Empower your Hospitality Business with Complex Sales CPQ for Hospitality

How to create outlook signature

[Music] hi I'm Kurt Smith and welcome to app talks a series of conversations with Salesforce customers on how using business apps from the app exchange can help you manage all aspects of your business I'm here today with Craig Eider from to talk about how is using Salesforce an app to cpq to transform their sales process welcome to app talks Craig yeah Thank You Kurt so tell me about is a 12 billion dollar global company we have three divisions we have a finance and risk division headquartered in New York City we have a tax division headquartered in Texas and we have a legal division headquartered in Minneapolis Minnesota which is where I work and what is your role there so my role is to lead the Salesforce ecosystem for legal division and legal we have 3.4 billion dollars of Revenue we have over 20,000 online products and services and we have over 4,000 sales professionals that use the Salesforce ecosystem so take me back to the situation the challenges that your sales teams were facing that led you to start looking for cpq solution yeah great question Kurt it starts with our customer really so we know historically our number one customer complaint has been billing and while that sounds mundane we believe that an effective cpq solution would allow us to reduce our customer friction in terms of billing and how did you go about selecting a solution to cpq solution we evaluated eight cpq vendors and we went through a pretty rigorous process to to down select and choose app to cpq really where we started was we went we looked at some basic workflows and we got down to three finalists if you will and one of the things we did early on then in this evaluation process was for those three finalists we said here are six basic workflows that a sales professional has to do think sell a new product cross-sell or upsell laps a product basic workflows and we sent six workflows to those three providers and we said come in to our office and show us live right how your product would satisfy these basic workflows we gave them those basic workflows 48 hours in advance that's when they were scheduled to be in the office and we did that intentionally so they each had a 40-hour 48 hour window to design and build and then play back to us right how their product and service would satisfy those basic workflows in that process it was pretty amazing one of the three basically came in and said we couldn't do that in such a short window and but our basic demonstrations satisfy 80 or 90% of what you're looking for our evaluation team looked around the table at each other and they were out on the final two vendors of which obviously apt to cpq was one of them they basically came in and showed us quickly how those six basic workflows are satisfied what we learned in that was how much would be out of the box right because we wanted to customize as little as possible for obvious reasons and then what we did was we took the two finalists than that that satisfied those six basic workflow is the best and we actually went into their environments and put in products put in pricing put in business rules and we had our evaluation team which included sales reps basically look at some of the workflows and then we made our decision from there did you use any other scorecards or any other important parts of the business that you use to measure each of these vendors against each other we actually had three scorecards and we created each one uniquely for this cpq process we had a business scorecard for our sales professionals and so from day one the sales professional user experience was first and foremost in our mind and we had a lot of criteria underneath that business scorecard but that was basically the gist of it how easy would it be for a sales professional to use this tool the second scorecard that we had was a technical scorecard and the technical scorecard is really around an arc sexual consideration from how we conduct business would it be effective and would it be efficient to plug in to our Salesforce ecosystem not just today but also three and five years down the road so that was the technical scorecard our third scorecard is probably an obvious one but it's a financial scorecard but what I want to point out there is it's more than just the licensing costs and the implementation cost per se it's really as you think about this as a tool within your Salesforce ecosystem how easy would it be to maintain develop and enhance into the coming years so we were really looking at a strategic partnership so those were our three scorecards so you have the scorecards you did the 48-hour test you did the sandbox test why Optus yeah so so basically Aptus one each scorecard write individually and then obviously collectively when we put them together Aptus what's the right choice we feel that Aptus we were betting at that time and we know now that Aptus is the best enterprise solution because even though we want to be simple about how we go to market and make it simple for our customers to do business with us we have a phrase that we call easy to do business with in our customer experience surveys so we wanted to be easy to do business with we want it to be simple for our sales professionals to use and then we want to be able to administer and configure it behind the scenes with multiple internal colleagues like finance and legal and product and so Aptus won all three of those scorecards and we believe app just fills the bill in terms of being simple on a go-forward basis so you know you've selected out tests and now you have to start the implementation can you tell me how you guys started that process yeah our implementation process we basically had two phases and the first was an early adopter program and the second was full launch so from an early adopter program what we wanted to do before the full launch for 1,200 sellers right a subset of our 4400 users right because we're bringing this app to cpq solution to the rest of them literally right now as we speak but we didn't just want to have a big bang if you will at launch so our early adopter program was critical and what it proved to us was that three months before the full launch we had 40 sales reps using app to cpq in the marketplace so they were pulling down products they were dynamically assembling bundles they were pricing them properly they were putting in the right contract terms and conditions and clients were indeed electronically signing them and sending them back to us so we proved that the system worked all the way through contract and order acceptance so that process really gave us confidence that when we rolled it out to all 1,200 sellers that was work so that's the first thing that we did the second thing that we did that I think was really important was we had those early adopters sales reps those 40 sales reps part of our entire implement build and implementation process from day one so they were at the table with us while we were designing workflows while we were had technical people in the room talking about how we would build them and then every two weeks we would have a sprint because we did this project in an agile like methodology and the conclusion of a sprint is actually the technical people play back the workflows and so we had sales reps in the room observing and speaking into the processes that they were seeing and they gave us feedback that we then built into both the early adopter final product and then the final product that was launched all 1,200 sellers that's awesome that obviously made a huge difference having the end users there in that whole process so they're part of that process how did they also help you then roll it out and how did you roll it out yeah so we rolled out for the full 1,200 people with a couple of key concepts one was we actually had we designed and built learning modules so that between the early adopter launch and our full launch we had all 1,200 sales reps go through and actually pull down products dynamically assemble bundles price them put the right contract terms and conditions in and then send it to clients and so we knew that every sales rep could do that because we had them certify it through an online learning module and that was that was really important so that when we launched it we weren't training how to use the tool we knew they already did and so we designed some exercises that were fun and gamified that allowed us to kind of like build some momentum and enthusiasm and not really train on the basic keystrokes because that keystroke training happened between early adopter and full launch so what was the impact that you saw on your business yeah so in the first four to five months we've seen tremendous feedback and I'll just talk about two main areas the first one is from customers so with the first 1,200 customers that purchased our products and services through app 2 cpq we did an ad hoc customer experience survey and so we asked them basically how easy are we to do business with the results from that survey we're outstanding and here's an example so we do customer experience surveys regularly and so we know our legacy Net Promoter Score like responses on a 1 to 10 scale they're the 9s and 10s we know what that is for these first 1,200 customers that Net Promoter Score dark-green the 9s and 10s was three times higher than our legacy Wow so our customers responded overwhelmingly positive in terms of being able to contract and do business with us this way from our sales professionals perspective the feedback we got unsolicited were quotes to our sales ops folks and they were basically I love order capture you know and somebody actually screamed that into their phone driving down the road and so we took that quote another direct quote is you're saving me at least two hours per week with that with this new order capture solution and so the the the feedback from our customers and from our sales professionals was really overwhelming so the two hours a week is really interesting because it doesn't seem like it's a huge amount but when you go ahead and game play it all the way out it's a lot has that hopes those people even close business faster because they have more time yeah great point Kurt because we've heard several things including I am able to sit down with the client have a conversation understand their needs and and dynamically assemble the bundle in their office face to face in the conversation and send that quote and proposal to the client and they real-time pull down their email and they send their signature back to me and so we've gotten real-time feedback from sales reps that they've done one call closes and that's just it's overwhelming that's fantastic can you give me a couple metrics just some numbers and on on the impact yeah with app two cpq we've seen dramatic results we've seen seventy percent fewer held orders which obviously helps sales reps and customers we've seen 55% fewer exceptions and one exception is when a sales rep past asks for pricing or product configuration that's outside the norm so 55% fewer exceptions means speed to market and accuracy and we've also seen a 50% reduction in our sellable products so we know that we're simplifying the business in meaningful ways Craig one of the things we like to do in app talks is always then with some peer-to-peer advice so if I was in charge of sales and implement at a company and I was looking for a cpq solution what advice would you give me yeah I'll give you three points that I think are relevant the first one is have your strategy sound right and our strategy was very clear and we talked about it regularly even today the first thing is the customer experience has to be improved we have to be easier to do business with and reducing this billing friction would be a great win for us and so we had that in in in in the lens from day one the second part of our strategy was sales professional experience the UX has to be simple the process to go from lead to order and contract has to be simple that was in our lens from day one and the third thing is we knew we had this simplifier business because there's too many rules too many products too many permutations sales professionals and customers just couldn't understand how to do business together so strategically that's what I would say would be the first thing have your strategy sound and stay stay stay true to it the second thing is I think it was really critical to have sales reps involved from day one and the reason is is very obvious but I'll say it anyway it's that having the people that have to use the tool participate and speak into the workflows and the ultimate end product did a couple of things that were really important number one it made sure that what we rolled out worked yeah and number two we had instant credibility when we were training to the tool because they knew the sales reps that were in the early adopter program were part of the design and development process since day one so those two things were really really important and then the third thing I would say is the evaluation criteria the scorecards and they they they were really representations of our strategy but having a business scorecard a technical scorecard and a finance scorecard and rolling those out through this really short window of demonstrating basic workflows was really important so I would say stay true to your strategy have sales reps involved from day one and then have a heavy crisp evaluation process thanks very much for being here Craig I really enjoyed speaking with you that was great advice and thank you for joining us and I look forward to seeing you on the next op talks [Music] you