Introducing Sequence - From the Founders

We’re excited to introduce Sequence, modernising revenue collection for sales led businesses.

My Co-Founder, Eamon, and I have spent 10+ years founding and scaling B2B companies. Despite all of the tools at our disposal throughout this time, we never found a scalable and effective way to manage the process from sales contract to revenue.

While B2C fintech and payments infrastructure has progressed significantly in recent years, revenue collection in B2B companies with custom deal terms or hybrid pricing models has lagged far behind. It remains manual, disjointed and led by incumbents who were not purpose-built for the pricing and billing flexibility required by modern teams.

The menu of choices for a typical software or infrastructure company usually looks something like this: 

1. Spreadsheet based: Pricing, billing and customer usage data lives in different silos, usually with a single point of failure and limited visibility across teams. The process is error prone, manual, and opportunities for maximising revenue are missed.
2. In House Build: Teams build a custom solution that works initially but diverts an increasing number of engineers towards tweaking and maintaining a large product surface area in house (everything from rate cards, billing and usage calculations to native integrations with other tools). Launching new product lines, pricing models, or geographies becomes constrained by the backoffice build. This pain ultimately leads to a multi-quarter engineering project to migrate to a third-party platform in the long run.
3. Multiple point solutions: Teams adopt 4-5 point solutions (CPQ + Billing + Invoicing + Commission Calcs + RevOps insights etc) just to be able to collect and track revenue, and invest a lot of effort stitching these products together or hiring a large team to manage it. They are often left with imperfect data flows between these tools and with their own product.
4. Legacy players: companies try to shoehorn modern pricing models and ways of working into inflexible & overpriced legacy solutions that aren’t designed for their business model. This again leads to product and business model changes being constrained by the backoffice.

Each of these paths creates a huge amount of friction for businesses that are trying to innovate quickly and react in real time to their customers' needs. We’ve talked to hundreds of leaders across finance, revenue and ops, and observed first hand how they have struggled to build in workflow automation, collaboration and visibility into their order to cash process.

Software buying has evolved and companies that keep pace with this are winning. Today we’re seeing a rapid trend towards businesses deploying hybrid pricing models; a mix of subscription, usage based, seat based and add ons to maximise revenue across the lifecycle of a customer. Our customers are tailoring pricing for each customer segment to maximise their revenue and the chance of getting deals across the line. We’ve also seen the best B2B companies leverage a mix of Sales-led and PLG to drive the best results. The available tooling today is not able to handle the complexity of multiple pricing models at the same time, or the human-in-loop adjustments that inevitably happen as part of a sales process.

Today we’re excited to announce our sales contract to revenue platform designed to help sales led companies in a modern pricing world boost their revenue and automate their operations.

Sequence helps modern, sales led B2B companies automate their end to end revenue process with a modular product suite and seamless data layer. With Sequence, employees can translate contracts, capture products and prices, include usage based charges, automate billing calculations, auto-send invoices and manage revenue recognition, and reconciliation. Sequence provides a source of truth for every sales contract and usage data record, that powers multiple teams to work faster and optimise across the full revenue cycle. Integrations with other tools in the stack means Sequence pushes actionable data back to enrich the tools that teams are already working in.

Moreover, Sequence provides a clear, visual workflow for automating revenue across Sales, Finance, Business Operations, Account Management and Engineering.  We’ve put a huge emphasis on usability, making the product magically simple for operators to work with.

We’re excited to help companies reduce costs through automation, consolidation and modern software. Our vision is to help companies manage their full revenue lifecycle with a suite of magically simple finance products and a unified revenue database that triggers actions and insights across the business.

We’ve assembled a deeply passionate team of builders from companies like Monzo, Wise, Stripe, Intercom, Revolut, Plaid, Onfido and Tessian, and are thankful to be backed by some of the best investors in the industry including A16z.

If you’re curious about what we’re shipping, stay up to date with our product changelog here. And if this sounds like something your company needs, get in touch here.

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Riya