As a SaaS provider, it is critical to have a straightforward process for managing the customer lifecycle: from introductions, transactions, and even cancellations. Order Management is a complex process and is often left to the IT department to design. However, this approach can leave important internal stakeholders out of the design process. Additionally, the efficiency of this system and the coordination between your customer-facing teams is a critical piece to ensuring a positive customer experience.
Before co-founding Cambium, Scott Hemmeter founded Geopointe, a leading Independent Software Vendor (ISV) on the Salesforce AppExchange. Salesforce provides its ISV partners with the License Management Application (LMA) tool. The LMA gives ISVs granular control over a customer’s application usage, allowing them to manage each app installation’s status, expiration date, and user count. However, the LMA is not well integrated into Salesforce CRM, creating challenges for maintaining accurate records and handling customer requests efficiently.
Improving on the LMA
Scott extended the standard Salesforce CRM and improved on the LMA:
| Opportunities | The standard Opportunity object was extended to allow customers to purchase licenses of different durations and for specific editions of the product. The sales team created Opportunities for new sales, add-ons, and renewals. Light layers of automation quickly generated Quotes and Orders from Opportunities. |
| Orders | Salesforce’s standard Orders object was inflexible and didn’t integrate with the LMA, so Geopointe created its own. This customization enabled flexible pricing, e-signatures, and online payments. |
| License Fulfillment | License Fulfillment custom logic maintained the license information when an order was completed. The system automation automatically maintained these records, instantly carrying through license changes to the LMA. |
| Payments | A custom Payment object not only served as a record of payments but also triggered automation related to license fulfillment and revenue recognition. Stripe was integrated into the Payments object to handle credit cards and ensure PCI compliance. |
| Invoices | A custom Invoice object made it possible to automate many routine Finance functions related to customer communication and reporting. |
| Renewal Maintenance | A scheduled background job was created that ensured the upcoming renewal was maintained as changes to the subscription occurred throughout the year. This ensured that the internal teams could forecast upcoming renewals and that the renewal was ready to be handled when the customer’s renewal approached. |
eCommerce Self-Service
Geopointe built an e-commerce solution on top of this order management framework to support its nearly 2,000 customers. A customer could look up their account, select the products they wished to purchase, sign & approve the order, and complete payment, all within a few minutes. Any changes took effect immediately, and the system notified the Geopointe Customer Success team, allowing them to reach out and assist if needed.
The Outcome
Investing in building this functionality allowed Geopointe to scale to serve over 2000 customers and be an organization primarily focused on customer-facing activities such as customer success and onboarding. It allowed Geopointe to continue as a lean organization that did not require a large staff to support its internal operational activities.