As a consulting firm, we offer CRM solutions to our customers and I am considering using Make scenarios to help customers automate processes. I have a Make account. I’d like to use ‘Folders’. One Folder per customer. Specific scenarios placed in customer-specific folders.
Questions:
How do I track the number of Operations running for each customer?
How best to monetize a Scenario and auto-bill customers?
I’m just not sure if its better to get the customer to just buy their own Make Account and just charge them a monthly fixed fee for consulting and leave the Make costs to the customer and Make.
How do others manage this? I’d be interested to learn. Thanks!
Depends on what you and your customer agree on. Some of my customers are Make enthusiasts themselves and invite me as an App Developer to their Make account. All Make related billing is done on their side.
There are other cases where I open a new account in name of my customer and invite myself as App Developer. This makes sense for me to keep track of payments, used operations an access control. If the customer want’s to take over the account in the future, I only have to transfer ownership.
In a few cases, I have scenario’s running in my own account. But the used operations are negligible.
I’d love to hear a bit more detail about how you’re going about this. It seems like there are three options:
Customer makes own account, invites you as developer
You make customer account, invite yourself as developer
You have scenarios running on your own account, usually low operations
For cases 1 and 2, I am assuming that the Make operations billing is handled by the customer, and you charge either one-time or recurring consulting fees. Does this sound correct?
Option 2 sounds best, as I would assume that it takes the burden off clients from having to go in and set things up themselves, yet it keeps things separate from your own Make account.
I am just trying to gather information, as I am very interested in beginning an automation consultancy using Make.
You are correct on all accounts. In my way of working, it is up to the preference of the customer. Some are already Make users, some are interested in Make themselves and want me to teach them, and others don’t want to know a single thing about it; they just want a working solution.
I have also found that the Make TEAMS feature is helpful for monetization. You do need to subscribe to Make Teams though $$.
I like Teams because I can have a Team per customer and I can monitor use of all operations by Team and bill my end customers accordingly. And because the cost of operations are for my organization and not for each Team, I can buy operations in bulk which reduces my costs.
It also makes it easy to switch between customer scenarios without logging off/on all the time and my staff have access to the one environment so its easier to support.