Subskribe helps SaaS companies keep up with modern demands by delivering a unified system for configure, price, quote (CPQ), billing, and revenue recognition. Now that it’s added comprehensive business intelligence (BI) and real-time data-exploration capabilities to its platform using Looker Embedded, Subskribe can also help SaaS providers improve decision making and drive growth with on-demand insights. By adopting Looker, Subskribe is also helping to drive its own growth. Not only has it accelerated customer onboarding by weeks and empowered business people to create customer-facing dashboards and reports, but its engineers can now quickly develop revenue-generating services such as embedded self-service BI tools for customers.
SaaS for SaaS providers
Virtually all software today is delivered as a service. But CPQ, billing, and revenue systems that support SaaS providers’ operations have traditionally been siloed, creating costly and time-consuming integration and reconciliation challenges as well as limited agility in pricing and selling. To address these challenges, Subskribe developed an adaptive quote-to-revenue system natively designed to support dynamic SaaS deals, packaging these systems in a single unified offering that delivers faster time-to-market, increased top-line growth, and operational savings to customers.
Improving the agility and value of our SaaS business platform
As Subskribe experienced rapid growth, it soon found that its manual SQL-based reporting processes were hindering its efficiency and innovation potential. Every new customer required weeks of engineering effort to develop custom reports for them, and engineers had to manually manage ongoing reporting changes. Subskribe needed a BI solution that made it easier to create custom reports with composable analytics, so its employees could easily create their own data experiences. And by adding embedded analytics to the Subskribe platform, including dashboards and self-service features, the company could make its platform more sticky by solving advanced BI challenges for their customers.
After evaluating the feasibility of authoring its own custom BI solution and evaluating various third-party tools, Subskribe chose to embed Looker into its platform. Not only does Looker best meet Subskribe’s product and compliance requirements, but it also provides the maturity and long-term reliability required for embedding it in the Subskribe platform.
Looker delivers advanced, enterprise BI capabilities for multi-tenancy, security, and embedded analytics — and it’s easy to use. Despite our system complexity, we got Looker up and running in about one month, with just two people.
Delivering customer-specific insights from one multi-tenant platform
Subskribe connected Looker to its existing database without building any data pipelines, and integrated Looker with the company’s test and production environments, saving time for engineers. Now when product changes are made, they can be pushed to Looker using one consistent set of processes and pipelines. As a result, global product iteration is faster, collaborative, and controlled. Additionally, Subskribe implemented controls that ensure secure insights by using security technologies in Google Cloud and built-in features in Looker such as user attributes.
We designed our semantic model so that, in just a matter of hours, anyone can use Looker to build their own dashboards and reports with the data they’re authorized to see.
Keeping resources focused on what they do best
Looker facilitates composable analytics, so Subskribe’s customer-success and product-management teams quickly learned how to develop and update accurate and sophisticated reports without having to write any code. The company held a quick Looker training session and within a few days, Subskribe’s product managers built multiple dashboards that are now used as templates, and which Looker automatically populates for customers using their data. Additionally, product managers and analysts are now using fact and dimension tables to easily create other types of custom reports that provide aggregated insights into key figures such as the momentum of accounts receivable, monthly sales bookings, and canceled subscriptions.
With Looker, we now onboard customers weeks faster because it takes just a few hours to create their custom BI. We provide better customer experiences including real-time insights from dashboards. We respond faster to new BI requests. And we achieve all of this with fewer resources.
Greater insights improve experiences, control, and outcomes
Subskribe’s first use case — which took just six weeks to complete — vastly improved user experience. From dashboards, customers can now instantly see key metrics about their entire revenue-generating process such as quoting and billing, waterfall forecasts, and revenue recognition that includes annual and deferred insights. They can also drill down and explore the data behind their metrics to answer new questions.
By offloading routine BI tasks for engineers with Looker, Subskribe has more bandwidth and opportunities to innovate. Teams are building an embedded analytics solution with Looker that will enable customers to create their own dashboards and reports. Expanded personalization options will drive product adoption and customer success by serving up trusted analytics that are tailored for user roles such as executives, finance staff, and client success teams. Subskribe also plans on using Looker to help customers streamline their business operations by providing alerts and helping to deliver data-informed recommendations such as when it’s time to close a deal and when it’s time to collect on payment due.
Subskribe says the flexibility gained with Looker is game changing. Not only can it pivot faster to meet customers’ immediate needs but it’s also easier for Subskribe to continually evolve its platform to stay ahead of industry demands and achieve its long-term product vision.
All our customers have different requirements and processes, and they ask us to tailor their insights this way or that. With Looker, we have the agility to quickly build what they want.
To create your own custom applications with unified metrics, learn more about Looker Embedded. To learn more about Subskribe, visit www.subskribe.com.