Zuora ‘17 and Why it Matters to Your Team

What do Fortune 500 companies such as IBM and GE have in common with the new disruptors like Uber and Spotify? They are all turning their customers into subscribers. It’s no longer possible to be successful with a one-size-fits all product set up for one-time sale. To be successful in the Subscription Economy, you have to continually evolve your product to meet customer needs, and build a relationship to reap recurring revenue in the long run.

Zuora’s market leading product is the foundation for recurring revenue businesses all over the world. Built on an enterprise grade platform and designed by a world class product and engineering team, our end-to-end solution helps you manage everything from pricing, subscriber lifecycle, quoting and order management, billing/collections, revenue management, and analytics.

In an exciting keynote at Subscribed ‘16, Zuora’s Product team unveiled the next major milestone in our journey – Zuora ‘17 – and gave a glimpse into our roadmap for the year ahead.

Zuora ‘17 is the first solution that:

  • Enables companies to monetize anything across diverse products and services
  • Built to address the new demands which hit all the different teams in your company
  • And lets you scale your operations globally, running multiple divisions and countries as separate entities.

Whether you’re in product, sales and marketing, finance, or IT, we are building Zuora ‘17 to make you a winner! Here’s how:

PRODUCT TEAMS: Build and deliver products for ongoing value

Gone are the days of big-bang releases when you optimized your supply chain and squeezed margin out of everything you could get your hands on. What matters today is customer experience, going to market quickly, and driving a product roadmap based on what your customers value. The question is, do you know what matters to them?

Zuora’17 helps you identify exactly what matters to your customers and how much.
You’ll have customer insights that combine demographic data, behavioral and usage data, and financial/subscription data – all in real time. This includes customer financials such as ARR, support requests (areas to improve on) , subscription changes (upgrades and downgrades), billing data (on time or late payments) and other key ‘moments’. By understanding which areas of the product drive the most value and outcomes for your different customers, you can make more informed and impactful decisions.

SALES & MARKETING TEAMS: Price and bill any way you like

No matter what your title is – Chief Revenue Officer or Chief Marketing Officer or VP of Sales – your objective is to grow your businesses and maximize revenue. To achieve this, you might want to launch a new product, expand internationally, pursue an upsell strategy, drive adoption with a freemium strategy, etc. Flexible pricing has been core to Zuora since day 1 and we have over 40 charge models for our customers to choose from when pricing their offerings.

Now we are going way, way ahead! Zuora ‘17 will be the first to let businesses add new pricing models on the fly, using an Excel-like formula language. Our new, breakthrough “Charge Model Builder” will enable you to truly bill for anything! And yes, you can have as many pricing models as required to meet your customers’ needs. By being able to price any way you like for any revenue stream, you’ll be able to easily embrace new monetization models and grow revenue.

FINANCE TEAMS: Business metrics at your fingertips

Subscription CFOs are optimizing their business around an entirely new set of forward-looking metrics that enhance traditional financial reporting and work with key performance indicators like ARR growth, CLTV, and net dollar retention. But ERP and traditional accounting systems don’t offer them these business insights.

Zuora ‘17 gives CFO’s the best of both worlds – your traditional GAAP metrics like billing and revenue, with the insight into your new operational metrics. We’ll help you understand your growth and assess its efficiency with your new revenue drivers – new subscriptions, upsells, downsells, and churn.

And we have more in the works for CFOs! After years of handling your operations, we’ve begun to see a new set of challenges – the issue of a multi-entity business. Be it large, global multi-divisional enterprises who often structure business units or geographical locations as separate legal entities or mid-market companies who make a business acquisition that they want to run separately or even CFOs of high-growth start-ups, this is becoming common.

Zuora ‘17 will offer multi-entity management – Companies can have a single Zuora tenant for operational efficiencies, but will still be able to operate each entity separately (separate users, home currencies, accounting period closes, etc), consolidate reporting across entities in a single currency, and share products and customer records across different entities.

IT TEAMS: Stay agile in every way

Subscriber-centric companies need agility to keep up with rapidly changing business needs. But traditional architectures based on ERP are rigid and require you to change too many things in dozens of systems to keep up with every business change.

Zuora’s RBM Platform enables CIOs to unify all their quote-to-cash systems with a single subscriber-centric solution. And Zuora ‘17 will add more power to the RBM platform giving CIOs what they want the most – a highly scalable platform that grows with their needs, the ability to integrate with their existing systems and a way to extend and customize solutions quickly.

Our forthcoming Data Connect Framework helps you connect any data to any system and syncs rich subscriber data to all systems that touch the subscriber. What’s more, you’ll be able to build connectors without any expensive middleware and sync Zuora data to any CRM in the front office, to data warehouses, or back office ERP systems.

AND…

  • We have the latest Zuora for Salesforce release with major product packaging enhancements for the front office
  • A stunning user experience based on a fully responsive design which looks great on any device
  • New “notifications on any event” capability making it easy for Zuora and any external systems to communicate with one another
  • RBM Connect, a thriving marketplace where you can find pre-built apps (30+) and have the ability to build and host your own, and so much more.

Zuora’s award-winning Security team makes sure your data is safe and secure. We already meet all critical compliance standards like PCI Level 1, SSAE 16 and SOC 2, have HIPAA certifications and continue to enhance our security capabilities with features such as 2-factor authentication and full audit trail capabilities.

With so many advancements in the works for our products, we’re super excited for what lies ahead! Please join the Zuora community for regular updates and be the first to hear about our product releases.

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