Since the start of 2023, our team has been busy at work enhancing Place and adding new capabilities to help our customers’ Revenue and Finance teams align more closely. Everything we’ve released this year is built to empower those teams to eliminate revenue leakage and create more predictable cash flows. 

Here’s a quick list of some of the most significant updates so far this year. Keep reading to get more details about each update. 

New Capabilities:

• Automatic Renewal Opportunity Creation Based on Trigger Events
• Automatic Renewal Quote Creation and Workflow Options with Custom Field Mapping
• Generate and Send Invoices Directly from Place
• Configurable Customer Contact Details for Invoicing

New in Metrics & Analytics: 

• Five New Cohort Reports

New in Subscription Management

Automatic Renewal Opportunity Creation Based on Trigger Events

One key to ensuring SaaS businesses maximize revenue and predictable cash collection is to standardize customer subscription renewals so that they are completed consistently across the responsible teams. While the exact timing for creating a customer’s Renewal Opportunity in Salesforce is hotly-debated, our customers all agree that they want Opps created based on predetermined, easily configurable triggers – without expensive Salesforce development work.

Now, Place has introduced the ability to use simple settings to create a time-based trigger that automatically creates a Renewal Opportunity. For example, if your policy is to not create Renewal Opportunities (or count them in the revenue forecast) until 90 days from the renewal date, simply configure that setting in the Place Admin screen. 

So no matter what time-based policy your company chooses for creating Renewal Opportunities, you can configure the rule once and let Place automatically generate them every time.

Automatic Renewal Quote Creation and Workflow Options 

Revenue teams can get frustrated by the effort and exhaustive attention to detail it takes to review data and manually create accurate Quotes. As with any manual data entry process, these teams risk incorrectly entering relevant product details that can lead to revenue leakage. For instance, if an account manager building a Quote misses entering a set of Products and nobody else spots it, the company may miss-out on revenue that should have been captured. 

With Place, when a Renewal Opportunity is created, whether by a user or automatically, a Quote will be generated and synced to that Opportunity. It will then build Quote Line items from the current Opportunity Products that are eligible for renewal, even pulling-in mapped custom fields. If, instead of the Opportunity being created automatically, the user has clicked the “Create renewal” button, the screen that appears will include a workflow so they can review and manually modify the new Quote and Quote Line items.

Now Revenue teams managing renewals can be confident they’re helping the company capture every last bit of committed revenue.  

New in Revenue & Billing

Generate and Send Invoices Directly from Place

B2B SaaS Billing teams lose significant time and focus by switching between systems to review and manually enter data into customer invoices. Often, those teams are tasked with gathering contract details from wherever they are, whether that’s Salesforce or from messages with the sales rep who closed the deal. Once they’ve tracked them down, they then have to enter them into a completely separate system from where the invoice is sent. 

As customer counts increase, this can become a major resource drain and put their company at risk of billing errors and delayed cash collections. 

Today, Place is excited to offer Billing teams the ability to generate and send invoice PDFs directly to their customer billing contacts from inside Salesforce. Now customers of Place are able to complete their entire invoice creation, approval, and sending workflow from a single system so they can collect cash on a predictable schedule and have time to support the business in more ways.

Configurable Customer Contact Details for Invoicing

Sending invoices with incorrect information like the wrong address or contact name is what leads to 61% of invoices sent in the US becoming past-due every year. This can create a significant shortfall in a SaaS company’s expected cash collection schedule. 

Salesforce is where most SaaS companies commit to keeping customer contact details updated, but often that information gets disconnected from systems external to Salesforce with poor, broken, or non-existent integrations. 

With Place, Billing teams can now set Salesforce Contact records as the source of truth. Those contact records can then be used for Place Invoices, for creating customer records in the accounting system, and/or in another external billing system. They can also set separate billing contacts per Contract record meaning large customers who have multiple agreements in multiple parts of their organization can be sent separate invoices with contact details synced accurately.

This gives our customers confidence that they will no longer have to go searching for the right billing contact details so they can send accurate invoices that will be more likely to be paid on-time by their customers. 

New in Metrics & Analytics

Customer Cohort Reporting

Gathering meaningful insights from data when it hasn’t been well-segmented can be difficult at best, and counterproductive at worst. For example, looking at a report showing your customer lifetime value (LTV) across every customer obscures the fact that those who have been customers for over a year will inherently have a larger LTV than those who have only recently subscribed.

Fortunately, some very intelligent people many years ago developed the concept of cohort-based customer reporting, or reporting based on groups of customers that have been segmented by dimensions like “contract start date” or “contract value.”

Earlier this year Place released our first set of cohort-based reports, enabling our customers to analyze and track their customers and revenue, segmented by interesting dimensions. This allows Metrics & Analytics users to look at their customer bases in interesting ways, such as for understanding net retention by cohort, grouped by contract start date. 

Until the Next Release…

For more information about these or any other updates, be sure to contact your Customer Success Manager!

We also publish monthly product update highlights in the Product Corner section of our newsletter, so sign up for that here to get more updates in the future.