Guide | Boost conversions and upscale your businesses

In subscription-based B2B businesses, success hinges on the development of long-term relationships. Customer conversions can occur at any point in the customer lifecycle, from the initial sale to upgrades and renewals. As a result, boosting conversions and expanding revenue need to take the whole customer experience into account.

Successful customer relationship management requires businesses to ensure that their teams are well-coordinated and strategically aligned, with each team working together to understand customer needs. Clear and effective systems should also be in place to enable proactive engagement strategies that keep the business at the forefront of the customer's mind, particularly after incomplete order journeys and following the initial purchase.

To further encourage purchasing, upgrades, and renewals, businesses need to offer frequent incentives that highlight the value of their products or services. Finally, provide great customer experiences that differentiate the business from competitors and turn customers into advocates for long-term success.

Strategically aligned, well-connected sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams are essential to the ongoing development of customer relationships in subscription businesses. In order for these teams to be aligned and to work in a coordinated manner, you need two things, the right mindset, and the suitable systems.

The right mindset for building long-term and healthy relationships is to put customers at the center of your business. The sales teams have deep insights into customer pain points, and the customer success teams can access customer feedback. The information combined enables better product development and ongoing marketing activities to increase customer satisfaction and seek out opportunities for expanding revenue.

Subscription businesses are integrations of multiple overlapping processes running in recurring intervals. A seamlessly choreographed system can help businesses understand customers' behaviors despite the complexity that comes with the subscription model and streamline opportunity management for prospects and customers.

The best way to look after existing customers consistently, retain strong communications, and understand their behaviors is through a fit-for-subscriptions customer portal. Use customer portals to enable your business to understand your customer's needs, and create pathways to facilitate customer retention.

A customer portal for subscriptions should not only have the capabilities to enable customer autonomy but also create pathways to facilitate retention, as well as further conversions. The portal should also have the ability to nurture existing customers by communicating value propositions and guiding them to the next conversion path by notifying them about campaigns and promotions that incentivize self-service upgrades and additional purchases.

Many organizations don't access the opportunities available through strategic partnerships for their subscription business because of the underlying complexities involved in sustaining them.

An effective partner strategy can help businesses differentiate from the competition and scale faster with less cost. By leveraging partners' knowledge and expertise, your business will be able to provide customers additional value on top of your product offerings. An effective partner strategy can also increase the lifetime value of your customers by effectively managing processes that engage and solve diverse problems for prospects and customers. By building an alliance network with reputable businesses that complement your product or service and address customer needs, you can instill trust and drive conversions in multiple spaces and to an expanded market.

Streamline your selling process

A guided selling solution for subscriptions must not only enable users to easily navigate through products but also provide a clear and seamless path to purchase for orders of all levels of complexity. With keylight’s in-built CPQ, Order Journeys, and its guided selling capabilities, businesses are able to build and orchestrate any sales process in clear steps and offer an effortless experience for all users— your sales reps, partners, and end customers.

The effectiveness of the subscription product offering and its pricing both play a crucial role in determining customer satisfaction and their likelihood to convert. A cutting-edge subscription system should empower businesses to experiment with pricing and gain a deeper understanding of the product-pricing fit for customer segments.

Subscription price changes are often cumbersome to carry out due to the complexity and effort to coordinate sales teams, communication strategies, contracts with existing customers, and diverse product-price-term combinations. However, to stay competitive and convert more customers, reviewing subscription prices at least once per year is needed.

Implement price effects and assess results

The subscription business model becomes more complex as businesses grow, adding new customers, products, services, and partners. It is imperative for businesses to have strong account management and pricing capabilities that allow implementation and display of price changes in a way that fits their communication. With a rule-based approach to price management, enabling sales, customer success, and partners to sell at a new price is instant, organized, and moderated.

For the end customer, the complexity behind the scenes should not be on show. Their experience should be one of total ease. It should be easy to find what they need, gain answers to questions, provide them with a sense of empowerment, and make the process enjoyable. For all of that, you need a great UX/UI. A great UX/UI increases customer stickiness by enabling a seamless flow of actions, successfully integrating your business offering into the customer's everyday life, and encouraging customers to adopt new products or services by providing them with a positive experience with the current offerings.

Read on to discover the five best ways to nurture opportunities, expand revenue and upscale your subscription business