A cloud-based planning platform provider achieves 25% reduction in their deal cycle time by upgrading to CPQ plus

The client is a SaaS planning platform provider offering a solution that enables dynamic, collaborative, and intelligent planning. With over 20 offices globally, 175 partners, and more than 1,250 customers worldwide, the company offers global enterprises solutions to connect people, data, and plans to enable real-time planning and decision-making.

The client’s configuration and pricing process was complex, with unique contracting process and multiple price versions for the same product. With the processes being mostly manual, quotes were often inaccurate, approvals were required redundantly. The business was double-checking on each quote: once it was made, and then after the approval, increasing the deal cycle time.

The quoting process was further complicated as sales users had access to all products even if not authorized to sell in their respective accounts. Admins were required to do these corrections, adding to the cycle time.

To address these challenges and gaps between their business processes and systems, the client  invited Brillio to review and analyze their Salesforce ecosystem. Identifying the process inefficiencies and their existing CPQ implementation, the team recommended an upgrade of their CPQ and automate the processes.

Unleashing the power of guided-selling, smart quotes, and smart approvals

Since Brillio was involved in the Salesforce ecosystem gap assessment, it was clear for the team to chalk out the plan of action with the accurate fix that was required. Brillio approached this engagement in a structured way of first defining the goals, business process, sales workflow, approval processes, and the technical implementation plan. The team, along with the client, identified and implemented on the following goals:

• • Automate the product pricing
  • Increase quote accuracy
  • Streamline and enhance the quote approval process
  • Support customers on legacy pricing
  • Streamline sales workflow to enable scale and to reduce the deal cycle time

Here are some critical features implemented:

Fully Configured Upgrade

Brillio upgraded to CPQ plus ensuring backward compatibility and the theme consistency. The upgrade was fully a 100% configuration-based build leveraging out of the box features possible keeping technical debt to a minimum. This ensured that any future configurations, process updates, or CPQ upgrades were direct and straightforward.

Product classification and visibility set up

The products were classified, catalogued and were made accessible to sales based on the type of accounts they handled. This feature sharpened the sales focus and also saved the Sales Ops admin bandwidth, which was until then removing such entries manually.

Improved Quote Accuracy with Guided-Selling Wizard

A wizard-based pricing feature with a new UI was built to handle the legacy pricing issues. The sales team, through guided selling, got the right pricing options based on the customer use case selected. The tool was configured to ensure that all constraints and dependencies were applicable to all dimensions on phased products. The Sales workflow was automated for each business use case to require minimal intervention from Sales Ops and Admins, while maintaining high Quoting accuracy. The system also presented a consolidated summary of alerts/warnings for the quote, ensuring instant remediation and high accuracy in the Approvals workflow.

Smart Approvals for Faster Approval Cycles

The advanced or smart approvals skip approvers who have already approved a specific category on the quote. This was done by retaining the history of previous approvals, which can be used as a reference for the new approval request, thus removing the need for redundant approvals. The new process was implemented based on the new delegation of authority rules that enhanced the proxy delegation feature for approvers.

Rapid upgrade and instant results – all in four months

The sales team saw an immediate improvement in the accuracy of their quotes, no matter how complex the deal configuration was. This was a global upgrade with multi-currency, multi-country and had local nuances, such as date formats. The key impact delivered includes:

• • 25% reduction in deal cycle time due to increase in quote accuracy and faster approval cycles
  • 100% fully configured implementation with minimum technical debt
  • Highly accurate quotes with minimal errors and user intervention
  • Improved the deal team bandwidth by removing the redundant validation of quote verifications
  • 100% sales adoption made possible with new UI and guided-selling features
  • Fully automated and enhanced product pricing
  • Zero P1 and P2 tickets even after months of going live with the new CPQ

Interested in a quick health assessment of your CPQ implementation? Reach out to our Salesforce CPQ experts at info@brillio.com