Yesterday, we invited some of the most interesting companies in Boston to the Ordway billing bash. The main purpose was to celebrate and connect parts of organizations that don’t seek the limelight and oftentimes are feeling the pain of data issues that lay between an organization’s CRM and their accounting software. We wanted to provide the community an opportunity to get together and celebrate successes that too often go unnoticed.

Our business is about eliminating manual workarounds in scaling businesses’ billing process from the initial sale of their service, through upsells and renewals, to revenue recognition. When I was an accountant, my training and education centered around basics of double-entry bookkeeping, credits and debits, T accounts, etc. It turns out I learned and implemented 500-year old methods to keep my clients’ books in order.

It’s 2019, and what was only recently chiefmartec.com’s Martech 5000 has swelled to a whopping 7040. As a result of this proliferation of technology, advertising tech (adtech) and marketing technologies (martech) continue to converge, into what is now being affectionately dubbed “Madtech.”

Sameer recently presented a pre-conference workshop at the Recurring Revenue Conference which brought together over 700 attendees from around the world to talk about scaling businesses. One of the important factors in building a sustainable B2B or B2C business is managing and reducing churn (when a customer partially or completely falls off their journey with you).

Sameer Gulati recently shared insights on scaling a startup outside of Silicon Valley with the audience at the Tom Tom festival in Charlottesville, Virginia. He took the stage with Entrepreneur's Editor in Chief, Jason Feifer, Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund Partner, David Hall, and STORD's Co-founder and CEO Sean Henry. 

Throughout the panel discussion, Jason as moderator was able to explore the differences between East Coast and West Coast Venture Capital (traction vs potential). The four panelists also discussed how to prove product market fit during the early phase of an organization's life cycle, and what it means to scale a business outside of a major tech hub like New York City, Silicon Valley, or Boston.

This series of blog posts is exploring companies in the emerging performance economy. Performance based pricing—also known as outcome-based pricing or results-based pricing—refers to a pricing model where the product is priced based on the customers’ expense reduction or revenue gained as a result of the adoption that product.

In the first two posts of this series, we covered performance-based pricing models that use revenue gained as the lever for shifts in pricing.

• [24/7].ai leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning, combined with human intelligence, to create a personalized, predictive, and effortless customer experience.
• Clerk.io helps companies drive sales by using artificial intelligence to power a personalized shopping experience, for every customer in their online store.

In performance economy spotlight #3, we’ll look at the other side of the performance-based pricing coin—using expense/cost reduction, rather than revenue gained, as a mechanism for setting customers’ price. What better industry to examine cost reduction than sourcing and procurement? LevaData stood out as an interesting company planting a flag deep into the performance economy.

As companies scale, especially in this SaaS-dominated economy, management teams will sooner or later be confronted with a build vs buy decision. All companies large or small, tend towards wanting to control everything they can. Compounding this natural inclination, if something is painful but “working,” they push making hard choices down the road. It's difficult to uncover what an organization is best suited to own fully, and what is worthy to hand off to external partners.

In the first of four posts exploring companies that are embracing the emerging performance economy we highlighted [24]7.ai. [24]7.ai is redefining the way companies interact with consumers by leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning—and a performance-based pricing model—to deliver customer acquisition products and customer engagement products.

Over a series of four posts, we’ll explore companies that are embracing the emerging performance economy. Aligned incentives and transparency of metrics are key to performance-based pricing that fuels this new trend. Technology and software are allowing business leaders to share both upside and downside risk with their partners, customers, and vendors.

SaaStr Annual 2019 was a little Burning Man, a little United Nations, and a lot of great ideas and sessions to help scale your business. Our team enjoyed networking, learning, and evangelizing how billing and revenue recognition can become a source of joy for businesses (not a hodgepodge of manual processes and disparate systems).