If your company isn’t already using a subscription-based pricing model to fuel revenue growth, chances are high you’ve at least considered it. The model continues to prove its value across industries.
With the global subscription economy projected to grow 68% between 2022 and 2026, reaching a total transaction value of $996 billion by 2028, it’s clear that the shift from ownership to usership is not just a trend, but a long-term transformation in how businesses generate and scale recurring revenue.
According to Frederick Reicheld, creator of the Net Promoter Score, “Return customers tend to buy more from a company over time. As they do, your operating costs to serve them decline.” For example, in financial services, a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit from those existing customers.
The research is clear: leaders who can maximize the number of customers who renew their contracts have the best opportunity to grow revenue. That’s why strategizing subscription management correctly and laying down the proper foundations for growing active subscriptions should be top of mind for RevOps.
The process of managing subscriptions is fraught with issues that revenue leaders need to mitigate to ensure they keep revenue leakage to a minimum. Let’s look at these challenges.
Challenges in the subscription management process
For B2B companies, managing subscriptions is a complex, high-stakes process that directly impacts revenue recognition, forecasting accuracy, and customer retention. Revenue operations managers sit at the center of this complexity, often facing several key challenges:
Data fragmentation across systems
Subscription data is frequently siloed across CRM, CPQ, billing, and ERP systems. This fragmentation makes it difficult for RevOps to maintain a single source of truth, leading to inconsistencies in customer records, billing errors, and delayed renewals.
Manual processes and lack of automation
Without automated workflows for subscription renewals, upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations, RevOps teams often rely on spreadsheets and manual input. This increases the risk of human error and limits the team’s ability to scale as the customer base grows.
Inaccurate revenue forecasting
Subscription renewals are a key driver of predictable revenue. When subscription terms, customer usage patterns, and churn indicators aren’t tracked effectively, forecasting becomes unreliable, making it harder to plan and allocate resources effectively.
Complex contract modifications
B2B subscription models often involve custom terms, usage-based pricing, and mid-term changes. Tracking these modifications over the contract lifecycle is difficult without a unified system, and inaccuracies can lead to revenue leakage or compliance issues.
Limited visibility into renewal health
Many RevOps teams struggle with real-time visibility into which accounts are up for renewal, which are at risk, and what actions have been taken. This lack of insight can result in missed renewal opportunities and lower retention rates.
Overcoming these challenges demands a unified approach integrating quoting, contracting, billing, and analytics into a seamless subscription management workflow.
How to increase subscription renewals and amplify revenue
Maximizing subscription renewals is a critical lever for predictable, scalable revenue growth. For revenue operations managers, renewals represent a key opportunity to not only secure recurring revenue but also to expand account value through upsells, cross-sells, and strategic bundling.
Achieving consistent renewal success requires a proactive, data-driven approach that blends automation, personalization, and customer-centric engagement. The strategies below will help your team increase renewal rates and unlock more revenue from your existing customer base.
1. Automate subscription renewal
The ability to automate renewal opportunities in your CRM is quickly becoming a necessity for companies with subscription-based revenue models. Automating the creation of renewal opportunities in CRMs like Salesforce, Freshworks, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 reduces the time required to create renewal quotes and eliminates the errors involved in doing so manually.
Additionally, by automating upselling, cross-selling, bundling, and co-terming, you can simplify the renewal process and drastically reduce administrative overhead – making it easy for anyone in your organization to carry out renewals.
2. Optimize upsells, cross-sells, and bundles
One Gartner statistic shows that 80% of your company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers. And since subscriptions are a key source of most companies’ revenue, generally the most effective way to increase revenue through subscriptions is by maximizing revenue gained by upselling, cross-selling, and bundling.
Gathering particular information about your current subscribers, deals, and products can provide information to help your organization do so. DealHub CPQ maximizes revenue opportunities by taking data from your entire customer ecosystem, and by providing a sales playbook that automatically suggests upselling, cross-sell, and bundling options based on relevant deal data. This enables anyone – from sales professionals to account managers to customer success managers – to leverage guided selling so they can drive greater subscription revenue in a fast, easy, and error-free way.
3. Offer incentives to renew
Incentives provide added value and can also add a sense of urgency to help reinforce and accelerate buying decisions. These renewal options help salespeople close more deals faster, facilitate long-term customer loyalty, and increase the renewal rate.
Some examples of incentives you can provide your customers include the following:
- Providing a discount or promotion (e.g. one month free) to those who renew early
- Offering special renewal pricing to customers who are at risk of churning or have already failed to renew
- Allowing for flexible billing, such as monthly payments for an annual subscription
- Offering discounted pricing options or special promotions to customers who opt into a longer subscription term
Of course, the ideal way to encourage customer renewals and increase subscription retention isn’t through monetary incentives. Next, we’ll discuss the importance of customer service and support in driving subscription revenue.
4. Identify churn candidates
One of the most common reasons customers choose to renew is their satisfaction with your brand, product, and services. The most apparent churn candidates are not just those who have a lot of issues with your service, but also those who disengage or stop using your product.
To minimize your churn rate, take a look at your customers’ health. Evaluate customer feedback, reviews, support tickets, and customer satisfaction or “use machine learning technology to crunch data to determine which customers are most likely to leave, and target the ones at the top of the list with new offers, sales, or promotions.” If these customers feel that their feedback will be listened to, it will improve the subscription experience and they may be more likely to renew their subscription.
5. Keep customers in the loop
Customers who question whether they should have renewed their subscription in the first place are likely to cancel it eventually. It’s vital to connect with customers and encourage them to communicate their brand experience. Provide opportunities for feedback throughout the customer journey, from surveys to chatbots to product feedback.
Effective communication in sales means understanding clients’ needs and pains, and reflecting that back in written and verbal communication with customers. To prevent churn, eliminate the causes of this doubt and remind customers of why your service is valuable. Keeping an open line of communication with them proactively encourages renewals and reinforces the notion that you value their business and have their best interests at heart.
One idea is to share updates and request feedback when sending customers a reminder that payment is due soon. This will help them feel in the loop and is an opportunity to reinforce the positive aspects of your service before renewal occurs.
6. Automate subscription billing
Manual billing processes create friction that can lead to delayed payments, invoicing errors, and a poor customer experience, putting subscription renewals at risk. Automating subscription billing ensures invoices are generated accurately and on time, tailored to each customer’s billing preferences and contract terms. This includes handling complexities like usage-based pricing, tiered plans, proration, co-terming, and mid-cycle changes.
Automated billing systems integrate with CRM and CPQ platforms to maintain consistency across the quote-to-revenue process. With real-time data flowing between systems, RevOps gains better visibility into revenue streams, simplifies compliance with revenue recognition standards, and reduces the administrative burden on finance teams.
Most importantly, automation strengthens the customer experience by making billing predictable, error-free, and easy to manage, laying the foundation for long-term renewals.
Increase renewal revenue and prevent revenue leaks with DealHub Subscription Management
DealHub helps organizations increase revenue from subscription renewals through the delivery of one fluid sales motion. Our Revenue Platform enables sales leaders to streamline the quote-to-revenue process and provide customers with the most engaging B2B buyer experience.
DealHub’s subscription management solution unifies the sales process and will allow your company to increase revenue and drive faster deals. Connect quoting to subscription services so you can automate contracts, subscriptions, renewals, recurring payments, upselling, cross-selling, co-terming, and more. Additionally, automate your billing and invoicing to accelerate time to revenue and get better insights into your customer journey and buying experience to better manage churn.
