Enhancing Salesforce with Usage Pricing

Salesforce provides a robust set of tools for businesses, including flexible usage-based pricing models within its quote-to-cash process. However, businesses with specialized usage scenarios or large volumes of usage data may find Salesforce’s standard offerings insufficient. Fortunately, Salesforce’s extensive integration capabilities allow for customization to meet these needs.

Here are scenarios where extending your Salesforce implementation can be beneficial:

Processing High Volumes of Usage Data

When your business needs to process large volumes of usage records, potentially billions per month, integrating with a high-volume data mediation and charging extension is essential. This system aggregates records and calculates charges accurately for the billing period. Usage summaries are then sent back to Salesforce Billing for invoicing. Synchronizing account product information and specialized pricing, possibly through Salesforce CPQ, ensures accurate calculation of specialized rates and volume discounts. This approach streamlines the process and maintains accuracy at scale.

Complex Usage Pricing Scenarios

Many businesses face unique or complex usage pricing scenarios that might require extending the Salesforce suite. Examples include:

• Tiered and Volume-Based Pricing: Pricing models that depend on the amount of service used during the billing period.
• Location or Zone-Based Pricing: Charges vary depending on where the device/product was used.
• Enterprise Contracts: These may involve commitments to minimum usage amounts, overage charges, and ramp-up periods.

In such cases, Salesforce’s product catalog can be linked to entities in an integrated system that calculates and charges the proper amounts based on contract rules.

Consumption Drawdown Models

A consumption drawdown model allows customers to set a budgeted amount for multiple services, drawing down from a set monetary amount based on usage. It provides flexibility with top-ups for overages and warnings when accounts near their limits.

This approach offers significant business advantages, such as creating a single contract for a monthly spend allowance, allowing customers to try new products without new contracts.

Salesforce CPQ and Billing can integrate with third-party systems to support this pricing configuration. Orders are submitted, drawdown amounts are calculated, and usage summaries are sent back to Salesforce for invoicing.

Visibility and Upsell Opportunities

Integrating more flexible pricing into Salesforce enhances visibility and opens up upsell opportunities. Using a Salesforce extension from the AppExchange, you can visualize key data such as:

• Revenue Insights: Track near real-time revenue generation across your usage services, identifying which are performing better or worse than expected.
• Customer Usage: Identify customers exceeding or falling short of expected usage, providing upsell opportunities or enabling proactive customer care.
• Revenue Leak Detection: Detect and address usage record exceptions to prevent revenue loss due to unassigned or unpriced records.

This integration ensures you maximize revenue and customer satisfaction.

Augment Your Salesforce Instance with LogiSense Billing

Salesforce is an incredibly powerful tool for your business. To get the most out of your investment there are ways to extend its capabilities to meet your business needs where at first glance it may not seem to be a fit.  

Augmenting your Salesforce instance with LogiSense Billing can create a powerful combination of business tools that will ensure you have the most flexibility, and visibility, for your business.

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