by Megan Golden
Yesterday, Zuora packed our bags and headed north to Seattle for our fourth Z-tour event this year.
Our luncheon was held at The Dahlia Lounge–fit for foodies and known as the epicenter of Northwest Cuisine featuring flakey crab cakes and steaming doughnuts.
Once the room was packed with a very engaging Seattle crowd, our CEO, Tien Tzuo spoke on how the world is moving to subscriptions. Everything from Netflix to Salesforce.com to ZipCar. The interesting point here is that while the subscription model enables greater flexibility for consumers, the need for a robust packaging and pricing model is key to subscription success.
We were thrilled to welcome local customer TalentSpring, who gave a testimonial on how they came to choose Zuora as their subscription billing platform and their results to date.
TalentSpring is a SaaS solution for candidate sourcing utilizing semantic search technology. Rather than focusing their time on company infrastructure, it was key for TalentSpring to direct all their resources to product development and candidate sourcing. It was also critical that they build their business processes quickly and seamlessly through salesforce.com. That’s where Zuora came in!
The solution for TalentSpring was Zuora’s suite of Subscription Management tools. With Z-Billing & Z-Payments, they have been able to build, test, quote, close, invoice, and collect cash through Zuora’s integration with salesforce.com with no additional IT resources required; all implementation and testing was completed by the VP of Sales!
In fact Mike Hayes, VP of Sales at TaletSpring said, “Every part of Zuora we’ve touched from the sales cycle to the post sales team to support has been fantastic!”
In the early planning stages for this event, we had expected this to be an intimate event with a handful of SaaS companies. However, despite the massive and unforeseen road construction blocking the entrance to the restaurant (thank you Seattle Department of Transportation. not.) we had an amazing turnout. Standing. Room. Only.
After getting to know some of our attendees and visiting with our customers, we realized that the Saas community in Seattle is more than just brewing; it’s here to stay. Coming from the mecca of the Web 2.0 community here in Silicon Valley, it’s so exciting to see other subscription communities evolve and create their own story in other cities.
Seattle, we will definitely be back!