Subscriptions go beyond streaming. Every business needs to rethink recurring revenue now.

I've been at Recurly for about a year. Subscriptions had me genuinely intrigued. Most people think of subscription and they think of streaming; that is no longer the whole story. The market is fast-moving with so many different verticals coming through. I came off a meeting this morning with airlines opening up new revenue streams through subscriptions, which would have been hard to imagine a few years ago.

Almost a decade in HR tech, time in benefits, a short stint in sales (I lost a bet; long story we won't tell today). The sales window gave me a clear view of how sales feels every day, what they go through, what it's like to carry a bag, which is probably why I work so well with CROs today.

Every merchant almost has the opportunity to get creative now. An airline can build subscriptions for bags, for loyalty, for seats. As a subscription management billing partner, our job is being able to provide everything they're going to run into. Flexibility of payments has become standard. If you want to grow globally, you have to be flexible on payments and offering.

We have subscription newbies and subscription old-timers. The old-timers know subscription from the back-end. The newbies are growth marketers and company leaders being told we need a new revenue stream, let's go through subscriptions, let's open it up. The Recurly tagline (get ahead of what's next) reflects what we owe those teams: showing them through data and trends what we believe is coming, where they could go, and how we can build it into the software to guide them.

Nuuly, the Urban Outfitters clothing-rental subscription, became a big customer last year, and we just renewed them. As a subscriber I've watched the brand open up new things over time. One example: subscribers demanded that when they return a box, they immediately get to order their next box. The question for Recurly was how do we build this in the back end. So when you arrive with your box to drop it off and you're at the store alone, you can already order your new box. The new behaviour was built behind the scenes so the subscriber experience could deliver it.

I just walked here from a meeting with Worldpay. Partnerships are everything to us today. PayPal, Avalara, Adyen, all critical. The discipline isn't I need to do things for Adyen. The final value goes to the customer, not to the partner or to us. We plan to get intimate with our partners the same way we get intimate with our customers (one of our winning strategies). We run over 20 events a year with partners across the world. Today's Worldpay conversation was the same conversation: how do we make this partnership a friendship, how do we connect with each other so we can do good for each other.

We launched the What's Next series. Stockholm, Amsterdam, London, Miami, Chicago, New York City. It isn't a series where we bring prospects in for a chat. Prospects and customers attend together, learn from each other, and come out with something new about how they can move ahead. We also bring industry experts who work with our competitors. The goal is to make the market better. Recurly will make the market better, and the market will get ahead. Customers love the series because they get to talk to our future customers, which helps us a great deal.

The hesitation marketers have around mixing prospects with customers is what if we don't know the health of the customer, what if they complain? That's an opportunity. If they're not happy, sit down and solve whatever is going on with them. Turn them into your greatest advocates.

The CMO's relationship with the CRO is the single most important relationship for growth. It's tricky to gain real growth or accelerate growth if that relationship isn't solid. The discipline that built it for me: I report on every pipeline. Marketing, partner, outbound, all of it. Some CMOs have said you're nuts, it's a heavy lift. When I met my CEO over a year ago, I told him that on day one. I can drive the function of marketing, yes, and the pipeline for marketing, I can run that. But I'm not your functional leader. It has to go beyond that, because that's when the power comes through. If marketing knows it's helping outbound and helping partners, the team owns all of it. If we're doing it right, no matter who you're calling, they've seen something from us. Our CRO loves that. There's a big buy-in because of it.

When I arrived, the teams were very separated. Sales doing one thing, marketing doing another, calling each other out terribly. The brief I gave was we are going to double our conversion rate. We tripled it.

Those teams had to learn to work well together without me and the CRO in the room. The job is not to be needed eventually. So we created a group called the Pipeline Warriors. They have their own shirts and crazy hats. The Warriors work together two to three times a week to build pipeline, sales and marketing leaders together, outbound included, working toward the same goal. They get the tension of the number, and they build the connection. We're bringing them in person next week because they've done such a good job this quarter.

When someone joins a marketing team, the first instinct is to say the most important team is demand generation, because they produce pipeline. They're important; their job is to get the activity out. The teams to build very strongly and very early are product marketing, content, design, and ops.

Product marketing. I will build that team before I build anything else. They drive positioning overall. That positioning streams into content.

Design. People look at it as the creative team that makes things look pretty. If it doesn't look good, it isn't going to be good. The team is critical.

Content. Social, PR, AR, all forms of content; that team boosts everything for pipeline. It's what demand generation then uses.

Demand generation. All of DG, paid, content syndication, ABM, lives there.

Operations and mar-tech. The connection of mar-tech and revenue tech is one of the most important things for growth. The CRM and marketing automation choices are critical to where the company goes in future.

Advocates is a very important metric and it's often overlooked. I track it closely. Case studies, anything from a customer perspective. Set it as a goal and report on it. Start small. At a company six times bigger I started by saying we'll start with 100 advocates. That isn't real. Start with five and learn what they need from you, not what you need from them. What do they like? Why do they come to conferences with you? They like to be exposed; they like to be guided; they want in-person. Find that out, then build the programme.

Conversions were low when I arrived. When conversions are low, you're meeting the pipeline goal but you're sending material to sales that isn't a fit, isn't ICP. You're wasting the team's productivity time, and you lose trust in sales that is very hard to get back. The first priority was MQL-to-pipeline conversion tracking. Gartner put out a report recently saying the average MQL-to-pipeline conversion is between 3 and 4%. Four is high. We set ours at 4 and we hit 6. That metric is critical.

Quarter-to-quarter pipeline. Month-by-month intensity even though we report quarterly. ACV (am I passing the right size of brand to sales, or are they good but not the right size). I get into sales metrics. Sales-cycle length, win rates: my product marketing team is measured big-time on win rates. If the cycle is starting to hurt, I don't want it to be the CRO's responsibility alone; we look at the data and see what it's telling us. We might be playing a big part in it.

The metric a board or private equity owner picks if they had to pick one for marketing: marketing's contribution to pipeline. Many companies are around 35 to 40%. We set ours higher because of the opportunity, around 50%. The healthy range depends on the motion, but 35 to 50% is the range. With a partner-led motion the number is different.

Our State of Subscriptions data shows the move from acquiring to retaining has completely changed the model. Merchants are now concentrating on retaining, because over time that's what creates the most growth. Subscription services that allow pausing (Recurly enables it) see tremendous returns. People who cancel and leave are often returning customers. Retention is becoming the industry, which means we will progress so much together.

For Recurly itself, retention is the metric I'm most excited about. Nobody wants to lose customers. If you're at risk of losing a customer, understand if they're not the right fit and let them go; that's also a retention strategy. For the ones you want to keep, you have to do what they need for you to do to make them successful. There's a lot to unpack there.