Empower Your IT Sales with Complex Sales CPQ for IT

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hi Anne thank you for joining us for another Q&A Friday a regular series where we chat about issues facing manufacturing companies in the new world of industry for quino I'm Jessica Biden a team member here at Mountain Pointe and I'm joined by Billy Weiss Gerber our senior solutions architects hi Billy hey Jess so today I'm going to show us a little bit more about Salesforce EPQ and for those of you listening Billy is our resident tpq expert and is certified in the solution and we know from previous episodes of Q&A Friday which were linked to and the notes that CB he was a great solution for kind of standardizing your quoting process taking away a lot of the guesswork and the back-and-forth that often accompanies quoting but the solution can also be stretched beyond fulfilling quotes that are based on standard or stock items right so from what I understand Billy today you're going to show us how we can extend the product a little bit so that it can be used to fulfill or create quotes for engineer to order processes yep so just to give a little background a lot of times when we talk through cpq and manufacturers products there's normally three categories that they tend to fall in the first is stock which is something that's already built or pre-configured and is ready for sell the next is a custom stock product where there might be one or two components that can easily get added and doesn't matter where it gets installed but if it's something that can just be added without a problem in that manner and then the last is more engineer to order and so I'm going to kind of talk through those three different examples on how speak you can kind of cater to each in one of those while CVG may not be hitting the full mark for engineer to order there is some things that you can do to at least get part of the way and maybe use an extra pool to finish that or integrate it with cpq then to get the full engineer to order functionality what's awesome so the first thing is stock and so they actually use guided selling a lot some companies like to help their sales reps to May think through the questions are needed to determine what product is best right now they only have three questions available and they have a dynamic so that I changed the product family it removes that one option right now but I'm just going to go ahead and say pre-configured because that's their stock label and I'm gonna click suggest and it automatically filters to this one product I'm gonna go ahead and select it and so for me this is already pre-configured dump truck I have all the components already on there that I know of and you can see that now I have the same thing that's up here but it's now added down here as well so that's how II like quick and easy a stock I don't can be added and then you can generate a quote multiple stock products if a customer is asking wool you know everything's great but can we add something to this you can definitely do that and that's where we're getting into the custom stock aspect and so I'm gonna go and reconfigure this so within cpq you can choose which products are able to be reconfigured and which ones are not and so if you know that this stock product can have maybe a couple accessories added on to it you can definitely do that and I'm gonna go ahead and fill out this required field and I'm gonna just jump over to additions and say you know we were going to they want the catwalk rail for this and you know that's the addition that they wanted and click Save so that's the quick transition from stock to paestum stock couple clicks and you already have something added on for that customer that they wanted to add on ok cool so i'm gonna go ahead do a quick save of this i'm not losing any of my products but then now maybe i'm not on the phone with a customer we're talking through the different options and everything and i'm gonna go ahead and remove my pre-configured filter and they say hey Billy I want a 15 foot dump truck body great and now we're going to talk through the whole configuration process therein tell me the side thickness and you can set up your configuration process based off of maybe what's needed first before you can continue down the line and that's how we currently have their full configuration process set up so though we have rules we have limitations in place to limit that aspect of saying oh I can't choose an electric charge system if has a manual type system and all those different items that way when it doesn't mess up when it goes to the shop floor in terms of the work orders and those aren't things but it also encourages the customization of letting the customer pick and choose exactly what they're looking for where they may not be hitting the mark for engineer to order is that there's something specific that fits that customer's needs therapy for what they do on a daily basis or what it may be used for that's where cvq really can't help with but you can at least put it in the description of what that customer is looking for and if you have it may be an internal coding team or someone that is on the engineering team that'll help finalize this quote they can review those requirements and then capture those and description or comments field so that then you know you're maybe 60 70 % of the way they're actually the rest of the requirements send it off to the engineering team or inside sales team and let them help and write the quote that you need to then finalize and sent to the customer yeah and it seems like it would cut down on a lot of the back-and-forth that so often accompanies the sales and engineering communication process because I know so often we hear from the engineers you know I'm not getting all the information that I need from the sales team and the sales team is saying I can't you know predict all of the information that the engineers are going to need and so this identifies that up front and at least helps like you said get them 60 or 70 percent the way there so that they have a good launchpad for those conversations right and that was a common complaint about this customer especially was that their excels team would be visiting customers and filling out a quick form and submitting a quote request and in fells team and that does the quotes couldn't really decide for everything that they were putting in or wasn't enough information and so the transition plan that we're working on right now is encourage the outside sales team to get the quote together as much as possible that they know of and if they need to then I'll get some insights those seem to generate the quotes so that one it helps ease the workload and helps turnaround time for more one of the custom quotes and then the stock folks yeah I can see where that would save a lot of time and really clear up the communication side of things so thank you so much Billy as always for walking us through some of the solutions that you've built for those of you listening if you have a question or a problem that's been keeping you up at night and/or eager to find out you know some ways to solve it let us know you can hit us up on social media on our website via email and we're happy to talk through those issues and future episodes of the Q&A Friday series again thanks Billy in happy Friday Thanks happy Friday [Music] [Music]