Three years ago, Nue launched Lifecycle Manager into the market with a simple but powerful premise: to put customer journeys at the heart of revenue lifecycles and help companies accelerate growth. In those years, we have seen a number of customers transform their go-to-market operations through our platform, with Lifecycle Manager being the centerpiece of that transformation. 

Today, we are launching a number of enhanced features in Lifecycle Manager. To mark these releases, we spoke with CTO and founder Tina Kung to get her thoughts on the origins and vision of Lifecycle Manager — including how it came to be, what it can do, and how it advances Nue as a Revenue Lifecycle Platform.

Tina Kung: It comes down to the perspective I gained from my prior roles.

At Salesforce Steelbrick [now Salesforce CPQ], I worked on CPQ technology. As was normal at the time, we focused solely on customer acquisition — quoting and initial sales. Billing didn’t figure into the equation. The customer had to find a billing or ERP vendor to complete their revenue journey.

But I also saw the other side when I worked at Zuora, which positioned itself as a subscription billing company. As was normal at the time, billing was seen as an order-to-cash process. Quoting didn’t quite fit into the equation.

And so I came to see that the industry needed a quote-to-revenue perspective, rather than attempting to awkwardly bridge two halves together. 

"The industry needed a quote-to-revenue perspective, rather than attempting to bridge two halves together." 

Naturally, everyone wants to automate their customers’ revenue journey. But that’s not feasible when you have two distinct systems that don't talk to each other. 

To me, the revenue lifecycle is more than quote-to-order, as people often say — it’s quote-to-revenue. It continues on from the order to provisioning and fulfillment. And from there, it moves onto billing, invoice generation, and collections. 

It’s also key to recognize the cyclical nature of the process. You should be able to easily do revenue recognition, create a change order, and then update your revenue recognition accordingly. The whole thing is like a snowball rolling down a hill — snowballing into revenue growth for the business.

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Tina Kung: CPQ tools and billing tools can offer stellar point solutions, but customers don’t want a solution that can do CPQ or billing in a vacuum. They want a system that can actually help them understand how to grow — and that requires unifying data across the revenue lifecycle.

"Customers want a system that can actually help them understand how to grow — and that requires unifying data across the revenue lifecycle." 

Customers need to answer questions like:

• What audience should I target?
• How is my business doing?
• Which product is generating the most revenue?
• Has my new product been successful?
• How are my customers doing in each region?
• How can I prevent churn?
• How can I predict revenue?

And these aren’t even advanced questions!

All of this is to say, people want more than just the ability to generate quotes and invoices. The bigger the company, the more questions they likely have. And before Nue, I don’t think there was a single system that could answer them all.

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Tina Kung: I’ve always compared the B2B buying and selling experience to Amazon as a benchmark.

Amazon is clear and easy-to-use. When you log on you can buy or sell, and review your order and subscription history, all in the same place. It’s a great example of customer-centric design. 

The traditional B2B go-to-market structure doesn’t support that. Sales, Finance, and RevOps teams have to focus on stitching together the quoting side and the billing side, rather than spending their time maximizing revenue.

In the initial slides we created in 2020 to introduce Nue, we made one message very clear: “Just focus on the customer. This is how you enable the customer journey, and in turn, the revenue journey.”

"Just focus on the customer. This is how you enable the customer journey, and in turn, the revenue journey."

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Tina Kung: RevOps urgently needs a unified data view — yet fragmentation between existing quoting and billing platforms remains severe. Even advanced integration platform-as-a-service systems don’t help. No matter what you do, they don’t integrate. 

The power of Lifecycle Manager, and Nue’s platform, comes from a unified data model that can deliver things like revenue intelligence and a unified view of the entire customer journey. 

When designing Nue, we had two priorities related to the unified data model: 

• The data Nue generates must be easily understood by existing admins and RevOps experts.

• It must be clear how Nue’s data integrates with systems upstream and downstream. 

The key to that is taking modern design principles and layering them over the traditional understanding of quote-to-revenue. 

"Nue's unified data model takes modern design principles and layers them over the traditional understanding of quote-to-revenue."

As an example, if you look at traditional CPQ, which is focused on physical goods or milestone services, the important dimensions are price and quantity. Basically, “Price x Quantity = Total Amount.” What we do is add the subscription as another dimension to that, whether it’s a month, a year, or some other term. “Price X Quantity X Subscription = Total Amount.” There’s no need to introduce a new object model that breaks everything.

So creating the “quote-to-revenue” object model only requires one extra dimension. This makes it easy for the customer to understand, since it’s just another factor in the math.

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Tina Kung: We created Lifecycle Manager because we want our users to focus on the customer and the opportunities they bring. As you use Lifecycle Manager on a regular basis, you gain actionable insights — tracking the revenue stream to find upsell opportunities and shape your future strategy. 

"Lifecycle Manager gives you actionable insights. You can track the revenue stream to find upsell opportunities and shape your future strategies."

This is significant because the operational design of other platforms doesn’t facilitate insight. If you’re familiar enough with Salesforce CPQ, for example, you may go through the motions of creating an opportunity or quote without ever asking “why do I want to do that?” or “what purpose do I want to achieve for this customer?”

With Nue, we addressed that by embedding an understanding of data into our users’ operational processes. You can see subscription charts and the revenue stream directly in Lifecycle Manager. You get a good understanding of how revenue has grown, how customers have been upsold or downsold over time, and what actions you can take. Those are actionable insights. Over time, we’re going to provide even more insights based on transaction history data.

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Tina Kung: In the next few years, I’d like to imagine that RLP will be as natural and indispensable to B2B workflows as CRM and ERP systems. Rather than having to worry about “do I do CPQ first, or billing first, and how do I connect them together?” you will just look to the RLP. 

Do note that RLP is not “revenue lifecycle management.” It’s not just a management system. It’s an end-to-end platform, where you can clearly see and optimize revenue, through transactions happening on the platform across channels. You can manage everything across channels but then also go beyond that to optimize revenue. You get clear visibility into customer journeys and data, and sell better.

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Nue’s Lifecycle Manager now features out-of-the-box analytics, actionable billing features, and other additions that give users unprecedented control over the revenue lifecycle. Learn more, or discover the challenges posed by fragmented CPQ and billing.