The consultant's problem

Simran Nanda, founder of Simply Revenue  is a solo revenue operations consultant who works with early-stage B2B SaaS companies ready to scale past founder-led sales. She helps them formalize their entire customer journey, from marketing to sales to customer success.

One problem kept coming up with her clients that she didn't have a good answer for: invoicing and CPQ.

"I don’t have a go-to invoicing tool. CPQ and invoicing are just very painful processes to solve and to implement. I get asked often what I would recommend, and I just don't have an answer I’m confident in."

What her clients were dealing with

Both of Simran's clients who eventually adopted Measure were doing invoicing by hand. Both had usage-based pricing components on top of standard subscription fees, which made the manual calculation painful and error-prone.

"There was a lot of calculation because for both of these clients, there's a usage-based component and a standard subscription platform fee. The usage-based piece became a huge pain point. It was just a really manual effort calculating everything, making sure it was right. There's always the chance for human error."

The head of finance at one client was buried in spreadsheets, maintaining a complicated system that worked but couldn't scale and could never be handed off to someone else.

How she found Measure

Simran met the Measure team at a RevOps dinner they hosted in Toronto. It was the first event she'd attended that gathered people specifically in revenue operations to talk about their shared challenges.

She was already intrigued by the founders' backgrounds. "They seem to be really experienced in this space. They seem to have faced these pain points themselves and are coming from a product-first, solution-first mindset."

By coincidence, both of her clients independently came across Measure around the same time and were evaluating it. She encouraged them to move forward.

The implementation experience

Simran's most recent Measure implementation has been the smoothest she's seen for this category of tool.

"Compared to a previous implementation that took six months for CPQ alone, we're on track to complete this months faster, with a dramatically lighter lift."

She highlighted a few things that made it work:

The team handled the heavy lifting. "Measure did a great job helping my clients gather and compile their data. That data cleanup exercise will almost inevitably need to happen for any migration. Measure took on the bulk of the effort and broke it into manageable chunks for the client to review."

No dedicated implementation firm needed. "Normally a CPQ implementation is its own dedicated project. At a previous company, we hired a consulting firm purely for that one build. With Measure, my client and I implemented it directly with their team, no dedicated firm needed."

The tool fits existing processes. "Measure did a great job understanding the requirements and meeting those needs point by point, fitting into the existing process rather than making us redo our pricing to work within their database."

The results

For her first client, Simran's involvement after implementation was minimal.

"No news is good news in RevOps. You very rarely hear about something when it's working. You usually only hear about it when something breaks. For the first client, they really didn't need my involvement much. I honestly very rarely hear about any fixes or improvements they need. It was ‘set it and forget it.’"

The biggest impact was on the head of finance's time. "It freed up her time a lot. Almost entirely. She was stuck in a lot of these tasks, tracking things in Excel and Google Sheets. It was a complicated system built by necessity that worked for her, but at scale, or if you ever needed to hand this off, I can't imagine what that would have looked like."

Why she keeps referring clients

Simran now recommends Measure to clients dealing with subscription and usage-based billing. Her reasoning:

It solves a problem she couldn't solve before. CPQ and invoicing were the gap in her toolkit. Now she has a recommendation.

It gets sensitive financial data out of the CRM. "Being able to push this stuff into a legitimate invoicing tool and get sensitive financial data out of our CRMs has been very beneficial overall."

It frees up finance leaders to do strategic work. "Instead of spending time figuring out which clients got signed and which ones need to be billed for what and re-referencing contracts every time, they can focus on strategy. How can we best use this revenue? How can we reallocate costs to the channels that are working?"

The API gives her flexibility. "Their API access has been a really valuable tool. We're able to update data, create data, whatever we need using our own workflow tools. It gives us a lot of autonomy to solve a very wide range of problems."

Her advice to other consultants

"Go in with clear requirements. Be very clear on exactly what the tool needs to do. And keep in mind the effort required on both ends. As long as you empower Measure with the right information and are available in that initial term, they'll take it from there and make it smooth for you."