Over the last number of years, there has been a growing number of subscription businesses popping up — both new companies launching with subscription business models, and established businesses and services who are looking to diversify their offerings.
According to the Subscronomics Report 2021, the subscription economy will surpass $228 billion in 2021. And it’s not just the pandemic that’s driving this, subscription businesses have been growing 200% annually since 2011.
For businesses, the attractiveness of recurring sales is hard to dismiss, and having a regular engagement with a customer also offers the chance to build more meaningful and valuable relationships.
However, to do this effectively, you need a CRM that’s connected to your payments stack so that you have a complete view of your customer, can optimize your payments workflow and deliver personalized experiences.
In this blog, we hear from VP of Product & Engineering at FinDock, Stefan van der Knaap, and CIO at Gen25, Tim Schuitemaker. Gen25 are the makers of GoMeddo, a native Salesforce application which allows users to manage subscription contracts and recurring invoices with ease.
Building FinDock with a subscription mechanism in mind
A: As you may know, FinDock started out in the nonprofit sector. Typically nonprofits have high volumes of recurring donations that they collect regularly, very similar to a typical subscription so we were always developing the product with subscription mechanisms in mind. Of course, now that we’re seeing a high volume of interest across other subscription business segments we are making improvements and adding new features, like Payment Links and Auto Collect to make subscription management in CRM much more seamless. Another way we’re increasing value for customers is by integrating with other applications, like Subscription 25.
FinDock & GoMeddo – a complete invoicing and payment solution
Q: Tim, can you tell me about the integration with FinDock and how this makes it easier for Salesforce customers to manage subscriptions?
A: GoMeddo lets you take care of your invoicing needs directly in Salesforce, whether we’re talking about one-time or recurring invoices. However, payments were never part of the product — customers used direct debit or bank transfers from their accountancy systems. Nowadays, customers demand easy payments and suppliers want to get paid as soon as possible for their goods and services.
The connection with FinDock allows us to integrate payments to invoices. It supports bank transfers and direct debits. Customers also like the fact that they can bring their Payment Service Provider to FinDock, allowing them to use what they already have. FinDock PayLinks are a great addition to our invoices.
Using the combination of FinDock and GoMeddo, users benefit from existing mandates and payment profiles that they already set up, meaning they can immediately perform direct debits based on existing GoMeddo contracts.
A complete invoicing and payment solution for any business or organization
Q: Tim, what other benefits can they get from the integration?
A: Customers need insight, and this is exactly what this partnership is offering. Together, FinDock and GoMeddo offer a complete invoicing and payment solution for any business or organization wanting to enable customers to pay single and recurring invoices, all from Salesforce.
A: To remain competitive, they need to truly understand their customers and deliver relevant, personalized, and engaging experiences. Companies and organizations also need to continuously test methods to make sure they are improving all the time, even those small improvements matter.
A: By integrating payment processing with your CRM you get the opportunity to treat every payment as a customer touchpoint. Now, companies have the insight and ability to easily offer customers their preferred payment method, implement personalized dunning in case the payment fails, and automate and test these journeys, to increase efficiencies.
It’s clear that the subscription payment model is becoming increasingly interesting for businesses. What’s important is that as more companies adopt subscription business models, they also find ways to differentiate themselves and deliver increased value to customers.
Check out how Zonnebloem, a nonprofit organization run entirely by volunteers, connected FinDock and GoMeddo to Salesforce in order to create seamless end-to-end journeys that helped volunteers provide safe and enjoyable experiences for their customers.