Author’s Note: You may have heard that we've acquired Goolash , makers of a SaaS license reconciliation and billing application. That's the headline, but I'd like to share the backstory behind the acquisition and why this brings us one step closer to our vision — the first intelligent Revenue Platform for technology partners.

An open secret among technology partners is that they’re under billing for SaaS licenses. Why? It’s usually due to manual, error-prone processes in billing. When you are managing 1000s of endpoints, there’s bound to be a few slips here and there. These compound over time, resulting in massive revenue leakage.

Working with partners, we found out that on average, you’re leaking as much as 20 percent of your license revenue per month. That’s insane, right? We thought so, too, and set out to solve the problem. 

We wanted to do this because we see it as critical to our vision for helping partners to add revenue and scale effectively. How can you chart a course to new waters with a leaky boat? 

Doing so led us to explore new territory as well, and in the process we found a way to expand our vision. But first, let’s start with understanding how they got here in the first place.

Setting the Scene: SaaS Explosion

By 2015, the SaaS explosion was in full swing. Small and medium businesses (SMBs) could buy enterprise-class software as a service from thousands of emerging vendors calling to solve their business problems (and capture their growing tech budgets). As a result, technology partners and advisers like you became even more important in sourcing and vetting SaaS apps, and a critical player in the cloud technology supply chain.

While working in the venture capital world, I saw many upstart SaaS companies struggling to gain traction with SMBs. Many did not understand how to get introduced to technology partners, let alone create productive relationships with them.

At the same time, your story was being rewritten. Technology partners shifted their business models massively. There was a scramble to adapt from ordering hardware/software and administering reactive break-fix services to providing proactive subscription services for dozens of solutions.

Chapter 1: Earn More Revenue by Accelerating Sales

Seeing the struggles of technology partners led me to ask, “How do you equip yourself to change your business model?”

It certainly means a shift in mindset. 

But how could I develop a product to help? 

Zomentum started by helping technology partners accelerate sales, consolidating many tools into one, and automating what can be a tedious process. Our partners are thrilled with the results. On average, Zomentum partners are creating documents 70 percent faster and closing twice as many deals — with a 600 percent increase in deal value! Your sales, upgrades, and expansions activities have booked $500 million a year in revenue on our platform. Kudos.

We love watching you win, but it felt like there was more we could do.

Chapter 2: Manage Revenue with License Reconciliation

Adding more revenue by optimizing the sale process is great, but only if you can accurately bill the solutions you sell. 

Let me explain: If you have just 20 SMB customers, each with 10 employees that use 10 apps, that's 2,000 licenses for you to track and invoice. With more customers, employees, and apps, the numbers of licenses to manage are staggering. 

This is a modern problem that didn’t exist 10 years ago. And it’s one most tech partners are still solving manually, resulting in inaccurate billing and lost revenue. It's sort of the partner ecosystem's dirty little secret, but it's costly; we estimate about one in five licenses go unbilled.

To help you protect your revenue, we knew we needed to solve this license reconciliation and billing problem. 

Ben Spector, a former MSP who now works as a product manager for our company, came to us with a solution. Goolash. It had been a lifesaver for him and encouraged us to look into a potential partnership.

Then we met with Goolash's founder Jef Bogaerts. Like many startup founders, he set out to conquer a problem he was tackling personally. He formed Goolash to solve his MSP's SaaS licensing and billing challenges. We saw in Jef the joy, enthusiasm, and intent to solve a problem. He worked on it for three years.

Jeff launched Goolash in 2017 and it’s now used by hundreds of technology partners. The solution is tried and tested, and our research found it to be one of the strongest license reconciliation and billing options on the market. 

Goolash’s superior product solved a problem we wanted to alleviate for our partners, and their team’s focus and determination was also a perfect fit. We made an offer to buy the company and bring Jef and his team on board to continue to build out the license reconciliation capabilities of the Zomentum Revenue Platform. (Note: You can subscribe to the app from Zomentum today. Click here: www.zomentum.com/license-reconciliation.) I couldn’t be more excited for our shared future.

Chapter 3: Grow Revenue with Smart Solutions for SMBs - Coming Soon!

With the Goolash acquisition, we've successfully delivered on two tentpoles of the Revenue Platform, accelerating revenue with the sales application and managing revenue with the license reconciliation.

The next step is to enable our technology partners to:

• Find new SaaS solutions to offer their SMB clients. 
• Add solutions to proposals instantly     
• Maximize recurring revenue 
• Deliver business-critical applications to their clients     

Soon we will enable SaaS vendors to be fully integrated in the platform, so sales enablement and transactions will happen in the same place. We want to facilitate a Partner Ecosystem that actually works for Partners, bringing everything together in one place. 

The Next Chapter: To Be Written

The SaaS explosion continues today and offers you the chance to grow with it. However,   without the right tools, it’s difficult to scale. That's where the Zomentum Revenue Platform comes in. Our vision is to enable you to earn, manage and grow your revenue. 

Looking forward, we see the potential of the Zomentum Revenue Platform to unlock opportunities for the entire technology partner ecosystem. Imagine how business decisions will change when we can empower users with insights based on hundreds of thousands of transactions flowing through our platform. We call it "revenue intelligence."

Partners, it’s time to capitalize on opportunities in the SaaS revolution. 

Let’s write the next chapter, together.