How CircleLoop Aligned their Sales and Operations Seamlessly To Automate Revenue Operations, with Chargebee

The Problem

CircleLoop was founded in 2017 as a pure-play subscription business. The company was launched to the market with a principle — anything that distracted them from their building their core product was to be purchased if a solution existed in the market, that did the job better.

This principle translated into a need to integrate with a powerful billing and subscription tool that enabled them to focus on building and growing CircleLoop without distractions.

Dylan Walsh is the Operations Manager at CircleLoop. Part of his responsibilities includes identifying revenue opportunities while delivering customer experience, in liaison with the Marketing and Customer Success teams. He was also responsible for reporting the day-to-day commercial growth of the product against the target.

When evaluating billing and subscription management tools, the team at CircleLoop wanted a product that would meet the following requirements —

• Pricing iterations: Handled various plans and tariffs as the product developed

• Flexible billing models: Had flexible modules for both recurring billing and usage-based billing

• Automated Invoicing and Tax Compliance: Took care of Invoicing and tax considerations

• Global Revenue and Customer Scale: Enable international growth at scale

• In-depth and Actionable Analytics: Gave actionable insights and data into their customer base

The Solution

After having done a thorough market comparison across various products, the team realized Chargebee was by far the best solution that was equipped to handle their needs and more. In Dylan’s words, “We have used Chargebee for nearly 3 years now and have never looked back!”.

As an Operations Manager, Dylan Walsh worked closely with Marketing and revenue functions. Even as CircleLoop caters to thousands of global customers to date, Chargebee enables Dylan to tie their budget and marketing spend back to what they are likely to earn per customer over a lifecycle (CAC:LTV).

Dylan’s use of Chargebee is tied to automating revenue operations with the sales and revenue metrics and is threefold — in that, he liaises with the Finance, Operations, and Customer Success and Marketing Teams.

The Payoff

Tracking MRR by Segment and Acquisition Channel:

For CircleLoop, MRR is a vital metric to track their company’s progress. With Chargebee, Dylan is able to track current, expected, and previous MRR. RevenueStory helps CircleLoop drill down the MRR into individual transactions against parameters such as:

• Payment Success and Failure

• Card Expiring

• Direct Debit MRR

• Transaction Date

With Chargebee API on their signup link (both paid and trial), CircleLoop is also able to track their New MRR and Addons by acquisition channel, thus giving them a view into their spend on sources such as Adwords, Display, and partnerships seamlessly.

Tracking Sales Metrics in RevenueStory:

RevenueStory’s “Sales Watch” functionality plays a vital role in the day to day functions of their Operations Team, to track the top-level picture of their month’s progress. It provides the team with key trends on a day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year basis, as well as allowing them to track key data including;

• Net Growth MRR

• Cancellation MRR

• Upgrade MRR

• New MRR by plan

Tracking Upgrade/Downgrade MRR with Mid-cycle Plan Movement:

With thousands of customers on different plans availing different addons, Chargebee gives CircleLoop a clear and in-depth view of each customer’s account and with the ability to manage their subscription. With this view, Dylan is also able to track Upgrade and Downgrade MRR with customers switching between plans on a pro-rata basis. Additionally, the team is also able to send consolidated invoices to customers with clear information on the accrued charges.

Pay-as-you-go Pricing Structure and Addons Management

Chargebee enables CircleLoop to deliver on its clear pricing structure without the need to produce their own in-house solution to track these changes. With a pricing plan for unlimited outbound calls as well as a pay-as-you-go plan, CircleLoop also offers recurring and non-recurring addons as part of the pricing package. These include;

• Extra Phone Numbers (including International Numbers)

• SMS Charges

• Calls outside of plans

Ultimately, Chargebee has a triple use in CircleLoop — it is used by our accounts team from an accountancy point of view but also from our Operations/Marketing Team from a revenue vs spend perspective. The third use is by my Customer Success team who use Chargebee to manage customer Invoices, account queries and to add in non-recurring charges such as porting numbers or bespoke call recording usage.

Dylan Walsh, Operations Manager, CircleLoop