At a business launch the other day, I made a “mouth-fart” stating that Service Providers, ISV or just vendors in general should consider “collecting money” in stead of “claiming money”. My point – people should subscribe to cash :).
In many European countries, there is a business service that automatically collect money for on-demand subscriptions such as utility power, phone bills etc. and making it easy for the providers to get rid of the collective cash-flow and angry customers for those interest rates we do add-on the bills for late payments.
What did I mean by Subscribe to “Cash”?
My point was: recurrent revenue stream companies are somewhat subscribing to cash. The beauty of recurrent revenue is you can predict next months income 90%; if you run a optimized and professional business (=churn). But the pitfall of those optimized business’ is exactly to get money at the invoice date, and not spend thousands of dollars in operational costs, to claim those. Service providers, SaaS companies and ISV companies should consider collection cash from payment services.
The problem to this, is there is no easy way. Corporate credit cards are not used in Europe and you rely on “if the country has a payment collection service”. Tip of the day: Business opportunity!
So – when you are in room with great friendship you can lauch of a wrong pronouncement, but reality is that I am often triggered by some of these thoughts in terms of changing the game/term.
Changing the Terms
Reality is many companies are to conservative in changing their business and adopting new procedures. Reality is we as human beings are reluctant to change – period! But any company vice president should book time with each segment of the company, to understand where and how to increase productivity, help customers remove barriers to consuming your product or understanding your sales process. Change is good. Change is great – if you can manage it probably.
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