Embrace new business models with confidence
The everything-as-a-service (XaaS) economy is booming, serving up major growth opportunity for businesses across industries. The most successful finance leaders have mastered the art of developing new revenue streams, turning products into services and services into products, and/or packaging either or both up in creative ways.
Developing a new revenue angle within your business may be the easy part. But do you have the data to validate your ideas and infrastructure to execute on them? Ongoing success will be determined by strategic planning and examination of your new markets, customers, and the systems that support them, so you can bring renewed value to your business.
Here are a few considerations to help you embrace new business models with confidence.
Make data-based decisions
To craft the ideal business model strategy, today’s finance leaders must focus on rich, accurate customer success data: time-to-value, product adoption rates, project delivery rates, usage rates, and service call patterns can all help predict future rates of interest, renewal, churn, and expansion. It’s no longer just data, it becomes actionable insight from which you can calculate your risks, margins, and returns, and ultimately make the smartest decisions. The good thing is that you can augment your efforts with artificial intelligence (AI) to help you process and gather this game-changing data with speed and ease.
Support multiple revenue streams
It’s imperative you have flexible, agile financial systems that actually help you act fast and grow, not restrict you. Legacy ERP systems—and even many SaaS solutions—are still built solely for physical products and optimized for discrete manufacturing enterprises with linear business processes. If your plan is to add a new service-based offering or create a services-product blend, make sure you have a system that can support multiple revenue streams for both general accounting and billing purposes. So whether you deal in complex, subscription-based contracts, fixed-fee services, or a simple widget, all sources of revenue can be accommodated, processed efficiently, and billed harmoniously.
Create a master customer record
Make sure your infrastructure drives customers satisfaction from the first interaction—which is why a master customer record is critical to success. Imagine everyone involved in the customer journey inputting every transaction, conversation, milestone, delivery date, payment date, and support questions — all attached to one record. Not only does this empower customer-facing staff to provide immediate, high-quality support and keep customers delighted, but it also grants financial leaders a wealth of data with which to develop strategic insight into pricing, contract amendments, and service delivery tracking.
Finance leaders can learn more
You can learn more about managing finance in the XaaS economy in this definitive guide for CFOs and finance leaders.
