Paddle Billing
ProfitWell MetricsThe company
Trusted globally by more than 30,000 businesses and 900,000 users, CrashPlan offers robust, secure computer backups accessible for anyone, anytime, anywhere.
Headquartered in Minneapolis, USA, CrashPlan’s user-friendly and highly-secure products appeal to a broad audience globally, including creative individuals such as podcasters and digital artists, right through to some of the world’s largest enterprises.
With a strong ambition to continue growing, the company is transforming into a comprehensive data resilience platform to further help its customers improve their ability to effectively withstand and recover from data-related disasters.
The challenge
CrashPlan was using a Merchant of Record platform to manage payments and billing and to facilitate purchases through its website, but this quickly became outdated.
Our existing solution was no longer serving us. While it was a Merchant of Record (MoR), it wasn’t really intended for e-commerce and SaaS. It was quite clunky and required a lot of code changes for us to make even the most basic of updates to the shopping cart. Its billing complexity also resulted in a lot of tickets for our support team."
Christine Schaefer, CMO, Crashplan
The solution also lacked any real reporting functionality.
“We had no metrics around retention,” said Jessica Seward, CrashPlan’s Director of Marketing Retention.
“That meant we had no way of knowing why customers were canceling. We could send some basic follow-up emails in the platform, but we didn’t even have any insight into whether they had been opened or not.”
CrashPlan’s marketing team realized they could do much better and sought a solution that would deliver a modern shopping cart experience, better metrics, and adaptability for new products and promotions.
While the marketing team was responsible for selecting a solution, it was the finance team that stepped in to insist that the chosen software was a MoR.
“From our standpoint, our main stipulation was that they had to choose a Merchant of Record,” said Anna Johnston, CrashPlan’s Finance Controller.
Here in the US, sales tax is a nasty thing to deal with. Every state has its own tax rules. We also sell our products in 14 currencies, so that adds further complexities. If we were to have a non-MoR payment solution, we would have had to hire at least three people to take care of our sales tax. While MoR solutions tend to be more expensive, they certainly aren’t as costly as three new hires."
Anna Johnston, Financial Controller, CrashPlan
The solution
After a thorough review of the market, it was only Paddle that checked all of CrashPlan’s boxes.
The fact that Paddle is purpose-built for SaaS was really appealing to us. It had a lot of features and functionalities that we could benefit from. We saw that we could make it easy for people to move between packages, for example. And there were a lot of metrics around retention."
Christine Schaefer, CMO, CrashPlan
Paddle’s term optimization feature also stood out.
“We have lots of people who sign up for a monthly plan thinking they will only need to back up their data for three months, but then decide to stay on for several years,” Christine said.
“We wanted to be able to encourage these people to sign up for annual plans so that we could make our accounts receivable more predictable. Paddle can facilitate that.”
“Paddle’s ability to offer discounts was another massive pull as we wanted to use promo codes for different campaigns and events,” Jessica said.
Paddle was also the only MoR on CrashPlan’s final shortlist, offering ease of compliance and reporting.
“From a payments standpoint, Paddle was significantly better than any other MoR,” said Eunice Riley, CrashPlan’s Senior Manager of Revenue and Accounts Receivable.
“We saw we would get payments three days after the end of the month. That's almost unheard of in our experience.”
Once CrashPlan settled on Paddle, they were up and running and producing their first reports in just eight weeks.
The Paddle team said they were all-in to help us implement fast, and they kept their word. Our development team is constantly in touch with the Paddle team to work through everything in real time. Any issues we had were fixed super-fast. We also have weekly check-ins, which are so useful.”
Jessica Seward, Director of Marketing Retention, CrashPlan
The results
Since switching to Paddle, CrashPlan is reaping the rewards.
100% increase in customer sign-ups with no additional marketing spend
Using Paddle, CrashPlan has easily created three different subscription packages tailored to different customer segments:
- Essential - Aimed at individual consumers
- Professional - For prosumers and small businesses
- Enterprise - Tailored towards larger corporations.
This has delivered tangible benefits:
Without increasing marketing dollars, we doubled the number of sign-ups off the back of trials. Instead of having one package that fits all, Paddle has made it easy for us to offer three packages that appeal directly to the target personas and at a suitable price point. I also think the buying experience is much better with Paddle."
Christine Schaefer, CMO, CrashPlan
Closing bigger deals faster
Paddle also facilitates product-led sales for CrashPlan’s enterprise customers.
“Because our product is so easy to use, it demos really well,” Christine explains. “People typically get a demo and immediately understand it. So, they'll come in and buy a few licenses to cover the first few people in their office for a specific use case, and then they'll grow from there. If they're of a certain size and bought through Paddle via the website, we can hand those leads off to the sales team. We call that a product-led sales motion.”
This approach means CrashPlan’s traditional slow-moving sales model is now a thing of the past. There’s no more chasing leads or proof of value presentations. This makes CrashPlan’s sales team more efficient and improves the customer experience at the same time.
Winning back over 300 lost customers
By leveraging the ability to offer promo codes via Paddle, CrashPlan has been able to bring back hundreds of previous customers.
We have been running a win-back campaign that has been hugely successful. We sent a promo code offering discounts on our three packages to former customers. We've already had over 300 people return. That’s big for us since we lost a lot of customers on the old platform."
Jessica Seward, Director of Marketing Retention, CrashPlan
90% reduction in billing support tickets
Since implementing Paddle, CrashPlan’s support team has witnessed a dramatic reduction in the amount of support requests they receive related to billing.
In our old solution, 90% of the tickets that our customers submitted were related to billing issues. And those have just disappeared now we have Paddle. That’s taken a lot of stress away from our support team."
Christine Schaefer, CMO, CrashPlan
Finance made easy
CrashPlan’s finance team also benefits from Paddle.
The MoR model makes our life easy. The risk lies completely with Paddle. It completely offloads the sales tax burden for us, so we don’t have any compliance responsibilities. It means we are free to do more meaningful work for the business."
Anna Johnston, Financial Controller, CrashPlan
Scaling success in the future
Following the success to date, Christine and her team are already exploring new experiments to increase conversions and revenue. They also plan to engage with Paddle's team to optimize their global pricing strategy and leverage what’s working for similar SaaS companies selling globally.
“It's a very consultative relationship. Paddle is very involved in telling us best practices of what other SaaS companies are doing and how they're doing it,” Christine said. “I really like the fact that Paddle is focused on SaaS. That was a big deal for us.”
Paddle allows us to experiment with different offers and functionalities, and then we can sit back and watch the metrics in real time to see how best to proceed. That’s really exciting for us – we can’t wait to unlock new possibilities."
Christine Schaefer, CMO, CrashPlan
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