Tracking upsell/downsell/renewal/churn

[kellier]

Hi everyone, 

I'm a product manager at a SaaS company, but we're a small team and so part of my role is in helping manage HS as an internal product, basically. I have a lot of background with HS generally, but I'm not well-versed in revenue operations and could use some guidance. 

Background: 

We use an outside partner to manage our invoices. We have to communicate very clearly to them changes to invoice amounts and relevant dates. We have both monthly and annual contract types, where some annual customers are paying monthly.

Our goal is to have a very clear view in HS into what a current invoice amount for any given customer should be, which takes into account any revenue-impacting event like upsell, downsell, renewal, or churn.

I know HS has native RR fields you can enable, but unless I'm misunderstanding, I don't think that will give us what we need in terms of current invoice totals per customer.

I have been debating a couple of ideas and trying to figure out what makes the most sense:

• Option 1: A (post-initial sale) revenue change event pipeline with stages related to each event that impacts invoice amounts/revenue: upsell, downsell, churn, renewal, contract conversion (ie monthly > annual or annual > monthly). 
  • What seems like a limitation here is that our bookkeeping partner would like to know the "old" values in addition to the "new" values (so previous contract value, new contract value, old unit count, new unit count, etc.) which I'm unsure how to do because I don't see how to reference the property values from the most recently closed deal prior to the current one in a workflow, for example.

• Option 2: Creating a custom object for Contracts, where associations can be made between contracts and deals and companies where custom properties or timeline events (not sure which yet, or maybe a combo of both) could store the "moment in time" information we need to be able to reference and pass along to our third-party partner. 
  • My concern here is that this feels duplicative of so much of the information that already lives with the deal and I don't want to put us in a spot where data gets difficult to maintain and find. 

Any advice or best practices/use cases that are out there that can help? I have read through many posts here and on the internet more broadly, but our use case seems sort of specific (and maybe the answer is that we shouldn't be trying to do this all within HubSpot), which I'm also open to hearing).

FWIW, we use PandaDoc with HS integration as our contract creation/signing platform.

Cheers!

Kellie

[NMalchy]

Hello,

I read https://knowledge.hubspot.com/deals/track-recurring-revenue-with-revenue-analytics?KBOpenTab

The values are available in our system.

I need help understanding how to set up the renewal pipeline to support the article above.

We have a renwal event every year, usually. 

We try to communicate with all our clients quarterly, but I am not sure about the transition from year to year.

Do we create a renewal deal every year for every client? Do we use the same renewal deal?

What kind of setup supports the article above?

I would appreciate help on that.

[kirstenmhb]

Can't offer any advice right now but commenting to follow this topic as it also affects my company! 

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Hi @kellier, 

Thank you for the provided information! 

I wanted to tag in a couple of subject matter experts to see if they can share any best practices / advice: 

Hi @HubDoPete, @Wa-re, @ChristinaKay, do you have any tips for @kellier? Thank you!

Cheers
Mia, Community Team