How Enterprise 4.0 Is Turbocharging Monetization

There’s been a lot of talk in the last few years about the digital transformation we find ourselves in the midst of this explosion of technology that is enabling individuals and businesses to capture and use data in more powerful ways than ever before. We’re more connected than we’ve ever been, and we know more about ourselves than we ever have. And businesses understand their customers’ needs and behaviors better than they ever could have imagined.

But, from a business perspective, all this customer data on its own is just data. Just raw information. It only becomes truly powerful when companies learn to monetize it, providing more value for customers, streamlining operations and, most importantly, increasing the bottom line.

Fortunately, the technology systems Enterprise 4.0 has ushered in enable businesses to do just that. Savvy businesses are embracing models that open the door to revenue growth, operations efficiency and improved customer experiences by embedding monetization directly into growth strategies and powering every step of the quote-to-cash process.

Let’s take a look at a few of the ways this happens.

Provide Customers the Offerings They Want

Forrester reported recently that 84 percent of companies leverage usage-based pricing or plan to within the next two years and that 71 percent of companies find these models lower barriers to product and service adoption. We’ve written extensively about usage-based billing, but this is one of the most powerful ways enterprises can leverage customer data to promote growth.

As you track the way customers buy and use your products, you can start to develop value-heavy bundles, packages, and even brand-new offerings tailored to your customers’ unique use cases. Do most customers purchase certain products together or heavily use certain features of your SaaS offering? Are you seeing high churn rates among customers who buy a particular product? By adjusting, repackaging, and repricing products and services accordingly, you can encourage continued usage and growth, and even entice new customers by providing valuable offerings that allow them to get their foot in the door at an accessible price point.

While adjusting offerings and pricing has traditionally meant significant backend work for a business, the agile monetization systems Enterprise 4.0 has brought to the forefront provide flexible, easily configurable product catalogs that make it easy to launch new products and services quickly, making agile, usage-based pricing models a no-brainer.

Let Them Pay the Way They Want

“If you have a customer that has specific needs,” says Zendesk’s Jim Gearhart, “why would you want to turn away their business by saying ‘sorry, this is the only way we can sell’?”

When it comes to the way businesses sell to customers, one size does not fit all. Even under basic subscription models, you’re likely juggling varied recurrence periods, prorations, pricing tiers, or customers with multiple services (to name a few). When you add usage-based models into the mix, that only gets more complicated. And when growth begins to take off, it becomes more complicated still.

And yet, this kind of flexibility is the key to keeping customers satisfied and engendering rapid growth. While legacy billing systems may buckle under growth, today’s cutting-edge solutions will thrive. Here again, Enterprise 4.0 technologies are making this flexibility and customization possible for customer-centric, growth-oriented companies. From varying subscription terms to increased volume and complexity and even the capability to manage multiple countries’ taxes, currencies, languages, and payment methods, Enterprise 4.0 is empowering businesses to meet customers where they are, so they can buy the way they want to buy.

Make Your Back Office Run Like Clockwork

It’s not just the customer experience that Enterprise 4.0 is supercharging — it’s the internal processes as well, from catalog maintenance to near-real-time usage and rating to revenue reporting to regulatory compliance, Enterprise 4.0 technologies are automating much of the heavy lifting to ensure every phase of the billing process runs smoothly.

And as an added bonus, leaders now have the transparency they need to see what’s going on with their customers and their business at a glance, any time. Every system from the CRM to the billing platform is collecting and storing massive amounts of data, and traditionally, it’s been all too easy for that data to get stuck in its silos, difficult to see and even harder to communicate from one system to another. Yet today, businesses can enjoy seamless system connectivity through powerful integrations and crystal-clear transparency into every process at any given moment.

Enterprise 4.0 is changing the way businesses and their customers relate to one another, and the companies embracing the new technologies to streamline internal and external processes are setting themselves up for fantastic growth. To learn more about the impact of the digital revolution on monetization, we invite you to take a tour of our platform and call us to schedule your complimentary, personalized demo.