The majority of B2B companies are harboring a flaw that undercuts revenue, customer goodwill, and the insights needed for effective decision making. The culprit? Billing. More specifically, fragmented billing infrastructure that keeps critical data from the teams who need it most.

This won’t change until a single system can handle billing for every kind of revenue model. And now, with Everything Billing from Nue, that system exists.

At the start of the decade, before the pandemic, it was common to have a billing engine that could only support one sales motion (typically subscription) — because it was common to only have one sales motion, period. 

"Before the pandemic, it was common to only have one billing engine (and one sales motion, period)."

But that was before the pandemic increased the demand for hybrid sales motions, drove down the desire for in-person direct sales, and increased interest in self-service purchasing and product-led growth motions. Recent polls from McKinsey find that nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of revenue from higher-growth companies comes from flexible value-based billing, compared to only 44 percent for lower-growth companies. 

Many of the biggest firms to emerge stronger from the pandemic have stood out for complex go-to-market motions. While it extends beyond B2B, Zoom is a prime example, as it offers a range of sales motions (including direct sales, demo-driven product-led sales, sales through partners, and more), and within some of those motions, an array of tiering pricing options.

Yet prominent success stories belie an unfortunate truth: Many B2B companies aren’t in a position to succeed with hybrid channel strategies, largely because their aging billing engines can’t handle complexity. This legacy technology can often only handle one kind of billing — and certainly not all the sales motions, pricing models, and billing schedules that companies need to succeed now. 

"Many B2B companies aren’t in a position to succeed with hybrid channel strategies, largely because their aging billing engines can’t handle complexity." 

The result is fragmented point solutions that each handle one type of billing, but don’t work well together. They only work together at all because of manual calibrations. And in turn, this makes it hard to implement adjustments — which means you lose the agility to adapt your pricing to changing conditions. To make matters worse, these systems likely have limited communication with CPQ systems, which means finance may be unable to invoice what the sales team has quoted customers.

As a veteran of Salesforce CPQ and Zuora, I have been deeply aware of the many limitations of traditional quote-to-revenue tools, which have only made revenue realization more murky and cumbersome for finance teams. 

There is a clear need for more agile pricing and billing that help companies stay competitive and innovate, and more agile tech stacks that liberate finance from manual data entry, calculations, and corrections. And so we set to work building a unified billing engine that could handle any kind of billing, eliminate gaps with CPQ, and aggregate data to provide useful analytics.

Everything Billing is the first enterprise-grade billing engine to unite all kinds of revenue models, and truly bring CPQ and Billing under one platform — transforming and accelerating finance operations. No matter what your go-to-market motion looks like, or might look like in the future, you can launch and monetize it with Everything Billing. 

"Everything Billing is the first enterprise-grade billing engine to unite all kinds of billing."

Our product delivers four key functions that overcome the challenges of fragmented billing: 

1. Billing for any kind of revenue model and product, individually or simultaneously — across subscriptions, usage-based pricing (including traditionally challenging approaches like tiered pricing structures and credit-based consumption), one-time (or milestone-based) services, and physical goods. 
2. The capacity to seamlessly handle mid-term upsells and cross-sells with effortless co-terming, leaning into the crucial role of land-and-expand in modern enterprise.
3. Billing across any kind of sales motion (direct, self-service, and partner motions).
4. Immediate and 100% accurate communication between CPQ and billing to ensure that you can immediately bill for any quote.

Because Nue’s platform spans the full quote-to-revenue process, Everything Billing is intrinsically linked to Nue’s CPQ functionality, and Nue’s intuitive interface. This enables crystal-clear communication between sales and finance, and serves to unify, centralize, and analyze customer data.

(Nue’s Lifecycle Manager, which is included with Everything Billing, showcases a customer’s account hierarchy and revenue streams.)

Nue also provides the tools needed to navigate the challenges of usage-based pricing — ensuring that sales reps know when to reach out for upsells, identify declines in usage early enough to prevent churn, and bring usage together with direct sales for a full picture of the customer lifecycle. If customers are offered both usage-based pricing and subscription pricing through a bundle, RevOps teams can review both through the Nue platform.

(The Nue platform’s Bundle Suite page represents a convergence of product-led and sales-led growth.)

• As the primary steward of the billing process, finance naturally sees immediate benefits from Everything Billing — including 100% reliable, real-time invoice generation and revenue recognition with complete ASC 606 compliance. As a result, finance saves time and eliminates potential errors in the billing process. 

• RevOps teams often find their ability to supervise and modify the entire go-to-market motion lacking. With Everything Billing, RevOps can consolidate all kinds of billing (and quoting) in a single tool, which offers unprecedented insight into and control over the GTM motion. It also makes it possible to identify and remove all possible sources of revenue leakage.

"RevOps can consolidate all kinds of billing (and quoting) in a single tool, which offers unprecedented insight into and control over the GTM motion."

• Engineering and product teams gain insights from every sales motion — not just the product-led growth motions they directly supervise. This allows for issues to be pinpointed more quickly, and for product improvements to be more accurately prioritized based on customer needs. 

• Sales reps can immediately and independently generate invoice previews once they create a quote, an emerging best practice that increases the appearance of professionalism and improves customer trust.  Sales also gains full confidence that what it quotes will match what is billed.

If you would like to learn more about the specific features of Everything Billing, schedule a demo with the Nue team. And If you’d like to learn more about the challenges that Nue addresses when it comes to fragmented billing, and the power that unified and agile billing can bring to long-suffering finance departments, review our Billing Demystified series.