Integrating Zuora with Salesforce (and the Rest of Your Technology Stack)

How many actionable data points are hidden away in your billing and subscription system?

Your marketing, sales, and customer success teams probably need regular insight into:

1. Who’s finishing their free trial, and ready to pay you for the first time (but hasn’t given you their credit card)
2. Whose subscription is up for renewal
3. Who is eligible for a cross-sell or upsell to a better subscription tier
4. Whose account has a billing exception like credit card expiration or declined charges
5. Changes to account members or billing owners on an account

Until now, there have been three approaches to getting data out of Zuora and into other systems: building dev-intensive custom integrations with the Zuora API, partnering with (and paying for) an integration solution provider, or using point-to-point connectors that only pipe data in one direction.

Usermind takes a different approach: Our Zuora integration uses both their REST and SOAP APIs, and because you can define your business logic and automate processes in natural language, you never have to write a line of code.

With Usermind, you can connect business processes between your CRM, marketing automation, transactional email, communication tools, and Zuora — and get actionable insight on those end-to-end processes. And because Usermind handles entity mapping between systems, you can automate communications to the right person at the right time — even though Zuora only stores an email address for the billing contact person.

Here are some examples of what you can do in Usermind with triggers, actions, and data from Zuora and other systems:

• Map entities between Zuora and other systems so you can effectively manage customer, product, and partner lifecycles
• Manage the flow of information between Salesforce and Zuora
• Trigger automatic notifications to the account owner via email, Slack, or Jive when there are issues with billing or changes to an account
• Automate acquisition, upsell, and renewal processes in your marketing automation, help desk, and CRM
• Notify the appropriate member of your team when there’s a billing exception
• Update Zuora information based on changes to the Salesforce account
• Use Zuora account information to update custom fields or objects in Salesforce
• Use signals in Zuora to trigger an email through Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, Pardot, MailChimp, or Mandrill
• Use customer behavior to trigger upsell or cross-sell campaigns
• Manage lead/account conversion in Salesforce for products purchased via Zuora
• Prevent the trigger of marketing campaigns if an account has a billing exception
• Add someone to a nurture campaign when they’re X days out from renewal
• Automatically remove people from nurture campaigns when their accounts are renewed
• Update lead score based on someone’s Zuora account, billing information, or lack thereof

How it Works

Let’s say we want to optimize our SaaS free trial based on Zuora interactions. We’ll add rules to our Journeys in Usermind to define that logic.

1. Map Zuora account data to the correct entity data in CRM, marketing automation, and usage analytics systems

First, we’ll make sure our entities are appropriately mapped between our systems. For this example, we’re using Salesforce, Marketo, and Mixpanel. You could also connect Eloqua, Pardot, HubSpot, or use usage metrics from your custom database or delivered via webhooks. Once mapping is established in Usermind, objects in Zuora will be associated with the appropriate related objects or fields in your other connected systems.

2. Define your Milestones

Next, we’ll set criteria for successful completion of each stage in our free trial.

For this example, we’ll use: Signed up for Free Trial, Entered Billing Information, Successful Payment.

3. Define your rules

Next, we’ll define the logic behind our business processes to:

1. Notify the team whenever someone has credit card failure
2. Trigger email campaigns based on trial expiration date
3. Update Salesforce opportunity status based on status in Zuora
4. Assign a new account owner upon successful completion of free trial, or when a credit card is added

Sound like a lot of work? Here’s what it looks like in Usermind.

4. Analyze all of the things!

Because we’re capturing all of the data, you can compare cohorts over time, see where travelers are getting stuck, and gain insight into how to improve the journey at each step — based on the analytics of your customers’ actual progress.

Historically, it’s been difficult to integrate Zuora without expensive, time-consuming custom solutions — and even harder to get meaningful reporting on how billing issues impact your conversion rates.

With Usermind, you can optimize your customer’s experience from free trial to renewal, from one centralized hub for data, action, and analytics.