For businesses of every size, across both B2B and B2C markets, the recurring billing model – where customers agree to fixed or variable automated payments at regular intervals in exchange for products or services – delivers substantial benefits to buyers and sellers alike.
For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), which make up 98% of companies worldwide, the economic impact is significant. By accepting recurring payments, your organization can realize real benefits: a more predictable revenue stream, improved efficiency, and the tools to provide an exceptional customer experience that drives long-term loyalty, and makes better use of customer data.
Recurring Billing Delivers Benefits for SMBs
72% of SMBs have increased their online presence.
Companies of all sizes are leveraging technology to gain a competitive advantage. Making smart investments in strategic areas is critical.
For SMBs using Salesforce’s robust small business solutions, Chargent makes recurring billing in Salesforce simple. Here, we’ll take a look at some of the benefits of recurring payments, and how they can give you an edge.
Establish Predictable Revenue
Failed payments make it difficult to accurately forecast revenue – and time spent chasing down late or missed payments adds up quickly. Recurring payments bring predictability and help businesses establish a more consistent cash flow.
That said, recurring and subscription payments can be complex. The perks that your customers and sales reps love – like free trials, introductory pricing, upgrades, the ability to pause – can create headaches for your finance team. As you grow, you’ll need to scale billing systems to accommodate growth.
Uncover New Efficiencies With Automation
Automation is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes to collect subscription, installment, or recurring payments, that eliminates the inefficiencies of manually processing these payments and removes the potential for mistakes due to human error.
It’s inevitable that some recurring payments will fail. With the right subscription billing solution, you can leverage automation to retry failed payments, solving many payment issues before your finance team ever needs to get involved.
Deliver a World-Class Customer Experience
Whether they’re setting up a subscription for coffee delivery, or automating their monthly utility bill payment, consumers expect a seamless experience across the board – and they don’t distinguish between your SMB and the global giants. They want it to be easy, and convenient and, by the way, they also want options like payment plans, their choice of payment methods, and the ability to set their own payment schedule.
The #1 rule of subscription payments is billing your customers at regular intervals. Add in the complexity of offering consumer-friendly payment options, and it can be a heavy lift for SMBs. Here’s where Chargent comes in.
Chargent allows you to tailor your process to meet the needs of your business and your customers. Recurring payments can reduce barriers for your customers – but you have to anticipate and meet their (high) expectations.
Achieve a 360-View of Your Customers
Customers appreciate the convenience of subscriptions and recurring payments. Recurring payments offer convenience and cost savings for everything from coffee deliveries to utility payments. The ability to ‘set it and forget it’ means they never find themselves uncaffeinated, incur fees from late payments, or worse, run the risk of losing an essential service because they forgot to pay the bill.
And if you make things easy enough for them, they’ll show you loyalty in return – and that loyalty is powerful. It’s significantly more expensive to attract a new customer than to retain an existing customer.
Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
Bolstering loyalty can have a real impact on your bottom line. Bain & Company research found that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. Integrating your customer and payment data, like with Salesforce and Chargent, breaks down silos, and creates a single, actionable source of truth for your valuable customer data, so you can better anticipate their needs. After all, the best indicator of what your customers will want tomorrow is what they want today.
Want to learn more about how subscription and recurring billing with Chargent and Salesforce can deliver for your SMB? Let’s start a conversation.
