with ERP systems other than NetSuite?
Yes, Continuous has a productized integration for NetSuite but can also integrate seamlessly with virtually any ERP or downstream financial system.

Do I need to replace my current Salesforce deployment to use Continuous?
No, Continuous complements and enhances your existing Salesforce setup, allowing you to extend capabilities without replacing your core deployment.

How does Continuous support large-scale data requirements?
Continuous uses an off-platform rating engine optimized for extremely high data volumes, managing billions of records monthly without affecting Salesforce performance.

Can you explain the difference between Salesforce CPQ & Billing and Revenue Cloud Advanced?
Salesforce CPQ & Billing originated from Salesforce’s acquisition of Steelbrick and InvoiceIT, and thus still relies on managed packages. Revenue Cloud Advanced, on the other hand, is fully built on Salesforce’s core platform. It leverages an API-driven, composable architecture, bringing forward all the strengths of the original CPQ & Billing solution while offering significantly enhanced flexibility, scalability, and integration capabilities.

How is Continuous different from other usage-based billing systems?
Traditional usage-based billing applications require businesses to set up products within their own separate billing catalogs and then integrate these catalogs with sales tools like Salesforce—an approach that often creates complexity, cost, and maintenance challenges. Continuous eliminates this complexity by embedding directly within Salesforce’s existing product catalog through native AppExchange extensions. This unique embedded “revenue fabric” approach ensures businesses can manage all pricing and packaging directly within Salesforce, completely removing the need for complex billing system integrations. Additionally, Continuous ensures your existing financial system—such as NetSuite—remains the financial system of record, avoiding duplication of functionality and the cost and complexity associated with maintaining integrations. This embedded approach ensures coordinated visibility and control across revenue operations and finance teams, allowing businesses to leverage the full capabilities of both Salesforce and their ERP solutions.

Rethinking the Recurring Billing Status Quo: Why Analyst Reports Highlight a Broken Market

Posted on September 12, 2024 by - Consumption-Based Pricing, standalone billing, Usage-Based Pricing

On August 6, 2024, Gartner released their latest “Magic Quadrant for Recurring Billing Applications“ followed by Forrester’s “The Recurring Billing Solutions Landscape, Q3 2024“ on September 3, 2024. These reports assess a competitive landscape that has been evolving for over a decade, evaluating vendors based on their ability to manage the entire sales-to-finance process for recurring billing.

While these reports are valuable, they also reveal a deeper problem in the industry—a problem rooted in how standalone billing systems approach the recurring billing challenge. At Continuous, we believe the way the market has evolved has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the recurring billing problem, making it difficult for analysts to cover accurately and even more painful for customers to select the right solutions.

Both the Gartner and Forrester reports rank vendors based on their ability to handle the entire recurring billing lifecycle, which includes tasks such as:

Sales Process and Quoting:
Creating flexible pricing models and accurate quotes within the sales cycle, ensuring they align seamlessly with both CRM and billing systems.

Contracting:
Managing the transition from quoting to contracts, including drafting, signing, and handling amendments or renewals, while integrating pricing and terms from the sales process.

Service Provisioning:
Setting up and activating services according to contract terms, tracking usage in real-time to ensure accurate billing.

Usage Data Collection and Rating:
Capturing, mediating, and rating usage data in real-time, applying pricing rules to ensure accurate and scalable billing for consumption-based models.

Billing and Invoice Generation:
Consolidating one time, periodic and usage charges into detailed invoices, ensuring timely delivery to customers via their preferred channels.

Payment Processing:
Facilitating payment collection, managing recurring payments, and ensuring accurate reconciliation with financial systems.

Revenue Recognition and Financial Reporting:
Ensuring compliance with accounting standards by accurately recognizing revenue and providing detailed financial reports that integrate with the ERP system.

These tasks encompass a wide range of functions traditionally handled by CRM (Sales) and ERP (Finance) platforms. However, over the past decade, specialized billing vendors have emerged to address gaps in these systems. Their solution? Introduce a “billing system of record” – a third platform that sits between CRM and ERP to manage these critical processes. This shift has created a new category of software, one that analysts like Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and others are now tasked with evaluating.

The Rise of Standalone Billing Systems: A New Category Emerges

Around 2010, a belief took hold that CRM and ERP vendors couldn’t handle the increasing complexity of billing as companies shifted from traditional perpetual license models to subscription billing models. In response, a range of specialized billing systems began emerging, offering solutions to support this new “Subscription Economy”.

By 2017, this new category of standalone billing systems had matured enough to receive formal analyst coverage, leading to the release of reports like the Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave. These vendors promised to simplify recurring billing by offering a third-party solution that could manage the billing lifecycle independently. This trend accelerated as consumption and prepaid credit models gained popularity, leading to the crowded market landscape we see today.

But here’s the issue: billing is not, and never should be, a standalone process. It’s intertwined with sales, finance, and customer management. When billing is siloed into a separate platform, businesses are forced to build complex integrations, juggle multiple systems, and deal with costly maintenance—problems that CRM and ERP systems were originally designed to solve.

What These Reports Reveal: Complexity, Not Simplicity

The criteria used by Gartner and Forrester to evaluate vendors include tasks that traditionally belong within the domains of CRM and ERP systems. However, instead of enhancing these core systems, standalone billing vendors have introduced an unnecessary third layer of complexity.

Consider the following:

  • Quote Creation and Negotiation are native functions of CRM systems, where sales teams manage customer interactions and quote data from all channels should be stored.
  • Contract Drafting and Management should flow naturally from CRM to ERP, enabling seamless financial reporting.
  • Invoice Creation and Payment Processing are core functions of billing that should reside within the ERP or CRM system, where financial and sales data is already managed.

By positioning a third-party billing system as essential, standalone vendors have shifted what should be natural extensions of CRM and ERP into fragmented processes. This fragmentation forces businesses to build complex integrations, making it harder to achieve a seamless sales-to-finance workflow.

The Problem with Standalone Billing Systems

At Continuous, we believe the current approach taken by standalone billing vendors is fundamentally flawed. Instead of simplifying processes, these vendors create friction by placing themselves as overlapping solutions with the CRM and ERP systems they are also dependent on. This introduces costly, cumbersome integrations that are difficult to maintain—particularly as pricing and packaging models evolve.

There’s no inherent reason why traditional sales and financial processes should be managed by a separate system when sales and finance teams have already invested in systems like Salesforce and NetSuite. Standalone billing vendors want businesses to believe they must control these processes, but the reality is that doing so makes their systems “stickier” by requiring complex customizations and significant services investments. The end result for customers of these vendors are deployments that are:

  • Expensive to integrate: Building and maintaining integrations between CRM, ERP, and standalone billing systems often requires costly services and custom work.
  • Rigid and limiting: Once integrations are built, they become rigid, making it difficult for businesses to adapt to new pricing models or market changes without extensive rework.
  • Manual and error-prone: Despite these integrations, many billing processes still require manual intervention, leading to inefficiencies and potential errors in financial reporting and customer invoicing.

This is why the current market is so difficult for analysts to cover: the premise of a standalone billing system is inherently flawed. The criteria that Gartner and Forrester use to evaluate these vendors encompass functions that should naturally belong in core CRM and ERP systems. However, standalone vendors pull these critical processes into a third cloud, which struggles to work effectively alongside CRM or ERP solutions.

The Continuous Approach: Back to Common Sense

At Continuous, we challenge this status quo. We believe that the best way to solve the recurring billing problem is to go back to what was previously common sense: there should not be a third cloud in between CRM and ERP.

Instead, we advocate for enhancing the core applications that B2B companies already rely on—CRM for sales and ERP for finance—and supplementing them with a powerful calculation engine that integrates with customers’ internal platforms. By doing this, we enable a truly unified quote-to-consumption process that is:

  • Easier to maintain.
  • More flexible as pricing and packaging needs evolve.
  • Less expensive to deploy, reducing both software license and integration costs.

Conclusion: Challenging the Status Quo

The release of the Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave reports highlights how deeply entrenched the idea of standalone billing systems has become. But as businesses increasingly adopt complex pricing models and usage-based billing, the limitations of these systems become more apparent.

At Continuous, we believe there’s a better way—one that embeds billing awareness directly into the tools businesses use every day, rather than introducing another layer of complexity. By rethinking how billing should work, we can simplify the process for businesses and create a more efficient, flexible future for recurring billing.

Ready to simplify your sales and finance processes?

Stop juggling fragmented systems and costly integrations. At Continuous, we unify your sales and finance workflows by building on the trusted CRM and ERP platforms you already use.

If you’re ready to move beyond the limitations of standalone billing systems, let’s talk. Explore how Continuous can streamline your quote-to-cash process and help your business scale with confidence. Find out more today at: Product | Continuous Technologies.

Should You Nix Time-Based Trials? If You Have a Usage-Based Product, the Answer is YES!!

Posted on June 17, 2023 by - Usage-Based Pricing

If Henry Ford had said to customers, “Here are the keys to your brand new car,go out and take a spin” would he have sold more cars? 

Of course he would.

And this is why so many companies offer free trials today.

Free trials can be a great way to provide prospective users with hands-on experience. Because, let’s face it, most buyers are risk averse. We want to know first-hand what we are getting for our money.

For companies, trials also help provide valuable feedback on target buyers, pricing, key use cases, what’s working and where users are falling down. And they hold the promise of landing new customers faster, without a lot of hand-holding and associated costs.

But what’s the best way to go about conducting a trial? After all-we know that SaaS trial conversion rates are incredibly low with 66% of Saas vendors reporting Free Trial conversion rates of 25% or less.

Well, for one, organizations need to make sure their service or product is ready for a trial. And by ready, I mean that it is something that customers can easily get, understand, use and see value from.

But another, perhaps equally important thing companies can do to drive more attach to their trials is to look at how they are setting these up.

Typically most companies look at time-based trials and usage-based trials. Time-based trials allow you to download and use a product or service for a fixed period of time. Usage-based trials don’t restrict your time, but they do put a limit around how much of the product you can use.

There are pros and cons to each approach, but if you are a company with a product or service that is being sold on a consumption-basis, you should seriously nix going with time-based trials and opt for usage-based trials instead.

Here are four reasons why.

  1. Time-based trials rarely work- How many times have you downloaded a time-based trial with the best of intentions and found you just can’t get to use it in the time allotted? This is particularly true if the trial requires any set up, 3rd party integrations or back-end approvals with other teams or users.Time-based trials are meant to create a sense of urgency. But typically that urgency is only felt by the company offering the trial. The person using it is usually on a completely different timeline.So, they have two choices–they can let the trial lapse-which many do. Or they can renew again and again for as long as it takes. But in both cases, your company is no closer to making a sale or getting the feedback they really need.
  2. Usage-based trials provide an easier transition for customers to move from trial to production for usage-based products- If you are planning on putting usage-based pricing in place for your products or services,then, usage-based trials will make it easier for your customers to understand and predict how much of your product or service they will likely need when they move to production. It will also get them more familiar with your metric and will help them put a business case together to support moving to the next phase.
  3. Usage-based trials can serve as an early indicator for the success of a new product or consumption-based  pricing model– Curious about what features are being used? Usage-based trials can give you real-time visibility into which capabilities or features are most widely adopted. These trials can also be fantastic for companies who are introducing consumption-based pricing into the market for the first time-especially if they are using a brand new metric.

For example, one organization wanted to launch a new data access governance product into the market. They thought going with column-based pricing would be the optimal approach. Unfortunately they had no data on how many columns their customers would need and if this type of pricing would fly. Introducing a usage-based trial gave them a window into usage and helped them understand where their customers were getting hung up and whether or not their new pricing model would fly. 

  1. Usage-based trials allow you to minimize costs and maximize customer experience– If you have a new product or service with metered pricing, you likely have to account for some costs on the backend. These infrastructure and hosting costs can quickly add up and will likely be difficult to predict with time-based trials. Going with usage-based trials helps curb costs and ensures organizations can predictably plan and support customers to ensure they have the best possible experience. And as PwC points out, experience is everything. In fact, if you focus on customer experience, you can expect to get a 16% price premium from your customers.Usage-based pricing makes this easier. It ensures companies have the right back-end infrastructure in place to support customers with the best possible experience throughout their trial. 

In the End

Trials are a great way to bring new customers into the fold and secure feedback on products, pricing and services. But as the old adage goes,just because you build it, doesn’t mean customers will come (or use your product). Making sure your trial is is easy to use and adopt is key to driving adoption and conversion. But so too is structuring your trial for success. And this often means-throwing time-based trials out the window in favor of usage-based trials–especially when it comes to usage-based pricing and products.

Looking for an easy way to run usage-based trials with your customers? Be sure to check out Continuous. Continuous is the only solution designed to help you launch and grow usage consumption pricing models on the Salesforce platform. Find out more today at: Product | Continuous Technologies.

Comparing usage-based and subscription pricing

Posted on February 9, 2023 by - Usage-Based Pricing

As more and more companies adopt a digital-first approach, pricing models are becoming increasingly important. Two popular pricing strategies are usage-based pricing and subscription pricing. In this blog post, we’ll compare the two models and highlight the pros and cons of each.

Usage-Based Pricing

Usage-based pricing, as the name suggests, charges customers based on their usage of a product or service. This model is particularly useful for businesses that offer services that have a variable usage pattern, such as data storage or cloud computing. Customers are charged according to the amount of data they store or the amount of processing power they use.

Pros:

  • Flexibility: Customers can scale their usage up or down as needed, making this model particularly useful for businesses that experience fluctuations in demand.
  • Fairness: Customers only pay for what they use, which can be seen as a fairer pricing model.
  • Incentivizes customers to use less: Since customers are charged based on usage, they may be incentivized to use less and optimize their usage, which can be a win-win for both the customer and the business.

Cons:

  • Lack of predictability: Because customers are charged based on usage, their bills may vary from month to month, making budgeting and forecasting difficult.
  • Complexity: The usage-based model can be complex, particularly if there are different usage tiers or pricing structures based on the type of usage. This complexity can be a turnoff for some customers.

Subscription Pricing

Subscription pricing charges customers a recurring fee in exchange for access to a product or service. This model is particularly useful for businesses that offer ongoing services. Such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies or media streaming services.

Pros:

  • Predictable revenue: Since customers are charged a recurring fee, revenue is predictable. This makes budgeting and forecasting easier.
  • Customer loyalty: Customers who subscribe to a product or service may feel a sense of loyalty to the brand. Which can result in long-term customer relationships and a stable revenue stream.
  • Simplicity: Subscription pricing is straightforward and easy to understand.

Cons:

  • Lack of flexibility: Subscription pricing can be inflexible, as customers are often locked into a fixed period of time, such as a year-long subscription. This can be a turnoff for customers who only need a product or service for a short period of time.
  • Potential for unused subscriptions: If a customer subscribes to a service but doesn’t use it, they may still be charged for the duration of their subscription, which can be seen as wasteful.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the choice between usage-based pricing and subscription pricing will depend on the specific needs of the business and its customers. Businesses that offer services with a variable usage pattern may find that usage-based pricing is more appropriate. While those that offer ongoing services may find that subscription pricing is a better fit. Carefully consider the pros and cons of each pricing model. Businesses can choose the option that works best for them and their customers.