The LeanScale Podcast · Episode 49

Why Your Quote-to-Cash Process Shouldn't Be Unique

Prakash Raina on unifying CPQ, billing, and rev rec — and letting reps quote straight from Slack

Prakash Raina · Co-Founder & CEO · Subskribe Hosted by Anthony Enrico
Published Updated 00:49:42 43 min read 8,530 words
Revenue Operations Consumption Revenue Pricing & Packaging AI in GTM GTM Strategy
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Executive Summary

The one-paragraph brief, extended

Why this conversation matters — and who should spend the hour.

Quote-to-cash — the machinery that turns a signed deal into a quote, an invoice, and recognized revenue — is one of the most painful, expensive problems a scaling SaaS company owns, and almost nobody talks about it until it breaks. In this episode LeanScale co-founder Anthony Enrico sits down with Prakash Raina, founder of Subskribe, one of LeanScale's most-recommended CPQ and revenue-orchestration platforms, for a founding story and a live product walkthrough that doubles as a clinic on how modern revenue operations should actually run.

Prakash's conviction is earned. Before Subskribe he led business technology at Okta, joining well before the IPO, when quote-to-cash became a compliance-critical system the company had to get right to run as a public company. Okta went from under $100M to $1B in less than five years, and through constant M&A, geographic expansion, and revenue growth he tried every CPQ and billing product on the market — none of them kept up. He teamed up with two co-founders from Zuora (one engineering, one product) who had lived the same pain from the vendor side, and started Subskribe in 2020. His central thesis is contrarian and clarifying: every public SaaS company answers to the same SEC rules, so if your quote-to-cash process feels uniquely complicated, that is not a competitive advantage — it is a problem, and the industry needs standardization.

The technical argument is that stitching a separate CPQ, billing system, and revenue-recognition system between your CRM and your ERP creates custom integrations, endless data reconciliation, and 10-to-15-day quarter closes full of VLOOKUPs and long nights. Subskribe collapses those three into one unified platform that sits between CRM and GL, so there is a single product catalog, no reconciliation, and one order object that flows from the sale cycle straight into finance. On top of that foundation, Anthony and Prakash dig into the parts operators feel most: a Slack-based AI deal-desk agent that lets any rep generate a compliant quote by typing a plain-English request; guided selling that collapses weeks of new-rep CPQ training; usage-based billing with real metering (stair-steps, accelerators, pre-committed plus overage, credit pools); and command centers for usage, deal desk, and AR analytics powered by Looker.

The back half is unusually useful for RevOps and finance leaders. They work through how to define an ARR you can actually raise venture capital against when revenue is usage-based — taking a policy-defined percentage of trailing consumption, and defending it to your auditor — and how ramping, multi-year deals force a real decision about whether you comp reps on first-year, renewal, or average ARR. Prakash argues the hardest and most valuable work happens after signature: amendments, co-terms, early renewals, and especially cancel-and-restructure deals that companies routinely walk away from because five people need two days to model one order — leaving good, customer-friendly revenue on the table. His north star is that CPQ is for sellers, not deal desk: a rep should be able to run a three-year ramp with partner margins and special terms, and the full lifecycle after it, without anyone's help.

Who should listen: founders and RevOps leaders drowning in quote-to-cash complexity, finance and revenue executives wrestling with usage-based ARR and rev rec, and any sales leader who wants reps closing instead of fighting the CPQ. The throughline is that owning CPQ, billing, and revenue on one platform is what finally makes quote-to-cash controllable, measurable, and standard — and that AI is most powerful when it removes the operational friction that quietly costs companies real revenue.

Key Takeaways

13 things worth stealing

The load-bearing ideas, each with the business implication and who should care.

01

A 'unique' quote-to-cash process is a liability, not a badge of honor

Every public SaaS company follows the same SEC guidelines, so there is no reason quote-to-cash should be uniquely broken from company to company. Prakash's mission is to standardize it — and he's blunt that if you think your process is special, that's not something to be proud of. Anthony reframes it directly: you're not winning because you have a unique quote-to-cash process.

Why it matters: Stop treating bespoke billing and rev-rec workarounds as differentiation. Push toward standard, out-of-the-box definitions and processes; the operational complexity you're proud of is usually just cost and risk.

FoundersRevOps LeadersRevenue Executives
02

Stitching CPQ, billing, and rev rec creates the reconciliation tax

Most companies run three separate systems between CRM and ERP — a CPQ for the field, a billing/AR system for finance, and a revenue-recognition system for accounting. That means custom integrations, constant data reconciliation, and 10-to-15-day quarter closes with long nights of Excel, CSV, and VLOOKUP to make booking, billing, and revenue numbers agree.

Why it matters: Every seam between systems is a place numbers drift and close slows down. Consolidating quote, billing, and revenue onto one platform removes the reconciliation work rather than automating it.

FoundersRevOps LeadersRevenue Executives
03

One order object should feed both the sale and finance — zero mismatch by design

In Subskribe the seller creates an 'order' (a draft during the sale cycle, a confirmed order once closed) and that exact same object generates the invoice. Because finance works off the identical data the seller used to close, there's no re-keying of the invoicing schedule and effectively no chance of the numbers not matching.

Why it matters: The biggest source of post-close finance pain — manually rebuilding invoicing schedules from an order-form PDF — disappears when the quote and the invoice are literally the same record.

RevOps LeadersRevenue ExecutivesCustomer Success
04

No seller wants to use a CPQ — so let them quote from Slack in plain English

Deal desk exists because CPQs are too hard for reps to use; sellers just want to describe the deal and get a quote back. Subskribe's AI agent lets a rep type a request in Slack ('create an SMB quote with 25 users on the basic platform'), then parses it, asks for anything missing per company policy (e.g., support level), applies product rules, and returns a quote PDF — the same conversation a rep would have with a deal-desk person.

Why it matters: The interface for quoting should meet reps where they work (Slack, mobile, email, CRM), not force them into the CPQ. This turns a ~20-minute configuration task into an instant, policy-compliant quote.

Sales LeadersRevOps LeadersFounders
05

Guided selling collapses new-rep ramp

Traditionally a new seller spends weeks to a couple of months learning how the CPQ is configured and which products can be sold together. Guided selling flips that: the system asks business-focused questions (where is the customer, what segment) and maps the answers to the right products, compliance, and discounting — so a rep who knows nothing about the config can still produce a correct quote.

Why it matters: Encoding pricing and packaging logic into a Q&A layer lets you onboard sellers into productive quoting far faster, and reduces reliance on tribal knowledge held by tenured reps and deal desk.

Sales LeadersRevOps LeadersFounders
06

Usage-based billing lives or dies on metering, which spreadsheets can't handle

The hard part of consumption billing isn't the invoice — it's the metering rules: stair-steps, accelerators that charge more above a threshold, high-watermark pricing based on peak active users. Subskribe supports the real flavors: pure pay-as-you-go, pre-committed plus overage (commit to 200,000 API calls/month, pay for overage), and credit pools (buy a $100k pool and draw it down across products, AWS/GCP-style).

Why it matters: As AI pushes more products to usage-based pricing, metering complexity becomes unmanageable in spreadsheets. You need a system that models commitment, overage, and drawdown natively or the model becomes unruly.

RevOps LeadersRevenue ExecutivesFounders
07

You can define a raise-worthy ARR for usage revenue — as long as it's backed by data

For pure pay-as-you-go, a CFO can take average consumption over the last three-to-six months and recognize a policy-defined share (e.g., 80%) as committed ARR. For committed-plus-overage, the commitment is fixed ARR and overage recognition depends on the auditor — a straight-line overage might support recognizing ~95%, a volatile one only ~20%. Investors accept the number as long as there's a clear, data-backed definition.

Why it matters: ARR is the metric companies are valued on and one of the hardest to measure in a usage world. Invest early in a defensible definition and the data lineage behind it; the flexibility to report it is worth building.

FoundersRevenue ExecutivesRevOps Leaders
08

Ramping, multi-year deals force a real rep-comp decision

A three-year ramp (125 users year one, 155, then 175) produces a different ARR each year. That surfaces an unavoidable question: do you comp the rep on the lower first-year number, the higher renewal number, or an average? Subskribe exposes first-year ARR, renewal ARR, average ARR, and an ARR trend out of the box so the comp choice can be made on real numbers.

Why it matters: Don't let a single 'ARR' field on the CRM opportunity hide the shape of a ramp deal. Decide deliberately which ARR you're paying on, and make sure the underlying numbers are visible to sales, finance, and comp.

RevOps LeadersSales LeadersRevenue Executives
09

The hardest, most valuable work happens after signature

Where most CPQs fall over is what comes after the first deal: co-terms, early renewals, amendments, and upsell as customers become multi-product. This is where things 'go off the rails' — and it's exactly where Prakash argues Subskribe stands tall, letting one rep run the entire post-signature lifecycle on one opportunity and one order form.

Why it matters: Evaluate quote-to-cash tools on the messy second, third, and tenth transaction with a customer — not the clean first quote. Land-and-expand motions depend on making amendments and renewals easy.

RevOps LeadersSales LeadersCustomer Success
10

Cancel-and-restructure friction quietly leaves real revenue on the table

When a customer wants to add licenses and renew early, you often must cancel the current term (crediting the unused period) and restructure — traditionally logged as churn, and so operationally hard that a near-billion-dollar company told Prakash it takes five people two days across sales ops, deal desk, and finance to model one deal. Some companies simply walk away from good, incremental revenue because it's too painful to execute.

Why it matters: Operational friction is silently costing you expansion revenue and customer goodwill. Making a rep able to run cancel-and-restructure on one order — with credits and proration auto-calculated and clean upsell (not churn) reporting — turns walked-away deals into closed ones.

RevOps LeadersRevenue ExecutivesSales Leaders
11

CPQ is for sellers, not for deal desk

Prakash's design principle is that the primary consumer of the CPQ should be the seller. In most companies the CPQ is so complex that only deal desk touches it and reps outsource configuration to them. He wants reps to run even complex deals — three-year ramps, partner/reseller margins, special payment terms — and the full customer lifecycle themselves.

Why it matters: If only deal desk can operate your CPQ, that's a symptom, not a workflow. Aim to put quoting power back in sellers' hands so deal desk becomes an exception-handler, not the bottleneck for every quote.

Sales LeadersRevOps LeadersFounders
12

AI should summarize and guide approvals — but not click the button

For a complex multi-year deal, Subskribe generates a human-readable summary (TCV, ARR from-to, discount) so an approver understands it fast, plus historical guidance ('your last 10 approvals at 20% discount suggest you should approve'). Crucially the AI won't auto-approve — that would fail SOX compliance — so a human still has to click. A longer AI summary serves deal desk, RevOps, and auditors and flags cancelable clauses and renewal uplifts.

Why it matters: Use AI to compress approval context and surface risk, not to remove human accountability from financial controls. The winning pattern is AI-assisted judgment with a compliant human in the loop.

Revenue ExecutivesRevOps LeadersFounders
13

Owning all three layers gives real-time CRM sync and a true 360 view

Because Subskribe owns CPQ, billing, and revenue, it syncs rich data back into Salesforce or HubSpot in real time — entry ARR, exit ARR, TCV, recurring vs. non-recurring, line-level detail, and an ARR trend (e.g., $55k on Jan 1, $65k mid-year, $75k next February) that a native single-ARR opportunity field can't hold. That combined data gives a genuine 360-degree view without exporting silos into a warehouse just to visualize them.

Why it matters: When one system owns quote, bill, and revenue, the metrics that are hardest to assemble across silos — ARR shape, collections, cash — come for free and land back in the CRM your team already lives in.

RevOps LeadersRevenue ExecutivesFounders
Frameworks Discussed

9 named models

Every framework Jimmy names, defined and time-stamped.

Standardize Quote-to-Cash

04:36

Because every public SaaS company answers to the same SEC rules, quote-to-cash should be a standardized, out-of-the-box process — not a uniquely engineered snowflake per company. A 'unique' process is a problem to fix, not a competitive advantage.

Prakash frames Subskribe's mission as educating the industry toward standard definitions (of ARR categories, of the close process). If you feel your quote-to-cash is very unique, that's probably not something to be proud of; you don't win deals because your billing is bespoke.

One Unified Platform vs. Three Stitched Systems

05:54

Instead of a separate CPQ, billing system, and revenue-recognition system integrated between CRM and ERP, run a single platform that handles CPQ, AR/billing, and ASC 606 rev rec — sitting between the CRM and the GL with no reconciliation and one product catalog.

The multi-system pattern forces custom integrations, data reconciliation, and 10-15-day quarter closes. A unified system removes the seams: same catalog, same data, one order that becomes the invoice, so booking, billing, and revenue numbers can't drift apart.

Slack-to-Quote AI Deal-Desk Agent

10:58

An AI agent that lets any seller generate a compliant quote by typing a plain-English request into Slack (or mobile, email, or the CRM). The agent parses the request, asks for any missing policy-required inputs, applies product rules, and returns a quote PDF.

It replicates the seller-to-deal-desk conversation: the agent knows business policy (e.g., every customer must buy a support level), knows product rules (the basic platform includes 15 users, so 25 users needs a 10-user add-on), and attaches standard terms — turning a 20-minute configuration into an instant quote.

Guided Selling

15:45

A business-focused Q&A layer that asks a seller simple questions (where is the customer located, what segment) and converts the answers into the right products, compliance, and discounting — instead of making the rep understand how the CPQ is configured.

The Slack deal-desk agent runs on top of guided selling. It navigates an almost infinite decision tree of product combinations for the rep and slashes the weeks-to-months of CPQ training a new seller would otherwise need.

The Flavors of Usage-Based Billing

21:40

Usage/consumption billing comes in distinct models: pure pay-as-you-go (no commitment, invoice on actual use), pre-committed plus overage (commit to a volume like 200,000 API calls/month, pay extra above it), and credit pools (buy a $100k pool and draw down across products, AWS/GCP-style).

Enterprises rarely want pure pay-as-you-go because it breaks budgeting, so committed and credit-pool models dominate. The system also has to handle metering nuances like stair-steps, accelerators above thresholds, and high-watermark pricing on peak active users — logic that's near-impossible in a spreadsheet.

Defining ARR for Usage-Based Revenue

27:12

A policy-driven method for turning variable consumption into a defensible ARR: for pay-as-you-go, take average consumption over a trailing 3-6 months and recognize a set percentage (e.g., 80%); for committed-plus-overage, the commitment is fixed ARR and overage recognition depends on how straight-line it is and what the auditor will accept (from ~95% down to ~20%).

Investors accept a usage-based ARR number as long as it has a clear definition backed by data. The point isn't a single right answer — it's flexibility plus a defensible, auditor-friendly policy, which LeanScale helps companies build.

Cancel-and-Restructure Without the Churn Penalty

34:01

When a customer adds licenses and renews early, you cancel the current term (crediting the unused period, like dropping a car lease) and restructure into a new term. Done right it's one opportunity, one order form, with credits and proration auto-calculated and reporting that shows it as upsell — not churn plus a new deal.

Traditionally this is logged as churn and is so operationally heavy (five people, two days across sales ops, deal desk, and finance) that companies leave incremental revenue on the table. Making a rep able to run it cleanly recovers good, customer-friendly deals.

CPQ Is for Sellers, Not Deal Desk

35:57

The design principle that the primary consumer of a CPQ should be the seller, not deal desk or RevOps. Reps should be able to run even complex deals (multi-year ramps, partner margins, special payment clauses) and the entire post-signature lifecycle themselves.

In most companies the CPQ is so hard that only deal desk touches it and reps outsource configuration. Prakash argues that's a symptom of bad tooling; put quoting power back in sellers' hands and deal desk becomes an exception-handler rather than the bottleneck for every quote.

One Order Object as Single Source of Truth

38:00

The seller creates an 'order' (draft during the sale cycle, confirmed once closed) and that same object generates the invoice and feeds finance. There's no separate quote-to-invoice re-keying, so numbers can't diverge between what sales sold and what finance bills.

Prakash deliberately calls it an order, not a quote: since the same record drives the invoicing schedule, there's zero chance of numbers not matching, and finance stops manually rebuilding schedules from an order-form PDF.

Best Quotes

17 lines worth clipping

Pulled verbatim. Copy or share any of them.

“It grew from less than $100 million to $1 billion in less than five years. It was crazy growth. And we tried every product in the market on the CPQ, on the billing side, and none of them were solving what Okta was looking for.”
Prakash Raina 02:20
“If you feel that you are very unique in the process, that's probably not something to be proud of.”
Prakash Raina 04:30
“That's not a competitive advantage. You're not winning because you have a unique quote-to-cash process.”
Anthony Enrico 04:36
“If you talk to many public companies, they'll say it takes 10 days, 15 days, long nights after every quarter end to close the book, because they have to make sure all three systems' data are reconciled.”
Prakash Raina 06:28
“I'll make a statement a lot of people will like or not: irrespective of how beautiful or how easy you build a CPQ, no salesperson wants to use a CPQ. And that's why the concept of deal desk came into the company.”
Prakash Raina 10:17
“There is an AI agent sitting in the back, and it's going to look at this and say, you gave me all the information, but you did not tell me what kind of support level they need — exactly what a deal desk guy would ask you.”
Prakash Raina 12:19
“All of that logic and all of those rules is near impossible to manage in a spreadsheet, and other platforms simply do not give you the ability to do that.”
Anthony Enrico 20:59
“As long as you have a definition for it, it's backed by data, and they can understand it, it makes sense. And we work on this all the time.”
Anthony Enrico 29:16
“Where we stand tall against all others is what you do post the customer has already signed. That's the most complex part.”
Prakash Raina 32:35
“Isn't it crazy that people are not doing a deal that's good for the customer, good for the company, just because it's too operationally difficult to make it happen?”
Anthony Enrico 34:41
“They understand it's going to bring a hundred thousand more, but to make that hundred thousand, five people have to spend two days — so they're losing the revenue from that side.”
Prakash Raina 35:19
“One of our motives is that CPQ is not a deal desk tool or a revenue operations tool. CPQ is for sellers — they should be the primary consumer.”
Prakash Raina 35:57
“We don't call it a quote, we call it an order. It's the same object the seller created to close the deal, and the same data now feeds the finance side, so there should be absolutely zero chance for numbers not matching.”
Prakash Raina 38:00
“The AI should not approve, because that will fail your SOX compliance — but it will give you all the metrics. You still have to go and click the button that yes, I agree.”
Prakash Raina 40:30
“ARR is the number one metric most SaaS, tech, and AI companies are valued on, but it's one of the most difficult things to measure — and most companies are still managing it in a spreadsheet.”
Anthony Enrico 45:05
“Quote-to-cash is one domain that's critical for every company, but there hasn't been any disruption in the last 15, 20 years — and that is what we are trying to do.”
Prakash Raina 48:27
“A Slack-to-quote capability is completely mind-blowing. I hope we can use that here at LeanScale so we can get our quotes out the door quicker and easier.”
Anthony Enrico 48:00
Practical Advice

What should you actually do?

The playbook, split by the seat you sit in.

Founders

  • Treat quote-to-cash as a compliance-critical system before you need to be public, not an afterthought — the pain compounds through M&A, geo expansion, and pricing changes.
  • Resist pride in a 'unique' billing process. Standard, out-of-the-box ARR categories and close processes are cheaper, faster to audit, and easier to raise against.
  • Invest early in a defensible ARR definition and the data lineage behind it, especially if any revenue is usage-based — investors accept the number when it's clearly defined and backed by data.

RevOps Leaders

  • Audit the seams between your CPQ, billing, and rev-rec systems — that's where reconciliation work, quarter-close delays, and number drift live. Fewer seams beats more integration.
  • Make sellers the primary users of the CPQ. If only deal desk can run a quote, that's a tooling problem; give reps guided selling or a plain-English agent so deal desk handles exceptions, not every deal.
  • Expose the full shape of ramp deals — first-year, renewal, and average ARR plus an ARR trend — so comp and forecasting aren't hiding behind a single opportunity field.

Sales Leaders

  • Meet reps where they work: a rep who can generate a compliant quote from Slack, email, or mobile closes faster than one fighting a CPQ.
  • Use guided selling to compress new-rep ramp — encode the pricing and packaging logic so a seller who doesn't know the config can still produce a correct quote.
  • Empower reps to run the full post-signature lifecycle (amendments, upsell, early renewal, cancel-and-restructure) themselves so expansion deals don't stall in deal desk.

Revenue Executives

  • Stop walking away from cancel-and-restructure deals because they're operationally hard — the friction, not the economics, is what's leaving expansion revenue on the table.
  • Use AI to compress approval context (summaries, historical discount guidance, risk flags) but keep a human clicking approve to preserve SOX compliance.
  • Define your usage-based ARR policy with your auditor up front — trailing-average recognition percentages should be agreed, defensible, and consistently applied.

Customer Success

  • Give account managers visibility into whether a customer is actually paying invoices before pushing upsell — there's no point selling more into an unpaid account.
  • Push for clean upsell reporting on renewals and expansions so growth (renewal add-on, more adoption) is distinguishable from a simple price markup.
AI Takeaways

How AI actually changes GTM

LeanScale's signature read on the AI-in-GTM question this episode wrestles with.

The thesis

AI's highest-value use in quote-to-cash isn't flashy autonomy — it's removing operational friction (quoting, ramp, approvals, deal summarization) while keeping a compliant human in the loop, so revenue that used to be too painful to capture actually gets captured.

Quote from Slack, in plain English

An AI deal-desk agent parses a rep's natural-language request, asks for policy-required missing inputs, applies product rules, and returns a compliant quote PDF — meeting sellers in Slack, email, mobile, or the CRM instead of forcing them into the CPQ.

Collapse new-rep ramp

Guided selling plus the agent let a seller who doesn't know the config produce a correct quote, compressing the weeks-to-months of CPQ training new reps otherwise need.

AI summarizes, humans approve

AI generates short (TCV, ARR, discount) and long deal summaries and historical approval guidance, and flags cancelable clauses and renewal uplifts — but it deliberately won't auto-approve, because that would fail SOX compliance.

Complexity, hidden

The Slack experience looks trivial ('just type and get a quote'), but a deep rules engine and guided-selling decision tree power it underneath — the AI is a friendly interface on hard logic, not a replacement for it.

Usage pricing is an AI-era tailwind

As AI products move to usage-based consumption billing, the metering and ARR-definition complexity Subskribe automates becomes table stakes rather than a nice-to-have.

Agent & automation ideas

  • A Slack/CRM quoting agent that turns a plain-English deal description into a policy-compliant order, prompting only for missing inputs (support level, term, discount approval).
  • An approval-copilot that summarizes complex multi-year deals (TCV, ARR from-to, discount), surfaces historical approve/reject patterns, and flags risky clauses — while leaving the approve click to a human for compliance.
  • A usage-ARR agent that computes a defensible committed-ARR number from trailing consumption per a configured recognition policy and assembles the audit trail behind it.
Operations Takeaways

By function

The same conversation, filtered for RevOps, pipeline/marketing ops, and customer ops.

Revenue Operations

  • Kill the reconciliation tax. Every seam between CPQ, billing, and rev-rec systems is where numbers drift and quarter-close slows; consolidating them removes the work rather than automating it.
  • One order, one truth. When the seller's order object also generates the invoice, sales and finance can't disagree on the numbers and no one rebuilds invoicing schedules from a PDF.
  • Sellers own the CPQ. If only deal desk can run a quote, the tool is the problem — guided selling and a plain-English agent make reps self-serve and reduce reliance on tribal knowledge.
  • Show the ARR shape. Expose first-year, renewal, and average ARR plus an ARR trend so comp, forecasting, and reporting aren't distorted by a single CRM field.
  • Standard definitions win. Out-of-the-box ARR categories (new logo, upsell, renewal markup vs. add-on) make the business legible and auditable instead of bespoke and fragile.

Customer Operations

  • Post-signature is the hard part. Co-terms, early renewals, amendments, and multi-product upsell are where CPQs break; make them runnable by a rep on one opportunity and one order form.
  • Recover walked-away expansion. Cancel-and-restructure friction (five people, two days) makes companies decline good deals; auto-calculated credits and proration with clean upsell reporting recover that revenue.
  • Check payment before upsell. Account managers should see whether a customer is actually paying invoices before selling more into the account.
  • Distinguish growth from markup. Report renewals so a genuine expansion (more product, more adoption) is separable from a simple price increase.
Metrics Mentioned

The numbers, with context

<$100M → $1B in <5 years
Okta growth

The hyper-growth (2016–2020) that made quote-to-cash a compliance-critical, unsolved problem and seeded the idea for Subskribe.

10–15 days of long nights
Quarter close

How long many public companies spend reconciling booking, billing, and revenue across three separate systems after quarter end.

15 included → +10 add-on
Basic platform users

Product-rule example the AI agent applies: the basic platform includes 15 users, so a 25-user request auto-adds a 10-user add-on.

200,000 API calls/month
Pre-committed usage example

Illustrates the committed-plus-overage model: pay for the commitment even if you use less, pay extra above it.

$100,000 pool
Credit pool example

AWS/GCP-style consumption model — buy a credit pool and draw down across multiple products as needed.

~80% of trailing average (95% vs. 20% on overage)
Usage ARR recognition

Policy-defined committed ARR: ~80% of trailing consumption for pay-as-you-go; overage recognition (~95% straight-line vs. ~20% volatile) depends on the auditor.

125 → 155 → 175 users over 3 years
Ramp deal shape

A three-year ramp produces different ARR each year, forcing a first-year vs. renewal vs. average comp decision.

5 people × 2 days for ~$100k
Cancel-and-restructure friction

Why companies walk away from good expansion deals — the operational cost of modeling a cancel-and-restructure outweighs the effort, not the revenue.

Weeks to a couple of months
New-rep CPQ ramp

Traditional time to learn a CPQ's configuration, which guided selling and the Slack agent are designed to collapse.

None in ~15–20 years
Quote-to-cash disruption

Prakash's framing of the opportunity: a critical domain that has gone largely un-innovated.

Entities

Companies, people & tools mentioned

Auto-extracted and linked into the knowledge graph.

Companies

SubskribeQuote-to-Cash / CPQ & Billing

Prakash's company; a unified quote-to-revenue (CPQ + billing + rev rec) platform he founded in 2020 and demos live throughout the episode. LeanScale recommends it as a top CPQ/revenue-orchestration system.

00:00 · 01:14 · 48:27Company →
OktaCybersecurity / Identity

Where Prakash led business technology before Subskribe, joining pre-IPO; getting quote-to-cash compliant for public-company operations was the problem that inspired the company. Okta grew from under $100M to $1B in under five years.

01:14 · 02:20Company →
ZuoraSubscription Management / Billing

Prior employer of Prakash's two Subskribe co-founders (one on engineering, one on product), who had lived quote-to-cash pain from the vendor side.

02:36Company →
GoogleSearch / Advertising

Subskribe's analytics are powered by Looker via a strong relationship with Google Cloud; used to build the usage, deal-desk, and AR command-center reports.

24:14Company →
AWSCloud Infrastructure

Cited (with GCP) as the model for credit-pool consumption pricing — buy a $100k pool and draw it down across products.

22:14Company →

People

Prakash Rainaguest

Co-founder & CEO of Subskribe; former business-technology leader at Okta who lived quote-to-cash pain through hyper-growth to a $1B company.

Co-Founder & CEOProfile →
Anthony Enricohost

Co-founder of LeanScale and host of The LeanScale Podcast.

Co-FounderProfile →

Tools & software

SalesforceCRM

One of the CRMs Subskribe integrates tightly with, syncing entry/exit ARR, TCV, recurring vs. non-recurring, line-level detail, and ARR trend back to the opportunity in real time.

Website ↗
HubSpotCRM

The other primary CRM Subskribe syncs quote and ARR data into; named alongside Salesforce as where reps live before Subskribe.

Website ↗
SlackTeam Messaging

The interface for the AI deal-desk agent and for approvals — reps type a plain-English quote request and approvers approve or reject a deal directly in Slack.

Website ↗
LookerBI / Data Modeling

The BI engine powering Subskribe's analytics and command centers; Prakash notes a strong relationship with Google Cloud and a large library of built-in reports.

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StripePayments / Billing

Named as an example of a payments/billing tool teams use for usage that leaves the hard metering logic (stair-steps, accelerators) manual.

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QuickBooksAccounting / ERP

Cited by Anthony as the financial system a company logs into for AR/cash data — the kind of siloed source Subskribe's owned data avoids bouncing between.

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Related LeanScale Services

Where this shows up in the work

Consumption & Usage-Based Modeling

Quota design, hunter/farmer structures, and unit economics for usage-based businesses.

The episode's core — usage-based billing, metering, and defining a raise-worthy ARR — is exactly the consumption-model work LeanScale does with usage-based customers.

Fractional RevOps

Embedded, field-facing RevOps leadership and execution — the operator model Jimmy describes, delivered as a service.

Standing up and running quote-to-cash (CPQ, billing, rev rec) cleanly across CRM and ERP is central RevOps work LeanScale embeds to deliver.

Forecasting & ARR Definition

Define a raise-worthy ARR and build a reliable consumption forecast across finance, data science, and go-to-market.

Defining a defensible ARR you can raise against and reading AR/invoice forecasts maps directly to LeanScale forecasting engagements.

AI for GTM

Agents and workflows that multiply operator throughput — the 'make humans superhuman' thesis, operationalized.

The Slack-to-quote agent and AI approval summaries are the applied AI-for-GTM leverage LeanScale helps customers adopt.

Frequently Asked Questions

Straight answers

Generated from the conversation, marked up for search and AI extraction.

What is quote-to-cash and why is it so hard for scaling SaaS companies?

Quote-to-cash is the end-to-end process of turning a deal into a quote (CPQ), an invoice (billing/AR), and recognized revenue (rev rec). It's hard because most companies run three separate systems between their CRM and ERP, which requires custom integrations and constant data reconciliation — often producing 10-to-15-day quarter closes full of manual Excel and VLOOKUP work to make booking, billing, and revenue numbers agree.

What is Subskribe?

Subskribe is a unified quote-to-revenue platform founded in 2020 by Prakash Raina (formerly of Okta) with two co-founders from Zuora. It combines CPQ, billing/AR, and ASC 606 revenue recognition into one system that sits between the CRM and the general ledger, so there's a single product catalog, no cross-system reconciliation, and one order object that flows from the sale straight into finance.

Why does Prakash Raina say a 'unique' quote-to-cash process isn't a competitive advantage?

Because every public SaaS company answers to the same SEC rules, there's no good reason quote-to-cash should be uniquely built at each company. Prakash argues that if your process feels very unique, that's not something to be proud of — it usually just means added cost, risk, and reconciliation. You don't win deals because your billing is bespoke, so the industry should move toward standardization.

How does a Slack-to-quote AI agent work?

A rep types a plain-English request into Slack (for example, an SMB quote with 25 users on the basic platform). An AI agent parses it, checks whether it has everything needed, and asks for any missing policy-required inputs like the support level. It then applies product rules — such as the basic platform including 15 users, so 25 users auto-adds a 10-user add-on — attaches standard terms, and returns a compliant quote PDF, replicating the conversation a seller would have with deal desk.

How do you define ARR for a usage-based or consumption business?

For pure pay-as-you-go, a CFO typically takes average consumption over a trailing three-to-six months and recognizes a policy-defined share (often around 80%) as committed ARR. For committed-plus-overage models, the commitment is fixed ARR and overage recognition depends on how straight-line it is and what the auditor accepts — anywhere from about 95% for consistent overage down to roughly 20% for volatile usage. Investors accept the number as long as it has a clear, data-backed definition.

What is cancel-and-restructure and why do companies avoid it?

Cancel-and-restructure is when a customer adds licenses and renews early, so you cancel the current term (crediting the unused period) and restructure into a new one. It's traditionally logged as churn and is so operationally heavy — one company told Prakash it takes five people two days across sales ops, deal desk, and finance — that some companies decline good, incremental deals just because they're too hard to execute. Automating the credits, proration, and clean upsell reporting recovers that revenue.

Why does Subskribe say CPQ is for sellers, not deal desk?

Because in most companies the CPQ is so complex that only deal desk can operate it, and reps outsource configuration to them. Prakash's design principle is that the seller should be the primary consumer of the CPQ — able to run even complex deals (multi-year ramps, partner margins, special terms) and the full post-signature lifecycle themselves — so deal desk becomes an exception-handler instead of a bottleneck on every quote.

Can AI automatically approve deals in a quote-to-cash system?

No — and by design. Subskribe's AI summarizes a deal (TCV, ARR, discount) and offers historical guidance based on past approvals, but it deliberately will not click approve, because auto-approving would fail SOX compliance. The pattern is AI-assisted judgment with a human still accountable for the final approval.

Timeline

Jump through the conversation

Click any chapter to open it in the transcript.

00:00Meet Prakash Raina and Subskribe 01:14Founding story: the Okta quote-to-cash struggle 03:14Why a 'unique' quote-to-cash process isn't a bragging right 05:13Three stitched systems vs. one unified platform 08:25Sales-led, PLG, and multi-entity on one platform 10:17"No seller wants a CPQ": the Slack deal-desk agent 15:45Guided selling and slashing new-rep ramp 19:06Platform depth: multi-currency, integrations, API/PLG 20:22Usage-based billing and metering complexity 22:58Command centers: usage, deal desk, and AR analytics 26:22ARR momentum and standard definitions 27:12Defining ARR for usage-based companies 29:47Ramping deals and how you comp the rep 31:17Smart approvals and executing the order in Slack 32:50The hard part: amendments and cancel-and-restructure 35:57CPQ is for sellers, not just deal desk 37:17One order object, one source of truth for finance 39:13AI deal summarization and approval guidance 41:47Personas, permissions, and enterprise complexity 43:42Real-time CRM sync and ARR trend 47:48Closing: standardizing quote-to-cash
Full Transcript

The whole conversation

Broken into chapters, searchable, verbatim from the audio. Speakers inferred (not diarized).

Transcript as markdown ↓ Whole episode as markdown ↓
00:00Meet Prakash Raina and Subskribe

0:00 I am so excited. Today we have Prakash Vrainath, one of our favorite and most recommended CPQ and overall revenue orchestration systems. Prakash, thank you so much for being here. Your platform and product is absolutely phenomenal and I'm really, really excited to get this in front of our customers, our audience, a deeper dive look for the rest of our team. And just thank you so much for taking the time to do this with us today. Thank you so much for having me, Anthony. And I always feel great about talking to someone from LeanScale. I have been working with some of your team members and it's always great to chat with some of you guys.

0:38 Appreciate it. Well, the partnership has been definitely mutually enjoyable. And at LeanScale, we don't recommend anything unless we just think it's the best. And you guys have done an outstanding job with a lot of our customers and you are also innovating so much. I know you have a lot of really exciting AI features to kick off here at the beginning too. So happy to dive into that. But before something we always do, especially when we have the founder on, we'd love to hear the founding story. Like what gave you the inspiration? There were lots of

01:14Founding story: the Okta quote-to-cash struggle

1:14 different platforms on the market. So what gave you that passion to say, "Hey, this needs to be built. It needs to be built today and I'm ready to devote my entire career into doing this?" Absolutely. Always feel great about this because before starting Subscribe, I was with Okta, very well-known cybersecurity company in identity management. And I was leading the business technology there. I joined Okta well before they were a public company. When the leadership at Okta started thinking about going public, Code2Cast is one of the critical applications that they had to

1:52 optimize for or making sure that it is compliant with running as a public company. And that's where I joined. And since Okta was growing really crazy back in 2016, 2017 or between 2016, 2020, my time at there, we were always struggling with what business was looking for, multiple M&A, expansion geographically, revenue growing. It grew from less than $100 million to $1 billion in less than five years. It was crazy growth. That's insane. And we tried to purchase or try every product in the market on the CBQ, on the billing side that was available at that time. And none of them were solving what

2:36 Okta was looking for. And we struggled a lot. We were investing a lot of dollar-wise, headcount-wise, there was still a lot of manual broken process. And that's where me and a couple of my friends, two of the other founders at Subscribe, they were at Zora. So we all had a different perspective on the same thing or very much our own experience in the Code2Cast side or Code2Revenue side of the thing. I was the one who was buying it, implementing it, managing it within this company. Two of the other founders, they were at Zora, one on the engineering side, one on the

03:14Why a 'unique' quote-to-cash process isn't a bragging right

3:14 product side. So a lot of experience on that. And we were all seeing the same pain point that companies were struggling. And that is where we thought that somebody needs to solve this problem differently. And that's where we started Subscribe back in 2020. So five exciting years that we have been in this journey. Well, congratulations. And I can speak from sincere, painful, unbelievably painful experiences that the Quote2Cash process, which typically involves CPQ, billing, revenue recognition, that entire process is so difficult and so complicated. And it's a really, really tough

3:56 problem to solve. So I'm really happy that some amazing minds came together to make that better for people like me, our team and our customers. And excited for you to show off what you have for us today. Absolutely. One of the things which we, my perspective is if you are in a SaaS business and you are a public company, everybody has to follow some guideline that SEC has. There is nothing unique about what Okta is doing versus what Salesforce is doing or Zoom is doing or Slack was doing. They all have to meet the same compliance. Then why the Quote2Cash has to be so broken or so different

4:36 across all of these companies? And that is where I think one of the things which we are trying to achieve or trying to educate the industry is there has to be some standardization. If you feel that you are very unique in the process, that's probably not something to be proud of. Yeah, that's not a competitive advantage. You're not winning because you have a unique Quote2Cash process. Yes, exactly. Wonderful. So let's jump right to that. I'm really excited to show the product that what we have built and maybe let me share my screen and I will jump right to a

05:13Three stitched systems vs. one unified platform

5:13 little bit of what we are doing from a product perspective and then jump to the product, just show you what we have built. Hope you can see my screen. Perfect. So just to give you at a very high level that, okay, how we are different from other, as you mentioned, there are many platforms who are in this domain, Quote2Cash, Quote2Revenue or the subscription billing, subscription management, CPQ side. So traditionally, if you go and look at many companies, they purchase between CRM and their ERP or the GL system. They have multiple systems, maybe a CPQ, which is being used by all the sales

5:54 at the go-to-market team. Then there is a billing system, which is mainly for the finance, for their AR, invoicing, payment, all of those functions. And then the third side is the revenue recognition system, where mainly the revenue accounting team is managing based on whatever has been done on the quoting side and the billing side, and then the revenue recognition based on the offering and other control measurement that they have. And from there, it does get integrated to the ERP. If you look at this, there are multiple systems. There is a lot of custom integration. There is a

6:28 lot of data reconciliation needs to happen. And that's why if you talk to many public companies, they will say that, okay, it takes 10 days, 15 days, long nights after every quarter end to close the book, because they have to make sure that all these three system data are reconciled. There is no issue with respect to any numbers, be it the booking number, what's my revenue number, what's my billing number, all the contact has been synced between these systems. And that's very inefficient in this AI world or the world that we are staying or living, where people have to do these manual

7:09 checks, Excel seats, CSV, VLOOKUP, and all of those things to make sure that, okay, the data is correct between these. This is where we said, like, subscribe. Can we change it? Can we rather than building as a multiple platform doing the same, doing a piece of the problem or doing the piece of the process, can there be a unified platform? And that is what subscribe QTR, Code to Revenue platform. It's a one unified system which has very advanced capability of CPQ. It has all the function that the billing system, AR payment system needs, as well as it matches or meets the

7:46 ASC 606 needs to do the revenue recognition. And from here, it sits between the CRM and the GL system, but you do not have to reconcile the data. You do not have to define the product catalog in multiple systems. You don't have to build any custom integration or so. So that's the major difference, I would say, between either CPQ or the billing system or revenue system, which are standalone versus subscribe as a unified platform. At the same time, we do sell just the CPQ also. I just want to add too, you guys perform extremely well in both sales led growth motions as well as

08:25Sales-led, PLG, and multi-entity on one platform

8:25 product led growth motions. And we tend to find there's some tailored solutions that serve each of those potentially, but most SaaS companies have a hybrid model. They're doing some product led growth, they're doing some sales led growth, especially if they're trying to move up market and go enterprise. And to be able to manage this with one solution, super beneficial for those teams that have those hybrid motions, where otherwise you would be bringing on different tools just to meet different motion types as well. Absolutely. And this is a journey for almost every company. When

9:01 you start a company, you want to focus on a one market, one particular product segment or specific segment or ICP wise. But to grow or to become a billion dollar or multi billion dollar company, you have to grow into the different areas. Could be going from a sales led to the PLG, could be going through a contracted or subscription billing to the usage base, could be going from focus into one geography to the other geography also where the multi entity, multi currency, all those things come. Subscribe is one only go to revenue platform, which can be used for, as you said,

9:39 sales led or the PLG. We do support everything on the SaaS pricing or one time professional service or consumption based. We also have a one unified platform, which is where you can run multiple entity. If you are acquiring a company, say that you as a part of your growth, you do acquire a lot of company, you can run the code to cast process for all of those different entity on one unified platform. So amazing. So flexible, too. As Anthony, you mentioned that, okay, there are a lot of focus on our side is on the AI like everyone else in the in the market. One of the

10:17"No seller wants a CPQ": the Slack deal-desk agent

10:17 thing which we did is, and I'll make a statement which a lot of people will like it or not, irrespective of how beautiful or how easy you build a CPQ, no salesperson wants to use a CPQ. They don't want to. And that's why the concept of deal desk came into the into the company. Because deal desk is a team of people where me as a seller, I just want to talk to my deal desk guy and say that, hey, my prospect is asking for a three year contract with user can't growing 10% year over year with the professional service premier support 20% discount. Can you build a

10:58 code for me? That is how all day because their job is I don't want to spend time on these system or creating this proposal and all I do want to go talk to prospect talk to customer and sell more to them. That's my job. So what we did is our CPQ and which I'm going to bring it is super easy to use it. If you look at the G two and all we are always rated as a easiest to use CPQ. But we took it even a next level that a rep can just come to a slack and say that okay, deal desk and just type some statement I have just copied it like hey, can you create a SMB code with 25 user on basic

11:39 platform only for admin? They just type that there is an AI agent sitting in the back and what it is going to do is it is going to pass the information and it's going to look at this. Okay. Hey, you gave me information. Do I have everything that I can give you a proposal or a code? Nice. I do. You gave me all the information, but you did not tell me what kind of support level they need. Can you tell me that okay, what support because the AI knows based on your business policy, your company policy, you have a policy that every customer needs to buy a support level also, which me as

12:19 a seller, I have not, which is exactly a deal less guy will ask you that okay, did you ask the prospect that okay, which level of support they need? They can say that okay, hey, they have said that okay, they are not going to look for any support. I'm not looking for any support. Once the agent gets all the information that it is looking, it needs to create a code. As soon as it does, it is going to just say, okay, here is the code for you. As soon as the agent gets all the information that it can create a proposal for me, it creates a code. It even brings the PDF right here that based on the information that you said, and it has a very

13:02 intelligent logic, you said like, I'm looking for 25 users. And you said like, I'm looking for basic platform. The basic platform only comes with 15 users. That means you need to get extra users, you have to buy add-on for the extra 10 system added that extra 10 and created a code for you. It added some of the terms and conditions which are common or a standard practice for your business. So the main goal here is can a rep Slack is a very widely used channel. We are going to extend it to some other interface also. The reason is why even come to the Slack? Can I just do through a

13:45 mobile app? Can I do it or pass the same command or interact with the same agent from my CRM? It could be any interface. It could be an email. I send an email and then I get a code back from the system. And it has all the logic that CPQ has. As you said, like it asked me what support you need. It applied the logic of that, okay, you need 10 additional add user as an add-on to meet your need of 25 users. It added my standard MSA privacy policy or terms of service by default. You can achieve everything that you, when you talk to a deal desk and the deal desk help

14:28 you to create a code for that. We are very excited about this feature. A lot of our customers are just loving it. This is absolutely insane. And I don't know if someone hasn't built the back end of this and has gone through this process. I don't know if they'll appreciate the level of complexity, especially when you're saying, Hey, there's different product rules here. So, you know, you ask for something that requires us to take a look at the different types of products and packages you have to put it together. This would normally take, even if you have it set up really,

15:03 really well, I'd say this would be like a 20 minute activity to go in, add all the things, click all the buttons, create the form. And you turn this into an instant quote, especially for teams that are doing high velocity deals, like that adds up. And to make sure that they're following all the policies and everything that you have, it's a huge, huge feature. Something I know reps would be super excited about, and I'm sure deal desk teams as well. Absolutely. And in fact, our reason is to take it to from a looking at a different lens. Today, when a new seller join a company, they have to go through at least a few weeks or maybe a couple of

15:45Guided selling and slashing new-rep ramp

15:45 months of training to understand how exactly the CPQ is configured, what are different product you can sell together and all. The goal here is if I'm a new rep and I don't know about all the information, I can just ask about, Hey, can you help me to create a code? And then agent is gonna guide me there. Yes. To get that you need to tell me what level of customer it is, what kind of support you need, how many users. And in fact, if I go now to the subscribe tab, which is here, this is behind the scene. This is the traditional guided selling, which is also very, very useful. Like it's saying

16:29 that where is the customer located in? I say it's in US based on different response. It can ask me different more question. And you, me as a seller, I'm interacting with the CPQ in a very business focused question, not really how the system is configured. It is just asking that, okay, which reason US you are located in. I'm answering these questions and based on whatever I answer, system is going to take this and these answer convert into the right product, right level of compliance, discounting, all of those things. And it is going to create a code for me. Versus in traditional CPQ, you go to a code, you pick the start date, end date, you pick the

17:20 which product you need, will you pick the timeline discount and all versus here, you are just interacting as a Q&A and it is going to, system is going to take your response and pick the right product based on that. That's the traditional guided selling. The slack that we saw the deal desk guy is running on top of that. So exactly to your point, Anthony, it looks very easy from the slack that, okay, I'm just typing and I'm getting a response, but behind the scene, there is a lot of complex rule or the complex implementation that our engineering team has built that is powering

17:54 that. Yeah, the decision tree of this guided selling is, you know, it can be almost infinite how many branches it can go, depending on the products and combinations. So helping somebody navigate through all of those and get them something really quickly. It's absolutely game changer. And like you mentioned, this is already really powerful to have this set up for a rep to go through. It's already much easier than what they're typically doing, like directly in Salesforce or HubSpot or goodness, just living in like sheets or Google Docs to get something in the system,

18:28 make sure you're following your your pricing rules and approval flows that you have in place. Super important to have him go into a system to do this. Yeah, almost a lot of big companies that we talked to, they all have a pricing calculator, few Excels that you have to go through that. And the main difference is the pricing calculator is based on the business conversation. CPQ is very systematic or the technical side. This guided selling is actually combining that you did not have to understand that, oh, this means the zero trust pro package, you're just selling that I'm

19:06Platform depth: multi-currency, integrations, API/PLG

19:06 selling to a mid market company, that means they should buy pro package. System has all these logics. Right. So now we are here in the in the subscribe wall, maybe let's let's go a little bit deeper on the on the subscribe platform wise, you can see we support various different different aspect of the CPQ go to gas or go to revenue side. We have support for the multi currencies, you can define currency exchange rate and all of these we have a lot of customers using our product internationally in all the different reasons. We integrate with various tax engines,

19:44 Salesforce, CRM, Esign, as well as the payment gateway wise. Subscribe is 100% API based and that is where we support the PLG because some of our bigger customer, they just want everything to be available on API so that they can consume and they can build their own interface however they want to do it. Could be free trial from their website, could be upsell from their product, could be marketplace, could be selling it some other third party website. All of those are possible using our API in that case. Dunning management, document template, a lot of bulk operation,

20:22Usage-based billing and metering complexity

20:22 usage billing as I mentioned, we do have support for consumption based billing. You can inject the uses as and when it is being consumed or you can upload a file also at the end of the month if you want to do that. So I want to pause there. I want to pause there because usage based billing, I think some people might not appreciate the nuance because maybe they are using something like Stripe or maybe they are using something else that is manual. The difficult part of usage based billing is managing all of the metering and the complexity of the different

20:59 metering rules you may have. Are there stair steps? Do you have accelerators if they go above and charge even more? Do you have these accelerators if they go above? All of that logic and all of those rules is near impossible to manage in a spreadsheet and other platforms and other tools simply do not give you the ability to do that. So we have a lot of companies that have usage based products. They need to be billing on a monthly basis especially in the era of AI. Usage based consumption, usage based billing is the leading way to charge for these type of solutions. So I

21:40 only see this growing in the future and if you don't have something like subscribe in place to manage it, it becomes completely unruly. Absolutely and I know when we call it as a usage based or consumption based billing but there is a lot of different flavor as you mentioned. There could be one pure pay as you go model. You do not have to commit it. How much you use? I'm gonna send an invoice based on that. In enterprise world, nobody wants to get that because then you are budgeting and all those things gets complex. So there is a model for pre-committed. So I'm

22:14 committing for 200,000 API every month. That's my commitment. I'm definitely gonna, if I use less than that, you are still gonna charge me for 200,000 API call. But if I go over that, then you're gonna charge me for over it. So prepaid plus over it or look at the AWS pricing or GCP pricing where you are buying a credit pool. I'm buying a $100,000 credit pool. I have access to tens of your application. I can pick and choose whichever I need at any point of time and you go and draw down from that bucket. All of those pricing model is well supported by subscribe. We have customer using all of these flavor. This is our uses command center. We have a

22:58Command centers: usage, deal desk, and AR analytics

22:58 very advanced analytics and we have few command center. This is uses command center but you can see a lot of these things, how exactly usage is going over month by month max because there could be high watermark price based on how many active user at any point of time that is what your high watermark. All of those different pricing model are well supported and available through the analytics also. I will show another, since we are on this, with the code to revenue, we feel that analytics is a very, very important part. As I showed you the usage command center, we have

23:37 something called dealless command center where if I'm the RevOps leader or sales leader, I can come here at the end of the quarter or end of the month and just try to see that how we are performing with my quarterly target. How many deals are active? How many renewals are going on? What is my average deal cycle? Okay, what are the top 15 deal from a dollar perspective that I have to chase to meet my quota or meet my target for this quarter? Where exactly these 15 deals are? Are they approved? Are they sitting for the CFO to approve? Has they gone out and waiting for the

24:14 signature? All of those things at one place that you can slice and dice and then you can see the data. This analytics engine is powered by Looker but we have a strong relationship with the Google Cloud and Looker is powering and we have built a lot of ton of reports based on these analytics. You can also see the AR command center. Now on the billing side, so dealless is more on the CPQ or the go-to market, usage is of course on the billing, on the product and all. The AR is more on the finance or the AR side. How exactly might aging look like? Not just the aging which our invoice has gone out, what are my forecasts for the invoice?

24:58 How many invoices are overdue? What's my cash flow look like? What is my DSO? A lot of these critical, I would say the metrics are very very important if you are either going to the street or talking to your board or talking to your investor. A lot of our customer CFOs or the sales leader, they just take the screen sort of these details and just go to their

25:26 management meeting to talk about how they are doing and I'll bring some more more analytics. Yeah and that's amazing intelligence that you can only get access to if you're owning everything end-to-end. So if you only have some of the data in silos, normally what we would do is we would, okay let's take the data from these systems, let's throw them into Looker so that way we can visualize everything in one place. I love by the way that you partnered with Looker to get the type of visualizations that you have, they're best in class. Yep. Or you're going into your ERP or you're going into whatever your financial system is, like in our case we're going

26:00 to be logging into QuickBooks to look at that type of data, but you're bouncing around so many systems but since you own and you're going to be asking these questions as you go through this natural storyline. What's pipeline look like? What do sales look like? Revenue, collections, and so to have all that data in one place, super powerful. Absolutely and as I said like earlier which I mentioned that okay one of the things which we are trying to drive or achieve here is how can we define some standardization across the industry. So this is our ARR momentum report we say

26:22ARR momentum and standard definitions

26:33 that hey what's the what was the ARR when we started the month and where we ended the month but within that 30 days or 31 day of the month what are different type of deal with it, new logo, upsell, renewal markup or renewal add-on. Did they just pay more during renewal because I raised the price by 10% or no they actually purchase more product during the renewal, more adoption, more growth with that customer. All of these categories are available very standard definition which should be applicable to any customer or every customer in the SaaS business. Those things are just available

27:12Defining ARR for usage-based companies

27:12 out of the box for you to just get a glimpse of that okay how exactly the business is doing. How do you handle ARR reporting for usage-based companies? Do you have the ability to like share usage and kind of count that into your ARR or distinguish like your ARR is 10 million but 2 million of it's actually like uncommitted? Exactly so going back to how you price your usage-based. If it is pure pay as you go model then you then the CFO says that okay let's look at the average consumption for the last three months or last quarter and that is what we take 80% as my

27:54 committed ARR. So that's there are some certain things and that's where as you said Looker has all those things. I bring all the usage dollar that okay the customer is having month over month. You define your policy is it 80% is it 100% or however you want to do it. But if you have committed plus overage model that means somebody is already committing for 50,000 a year that your fixed ARR is 50,000. Now if the usage overage variation is a lot more they are committing for 50,000 but they are consuming three times of that then again based on the overage you can define

28:35 your policies. So that's one area where the standardization is still missing and every company has their own way. Hey I consume and this is a lot more that you have to convince your auditor. Right. That okay if your auditor agrees that yes my overage is very straight line for the last six month. Why can't I recognize 95% of that as a committed ARR versus if you have a lot more fluctuation then your auditor will not gonna agree for the 95% they will say like them just pick maybe 20% of that as your committed ARR. I found with investors and if you're like going and raising

29:16 or something and you're articulating what your ARR is as long as you have a definition for it it's backed by data and they can understand it makes sense and we work on this all the time. So we work on this if somebody's trying to come up with like okay we have 10 million and committed we know if we look at the average of the last three months or six months whatever makes sense for them and we'll take 80% of that like you said and then that brings we're gonna say our ARR is 12 million and we have this much here but knowing that you have the flexibility in the reporting

29:47Ramping deals and how you comp the rep

29:47 here is great. Absolutely and in fact this is a question or this is maybe a variation even non usage based so if I come back here from let's say this is a code which is a two-year code and the first year is 12500 because it's a ramping deal they started with 125 user in the first year they grew to 155 and 175 it's a three-year ramp deal that means my ARR for the first year versus second year versus third year will be different. Now there are few aspects as you mentioned there are aspects that okay when you go and talk to your investor that okay how much is your ARR you always want to talk about the bigger number you said okay

30:35 mine committed is 16 grand but when you're comping your rep are you comping based on the first year which is a lower number the renewal which is a higher number or an average yeah all of these numbers are just available out of the box in the subscribe system really smart so this is a code object we have all the advanced approval we have a smart approval also if it has already been approved it isn't going to look for another approval unless until there is a material change you can submit for approval it is going to trigger approval i'm admin so it is asking me to bypass

31:17Smart approvals and executing the order in Slack

31:17 and i'll just to show another one on the slack side the approval is very much available in slack so if i bring my slack here you can see i receive a message on the slack seeing that okay here is the snapshot of the code and it is looking for an approval because there is a net 60 is given do you want to approve or reject and me as a approver i can if i'm a cfo i'm a cro i'm on the road i want to open the system check my email and all slack is very easy i can just approve or decline directly from the slack once it is available of course we have a full templating downloading the order form we have e signature you can send it for the signature and all

32:02 once everything is done let's say if i approve on behalf of someone the final step as any other deal cycle is to mark as executed where this code now is getting closed and it is being moved to a code to a subscription object and if i go back to the subscription just to show it the subscription is very similar information that okay what is my entry rr what is my exit rr and all of those which is very simple when you talk about traditional cpq and all where we stand tall against all other is what you do post the customer has already signed they are already a customer

32:50The hard part: amendments and cancel-and-restructure

32:50 that's the most complex part that's the part that everything seems to go off the rails like you sell your first deal then all of a sudden they want to co-term renew early that's the part where it gets really messy absolutely and this is where as i was saying that okay once you start become multi-product company once you start growing you are signing a multi-year deal there is multiple amendment that you have to do you are always trying to upsell is a big go-to-market motion for many big companies yeah i know you started with one product but i do land and expand

33:21 i want to sell another product and that's where the amendment comes very handy on that so these are still i would say traditional or more common or standard or probably easy but if you look at the last two no other cpq does that how subscribe supports it there is a contract going on three months left in the contract customers say that like i love the product i want to buy more licenses and i'm ready to renew also now there could be two flavor of that one is like a car leasing i'm dropping my today current lease and my new lease will start from today for the next 12 months

34:01 that's that's re-structured because i have to give you credit for unused period yep that's cancel and restructure there is no count on the churn i can tell you that okay how much time the companies spend on that i was talking to one of a company making like close to a billion dollar they say that okay they don't like cancel restructure even if it brings more arr because that needs two days between the sales order management deal desk and the finance team to come up with okay what should be the right number for this deal because they have to look at the invoices the credit the amendment the proration

34:41 coming up with the one order form it is so hectic that people are just leaving the dollar on the table isn't that crazy isn't it crazy that people are not doing a deal that's good for the customer good for the company just because it's too operationally difficult to make it happen absolutely absolutely this is like if you go and tell this to the company ceo they will be absolutely shocked that okay this is what is happening within their company but if you talk to the operation team they are saying that i understand that this is going to bring hundred thousand more but if you look at the unit of economics to make that hundred thousand more the

35:19 five people have to spend two days to make that happen right so from that perspective but they are losing the revenue from that that side that is where the subscribe has super easy the reps should be absolutely capable of go and make those changes one opportunity in the crm one order form it will calculate all the right numbers with respect to how much i have to give the credit how much i have to charge you the new contract and your reporting will also look absolutely clean that okay how much is the upsell it's not like there is a cancer restructure that

35:57CPQ is for sellers, not just deal desk

35:57 means it is a churn no churn it's all going as a upsell on an existing customer all of these deals can be done just by the rep the one of the motive for us is cpq is not a deal less tool or revenue operation tool cpq is for sellers they should be the primary consumer i'm sure you must have heard anthony but a lot of time cpq is only being used by the dealer stream because it is so complex to use it that seller comes to them and they go and configure the code because it is just so hard to somebody to find out how to use this system so a lot of these complex not just easy

36:39 one-year two-year three-year deal it's a three-year ramping deal with a different discount with the partner involved there is a 10 partner margin or the reseller margin there is a net 19 a special clause all of those can be done by the rep by themselves and not just the new deal throughout the life of that customer whatever they are doing adding more product swapping the product doing cancel a structure doing early renewal all of those can be done just by the seller without anybody's help you can see here it says that okay hey there is a cancellation part and there

37:17One order object, one source of truth for finance

37:17 is an structure part and it is combined into one order one matrix it say that okay what's my delta arr my the way that i build it my arr is not growing but it is changing there's a tc which is still some dollar if i go and try to sell more you can see that the arr is going up while i'm doing a cancel and restructure some of the other things if i go back this is all on the cpq but as soon as the deal is closed and a contract is created you can generate the invoice right here nobody have to look at the order form pdf and try to make sure that okay the numbers are right or

38:00 not so that they can generate the invoice it is the same object which the seller created to close the deal or during the sale cycle the same data is now going to feed the finance side so there should be absolutely zero chance for numbers not matching because it is the same quote object and that's why we don't call it as a quote we call it as an order just the naming change you create an order while it is in the sale cycle it is a draft once it is a close it's a confirmed order it will generate an invoice now yeah and i think a lot of people sometimes this

38:35 doesn't touch deal desk as much so people may not you're kind of help you're helping a few different people in this process where deal desk might not even have an appreciation for that but yes as soon as that deal gets closed then typically finance has to go in and create the invoicing schedule and make sure it matches everything it's super manual there's not a good way to automate like everything that you put in the order form into what the invoicing schedule should look like so this is a huge connection point where you know multiple teams are getting the benefit absolutely and what we have seen or we are learning more from the market is a lot of

39:13AI deal summarization and approval guidance

39:13 account management team where they are responsible for upsell and all they do want to know that okay is customer paying all the invoices or not right because if not then what is the point of selling more if they are not paying so having a view of the invoicing and the payment information is very useful for the account management team one other part of the ai uh as we we spoke earlier if i go back to this the the code that i created for the the three-year ramping deal we do have something called summarize going back to the approval let's say this is a multi-year deal

39:48 with the multiple product different discounting all of those different things are involved and now it goes to the cfo for approval so for the cfo to know about what is going on on this deal so that they can approve or decline or ask more questions they have to go through this long document or understand all of these we have a ai powered summarization so i can go and say okay can you generate a short summary of this deal very human readable it can just look at that it's like hey this is the TCB this is the ARR from this state to this state the discount is 25 percent and the more we are doing on the ai

40:30 if i know that last 10 order that you got or 10 approval that you got where you approved it because of the 20 discount it will give you a guidance also that based on your historical information you should be approving it right the system the ai should not approve because that will fail your socks compliance but it will give you all the matrix you still have to go and click the button that okay yes i agree and then i will close it this is a short version now if it i'm a deal-less person or revenue operation where i do want to hear about everything that what you are

41:06 doing what all product and all there is a long summary also where it is going to tell me about everything product ARR all of these invoicing schedule and all to say like okay do you want to and you can attach it to the approval workflow you can attach it to some maybe even auditor to read the auditor that okay what is going on on this this deal and is there any complexities there are non there are cancellable clause or renewal uplift and all of those things it can flag it yeah because sometimes these deals can get pretty big pretty complex you may have multiple parties involved there's lots there's lots in here so if you're running this through

41:47Personas, permissions, and enterprise complexity

41:47 an approval process to just get some quick insights and know what you should be looking at it's really helpful some of the other things are on the billing invoicing or accounting or the even on the some of the non-functional side you mentioned about we do take care of a lot of different type of user like a lot of different persona is using subscribe and that's why we have rules and all because dealers should not be playing around with the ARR or the invoicing side same with the if the I am a billing clerk I should not be playing around with the revenue side

42:22 I can also just have a read only for your auditor where they can just come and look at the information and all so a lot of different persona to make sure that okay it is serving or big organization we are built the subscribe is built mainly for the complex enterprise business multi-product business hyper growing business where they want to change pricing and packaging every quarter because they are growing they are still testing the market they are launching new product new packaging new partnership with a different different company in the market all of those things

42:58 how to make it easy for the companies to just try it out yeah and that agility is a massive competitive advantage and I don't think people realize oh if I change the way I'm pricing something in order to open up more market the amount of operational complexity that typically creates is something where sometimes the cost of it just simply doesn't make sense so yes keeping teams agile so that way they can change how they're going to market it gives them a huge edge on a lot of the people they're competing with absolutely one other aspect is again subscribe is as I showed this this diagram we sit between the crm and the erp so we have a very tight

43:42Real-time CRM sync and ARR trend

43:42 integration with the with the crm with the sales force or the hub spot as soon as a rep creates a quote in subscribe at real time we sink the data into the crm and we are putting all the information around what's my entry rr what's my exit rr what's my tcb recurring versus non-recurring if let's say you have a professional service also which is non-recurring cost all those numbers not just these at a high level we push all the line level details also and as I said if you have a three-year contract with a ramping deal the core sales force opportunity just have one arr field but as we saw

44:24 there is a first year arr there is a renewal arr there is an average arr and maybe the arr trend we have something called arr trend which gives you the time scale that okay on january 1st 2025 the arr is 55 000 on july 1st it is 65 000 on next february it is 75 000 so that if you are comping it or you just want to so that the overall life cycle of the customer you have all the data available in your crm also to pull wherever you want to take it of course we have a lot of metrics available from our side but enough our customer they have their own data warehouse

45:05 they just want to plug into their crm and for to support that we do sink all of these data into the sales force also for you to use it if you want that that's great and i think surprisingly because it's the number one metric most sas tech ai companies are being valued and based on is arr but it's one of the most difficult things to measure so having all that data pump back into sales force back to your crm and then be able to throw that into a dashboard that you're using there or hop into subscribe and take a look at it this is this is something most companies are still

45:43 managing in a spreadsheet even though it's the most important metric of the entire business absolutely this is analytics has become one of the probably most lovable after probably the ai is going to take over that but this because the cfo the executive they just love it revenue waterfall you want to see how my each product is doing there are a ton of metrics if i go back and show you some of the other report here it does show me that okay how is my arr doing by each product by each account what is my arr momentum month over month for the all these different types you can slice and dice and that's where the looker comes very handy because we bring

46:29 all the raw data maybe you want to slice and dice based on the segment you are selling a lot to non-profit organization and you want to see that okay how much is going to the non-profit you maybe as a growing company your your reps are giving a lot of cancelable clause that okay you can come out of this or free trial and all of those things you can report on that that okay how many of these contracts have a cancelable how many of these have a renewal uplift or renewal price lock so a lot of slicing and dicing of the data which is available in the cbq on the billing and the revenue and as you mentioned v being the one system i have data for

47:09 everything on the go-to market subscribe has all the data related to the billing the payment the delay and all of those things as well as the revenue recognition which is the actual metric that you have to show it to the street when we combine all of those three the true 360 view you can absolutely get it from there ricotta exactly how you put that being able to own all three of those aspects between the ciara and between the erp gives you so much control over the quote to cash process and then so much visibility on the data and the metrics that's that's where i think

47:48Closing: standardizing quote-to-cash

47:48 other solutions really really struggle to provide the level of functionality and impact that subscribe has because they're not owning those aspects of it which are completely interconnected and interrelated so i i just can't say again how excited we are about subscribe about what you all have built and you've built it from real pain so when we went through the founder story like you you have felt this being on the other end of it and then of course the powerhouse team of founders that you put together really capable of building this right from first principles and you're taking

48:27 it to the absolute next level with ai a slack to quote capability is completely mind-blowing um i hope that we can get to use that over here at lean scale so he can get our quotes out the door quicker and easier um and i know our customers are going to love it as well absolutely the whole view is this is one quote to cash or quote to revenue is a one domain which is critical for every company but there has not been any disruption in the last probably 15 20 years and that is what we are trying to do and our customers hyper growing company is making um hundreds of millions of dollars they are

49:03 just loving it and and we're getting a lot of feedback to the market as well as as i said our goal is to establish some standardization across the sass industry perfect well percasa thank you again so much for being here excited about what you're building uh can't wait for our customers to see this can't wait for our team to see this and more importantly can't wait to see what you guys build next thank you very much for having me uh anthony and i say like we love your team uh love working with you all and i see that okay we can bring some bigger value to to our customers perfect can't wait to you