How the Sales Team at Coorpacademy Spent 50% Less Time on Non-selling Tasks after Using Chargebee + Salesforce

Coorpacademy made the shift from Zuora to Chargebee to streamline its quote-to-cash processes.

Tech Stack
Finance	(Stripe), Chargebee, Xero, Upflow
Sales & Marketing	Salesforce, Mailchimp, Pardot
Operations	Zapier
Analytics	Xero, Salesforce

“There is a spot-on sync between Salesforce, Chargebee, and Xero. The sales team follows customer and subscription information in Chargebee and Salesforce. Finance team looks into Chargebee, Salesforce and Xero for the forecast and pipeline. One of the main KPIs is the quality of data between these integrated systems.”

- Quentin Choserot, Operations manager, Coorpacademy

Before Chargebee:

Long quote-to-cash sales cycle

Significant time of the sales team was spent on billing customers accurately and scouting for subscription information from different tools.

After Chargebee:

Streamlined sales operations

Chargebee + Salesforce integration streamlined the internal processes for Sales, Success and Finance, allowing them to concentrate on their bigger KPIs.

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Coorpacademy is a Learning Experience Platform used by corporates to upskill all their workforce with corporate training programs and about 1500+ online soft skills courses. As you read the story of how Chargebee helped perfect the sales process for Coorpacademy, 800,000 users are learning something new on the platform right now.

The Problem

As a 100% sales-driven organization selling to high-value corporates, a fast and accurate quote-to-cash process is essential for Coorpacademy. Sales at Coorpacademy involves 3 different teams stationed across the entire workflow right from when an opportunity becomes a customer to an upgrade:

Sales Development Representative (SDR) first contacts and qualifies the prospect.
Business Developer (BD) offers a demo, sends a quote, negotiates and wins the customer.
Customer Success Manager (CSM) handles recurring billing for customers and works closely to promote upgrades and renewals.

Time to convert from quote-to-cash hampered by manual processes

The BDs often had to create quotes with custom prices for bespoke course bundles. The innumerable back and forth negotiations with enterprise prospects just added to the complexity. After a quote got accepted, BDs had to make the custom price reflect on customer records in their CRM (Salesforce), the invoice and all the way back to Xero, their G/L system for accounting. Moments of elation quickly turned into frustration.

Siloed processes eating away at the efficiency of sales, success and finance teams

“The main KPI for a CSM is to reduce the response time taken when a customer raises an upgrade request. CSMs should not have to do a ton of detective work to fill in the right billing information on a quote or an invoice,” explains Quentin Choserot, Operations manager. “Part of my role includes process improvement. I work directly with finance, sales, success and marketing teams to improve our internal processes so they can concentrate on their bigger KPIs. And that’s why Chargebee was brought into the picture regarding the billing process.”

The problem with Zuora + Salesforce integration

With Salesforce as their single source of truth, getting billing information to flow seamlessly from Zuora into Salesforce was incredibly complex. “The main problem with Zuora was complexity. Even creating invoices involved a lot of human errors because of the different fields you have to fill. ” recalls Quentin. Standard reporting took way too long to execute: the finance team had to extract information from Zuora into Excel and then create forecast reports.

If your billing component doesn't work as expected, you won't get the same level of accuracy or efficiency in your source of truth - which is Salesforce for Coorpacademy.

The Solution

Weighed against Zuora, what set Chargebee apart for Coorpacademy was its

Deep integration with Salesforce
Chargebee Quotes
Two-way integration with Xero
Invoice automation
Attractive price

Here’s how the two-way sync between Chargebee and Salesforce empowers the sales team at Coorpacademy:

The sales team creates new customers in Salesforce and pushes customer information back into Chargebee. On the other side, invoices are created for respective accounts in Chargebee and line items are pushed back into Salesforce. This sync further enables the finance team and the sales team to create forecasting reports all without moving away from their CRM.
Once the CSM takes charge of a customer, they keep track of the user activity in the product. Example, let's say the customer wants to create a few more courses or add more employees to learn on the platform. Once the CSM identifies such an upgrade opportunity, they create an opportunity in Salesforce and immediately send out a customized quote from Chargebee to the customer.

The Payoff

Process improvements: With billing, subscription and pricing information easily accessible within chargebee, the sales team was able to efficiently navigate customers from quote-to-cash without making costly errors.
Flexible billing models: Coorpacademy has been able to bill the way that works best for their customers: stair step pricing in most cases, and custom prices for unique courses offered.
Time saved with Auto-sync: Integration with Xero accurately maps the payment information to the invoice from Chargebee, relieving the finance team of manual efforts and improving accuracy.
Zero-hiccup migration: “The implementation team from Chargebee was really kind and professional and they helped a lot to also handle the migration from Zuora and parallely implement Chargebee for our complex workflows” Quentin says.