Empower Your Business with Complex Sales CPQ for Management

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[Music] Tom's fees I'm the corporate director of marketing for a company called southern states and we're based in Hampton Georgia just south of Atlanta southern states is a company that serves the electric utility industry what we pride ourselves on is innovation talking to the customers getting to know the customer well having that relationship finding out where their problems are until the industry is kind of in a unique stage right now most the infrastructure was built in the 50s one thing that's clearly changed as requirements the customers the the way you communicate with people so that's been it's been part of the challenge of the job how do we understand our sales process and how do we build a better process and so we started searching and we had looked at CRM zand things before and we ended up sitting down with with a with our consultant moltov e and basically going through that whole process and we implemented Salesforce then we started looking back at okay how are we doing quotations how do we build in the different stages and integrate that into the Salesforce program so that it was all one package and one seamless approach we went to a couple Salesforce events we looked at who the competitors were four four cpq and many of them were quickly eliminated and the reason they were eliminated was that southern states is very complex they have over 250,000 SKUs some of their products have 16 factorial combinations now to put that in perspective I believe that's two point one four to the 13th power so that's a big number of combinations and a lot of the competitors were just weeded out because their products were really very simple maybe more for mom-and-pop may be geared more for the low end of the market and we need to something that was complex sophisticated that would handle ad hoc adding of products the product we make is highly engineered for you the utility industry there are factorial level of combinations of the device so it's a very complex product what rebbe cpq does for us it's become a very valuable tool for the salesperson to have in front of him a lot of that knowledge that for him to get prior to this tool he would have to go back talk to engineers have to go back to previous quotes have to go see what somebody else has done ask a lot of questions so it saves a lot of time and and just like anything else sales as relationships and if you're spending all your time putting quotes together and doing research you're not building relationships so this allows them to have more time with the customer with revi cpq it cuts the 20 to 30 minutes most depending on the specification if I know the spec it could be as little as 10 minutes you know when we get into larger quotes where you have blankets you could have a hundred line items and so configuring 100 line items can take quite a long time if you have to issue a word document to cost sheets so that's weeks fewer mistakes on quotations and proposals and more detail for sure and faster turnaround time the salespeople that are actively using it right now are extremely happy with it it's much simpler than what they've done before we've had a couple people one one gentleman who was with us took some time off to be with family for a year came back and we gave it to him and he did a quote and it just he didn't have to think twice he was able to go right through it and make where its first comment was this is awesome [Music]