Empower Your Financial Services with Complex Sales CPQ for Financial Services

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increasing sales protecting your margins scaling your business and just making the life easier for your sales team all all of those are just almost no-brainers and in today's complex world nicola nice to have you back in studio with me today we're going to talk about salesforce cpq and in which uh cases a company would like to use that type of solution to manage their quoting uh and part of their selling process we're going to go through a couple of use cases solution or system selling we're going to go through um typically used for large manufacturers that have thousands and thousands of skus bundles discounts distributor rates etc and we're also gonna touch uh using cpq for software service so renewals uh different licenses that start and stop at different dates that type of bundling and maybe if we have time we'll go over variable pricing and other pricing strategies and situations that might apply to utilities um so let's start with the first one so describe to me what would be a typical use case of a company that the solution in system selling why they would use cpq what cpu you can can do for them right so they primary use of cpq is really if you have complex systems complex solutions to sell or sophisticated solutions um so cpq is all about configure price quote so the first thing is if you have a complex system you need to provide your sales team with a very simple product configurator to allow them to go through all the different flows identify the right product uh for the right to the use case then allow them to automatically figure out the pricing apply the right discounts and finally you know generate a very professional looking quote so that they can send to their to their customers so that's the basics but then the icing on the cake especially for complex solution selling is well what about add-ons what about service contracts what about warranties let's make sure that we are guiding our sales team to think about all of these extra add-ons so that we're obviously you know maximizing uh the the revenue and margins that we can offer our customers yeah and you're right because here let's see if you're not involved in these types of system or solution selling you might not see the complexity but it's actually really really complex and a lot of people we meet in the marketplace still use excel very manual very extremely actually time consuming like sales people actually spending most of their time making quotes instead of selling so if they had the right tools they could save hours upon hours every week with a properly configured cpq or something similar so x expand a bit you gave a couple of examples add-ons uh warranties etc service contracts anything you want to add regarding the system or solution selling which can combine software hardware service um yeah i mean just two points you know traditionally or you know a couple years ago most most companies that offered a cpq solution were high volume b2c uh use cases you know computers cars that kind of stuff and unfortunately as you said we see too many manufacturers or complex selling solutions out there still operating with a manual so it's it's it's very very complex um the the the biggest the biggest bang for the buck is when you have different models and you have the concepts of constraints and dependencies so if you pick model a for example a computer what are the cpus that apply to this computer what are the ram modules that you can add which ones you cannot so the constraints and dependencies really uh is at the core of creating this bundle and making sure that you're guiding your your your your sales team and your customers to choose the right ones for their particular needs yeah yeah and and i think you mentioned this to me uh a while ago that another big benefit is if it's properly designed you save a lot on errors which means you also save time in pain points to your operations team so it's not just about the sales of it it's about what comes after that the ordering the production the delivery and so on yeah a lot of our customers will ask but what is the roi of cpq and i love giving the example of one of our customers he had just shipped a very expensive piece of hardware to kuala lumpur and realize that he had sold the wrong power supply something as basic as that the impact on his reputation the impact on shipping cost the impact on penalties because he shipped the wrong product you know it was huge the roi for cpq just with that single error being uh removed was paid off yeah so that's one of the cases but then there's so many other challenges that we see in the marketplace the big one is uh ramp up time of your sales team if you have to hire more sales people and you're trying to scale your business unfortunately if you have a complex solution to sell it takes a lot of time for your your sales team to ramp up that's one thing the other thing is if you're trying to scale your business well you need you know it's it's it's all about statistics it's a numbers game how many quotes can you get out there in the market if it takes a lot of time generating those quotes then uh you know your your sales team isn't actually uh calling up on new customers and generating those schools yeah and you might actually drop opportunities just because it seems too small to take the time to quote that's how long your quoting process can take exactly and then worst and this is something we see a lot so many companies only have a couple highly specialized staffed that can even conceive these quotes just because they're too complex so how can you scale a business when you're dependent on a couple key staff to generate those quotes so just those challenges are extremely important especially in the manufacturing or complex solution selling yeah the uh the very precious precious sales engineer correct all right um uh so i want to move on so let's go to a different type of use case lard manufacturer uh ten thousand hundred thousand skus or a couple of thousand skus we actually both work for a company that had over 100 000 skus um how does cpq help for bundles discounts distributor rates uh multipliers oh this customer debt rate that customer debt rate does that impact commission all that jazz exactly so the first thing is again the concept of a guided selling so you want a configurator that will guide your sales team step by step on making sure they're choosing the right product for the right use case for your customers so that's the first step the second step is well now you want to scale this why not allow your distributors your resellers your vars your system integrators generate their own quotes you've just industrialized your whole cpq process it's done why not open this up and you can do this with cpq with a super easy partner portal where your your partners can log in in a secure environment generate a quote then request approvals so that someone internally at your company can approve it validate it and then send it to the customer so opening up that cpq process to your channels it can also be very very powerful and then you can manage uh you know you can manage all the different multipliers the different discounts the different currencies all of that can be streamlined in cpq yeah and and just for uh maybe people less familiar with that universe so you mentioned putting cpq available to distributors and partners in a portal so of course here we're referring to salesforce experience cloud which was called community cloud back in the day but an easy way to make your internal tool available to partners but in a secure way so it's not available to the public it's only available for your partners exactly um before i move on to the next use case anything you want to add on the yeah on the big big manufacturer big manufacturers it's all about forecasting so if you're if you're better managing your quotes you know exactly which products which add-ons which models if you have this data this knowledge you can better plan your supply chain you can minimize your inventory you can maximize cash flow so again having the right tool to allow you to build those quotes can be a very very have a very big impact and then finally this is a use case we see a lot with large manufacturers how many times do you get an order with having to ship products at different times and at different locations how can you take one order and then split it to you know with that that that that schedule or the different locations that's something that cbq can handle for you as well yes so expand on that so your coding tool the output of it makes planning your production easier in an actual significant way in a very highly detailed way so can you can you sure expand a bit more on that so we see a lot of large manufacturers they'll get a big order from one of their distributors or one of their top customers for a thousand pieces but they don't need a thousand pieces right right away they'll need a thousand pieces maybe across the next three or four quarters so how can you split that order across different quarters so that again you have better visibility over your your supply chain your forecasting uh making sure that you you know the tool is allowing to split that large order into smaller orders automatically calculating all of the right pricing the right discounts it has a huge huge impact again on creating those quotes but having the better visibility yeah so so that within your your coding tool you actually have a matrix of quantity over time and not just a bucket of quantity correct all right uh ready to move on to uh the software space sure uh so if we look at uh software as a service um you know you could have various license bundles oftentimes software vendors have different modules different different products within their software suite so you'll have different license there they might be taken at different times so the renewal date is not the same they might add or remove users over time so there is complexity there so how does the cpq help and what what kind of use cases can a cpq address for the sas vendor right so that i mean the first use case is obviously the you know a new logo or first sell making sure that you're guiding your sales team again with product bundles so you're selling solution a why not bundle solution b and c to you know get a better bigger footprint at that customer uh but i think where uh cpq has the most value for software as a service is for renewals so you need a tool that's going to automatically manage all those renewals you don't want your sales team worrying about renewals you want them to be out there to upsell to existing customers or getting new logos you don't want them managing that that those low value manual tasks so cpq can manage all those renewals for you automatically but then cpq also allows you to manage all of those fringe cases that can be a very very challenging customer calls you you know before the renewal date and they want to add a couple licenses they want to put an extra add-on how do you manage that how do you price them do you start a new contract do you adults add on those licenses for just a couple months for the renewal cpq can handle all those different use cases and again the idea is just streamlining the process making it easy for your sales team to to offer the again the right products with the right pricing and again with with the um concepts of amendments if you have to amend the contract those can be very very complex again guiding your sales team through that process can be very very useful and finally if you have a complicated approval process how do you manage that and what is your approval process is it different departments does it have to go all the way to the cfo does it have to go through product approval so if you have a complicated uh approval process cpq can really manage all of those complex yeah and actually i'm sure many companies have different approval process based on size of deal maybe based on region maybe based on the product or software that was selected and so all that granularity those different use cases you can you can configure your cpq to handle those correct correct and then i think the the last thing just like in the manufacturing world if you're selling [Music] software as a service again with different uh activation dates you know how do you manage revenue recognition yes that can be extremely complicated as well we've seen it with a lot of our customers they really struggle with that but if you can automate if you can define your clear business rules how do you want to recognize revenue on those software licenses maybe on some of the professional services to activate those licenses uh these are all things again that cpq can uh can automate yeah and also because those things again are going to impact commission and of course other other key components of your of your business um all right so i want to address a last type of use case [Music] and this applies to in some instances different types of brokers can apply to utilities any type of company where the price is variable based on market context market situations um so tell me more about managing variable pricing that also impacts commission that also has other dependencies in the business and and what cpq supports in terms of use cases yeah i mean that's a great example so again product bundling is key how do you bundle different products how do you apply discounts on volume can you do discount schedules whereas you know for the first 10 licenses that you buy or the first 10 units you get x amount of a discount from 10 to 20 you get another so you can define those different discount schedules something you can do in cpq how do you manage promotions we see this a lot in you know telecommunications utilities there's regional promotions there are promotions that are limited in time they can get really really complicated and confusing yeah and in the case of utilities you know if you have energy pricing that fluctuates throughout the day uh if you're a broker of some kind of financial product interest rates might fluctuate you know either on a daily basis or weekly or monthly or quarterly basis so those types of of price fluctuations based on the market yeah and that's where with simple business rules we can automate pricing so you don't even have to worry about that you can grab the pricing the latest price rate from the from the web uh based on crude oil you know utility costs etc and then you can automate uh calculating those prices and again you can do that on a daily basis so again you're you're removing that complexity from from the selling piece and removing the the the onus of calculating all those things uh on a daily daily basis yeah and underlying this i'm guessing from a technical standpoint you have your api integration with whatever objective price indicator you're dealing with in the market connected to your sales force where cpq resides and that's how you you automatically manage those rules without manual intervention yeah that's why salesforce being an open platform is so useful not only can you integrate to through an api to any third-party system you can also integrate to your erp so if your material costs your inventories is changing your margins are changing you can have that automatically sync to cpq so that you're automatically adjusting your pricing so that you're ensuring you always keep a specific margin so these are all things again that can be done with an open platform like salesforce all right super interesting uh i think we covered a lot of these use cases uh at least you know setting a primer on our discussions about these different uh business situations uh we probably are gonna do maybe a deeper dive in some of those in the future uh before we uh we we leave any other notes you wanna add about cpq or the type of businesses it can apply to well again if you have a business and you're you're selling sophisticated solutions complex systems and you're still working with you know excel you're still manually generating quotes i was gonna say don't say excel putting a tool like cpq in place the roi is is is extremely fast it has so many advantages not just on increasing sales protecting your margins scaling your business and just making the life easier for your sales team all of those are just almost no-brainers in in today's complex world yeah and the the the thing you don't want to hear as a sales person or that you don't want to say as a sales manager is what do you mean the quote is not ready right nobody likes to say that and nobody likes to hear that so there's a solution for it if people are ready to invest the time get it set up and then get going yeah and again if you're if you've put in the effort to automate this whole process why not opening up to your partners or even to your customers this is becoming more and more popular people are creating self-service portals so customers can log in add more licenses put in add-ons they can do that all you know extremely simple they don't even have to call anyone they have they have the full power of doing it through a self-service portal and that approach of low touch highly automated self-service that's where you can scale your business exactly you empower the customer you impart a partner they in a way you know do a lot of the business actions that your staff would have done in the past by themselves so you can focus your staff on value-added tasks and not another transactional piece which is taken care of online in a public or private portal and and that's what all modern user experiences are all about it's digitizing automating your processes customers expect this now they they they use this in their day-to-day uh lives and they expect this as well uh in in the business [Applause]