Empower Your Sales Team with Complex Sales CPQ for Organizations

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[Music] hi my name is Leslie Tom Weiss president of exchange marketing and programs welcome to app talks app talks is a series of conversations with our Salesforce customers and how they're leveraging business apps from the app exchange to improve all aspects of their business today I'm joined by Jack Borland from Wolters Kluwer and Jack I just want to say welcome to app talks can you tell me a little bit about Wolters Kluwer and some of how your business is run Thank You Leslie so Wolters Kluwer is a 4.3 billion global company 4.3 billion euros we have operations in 183 countries we have offices in 40 countries and we sell content and expert solutions to the legal regulatory compliance health tax marketplace so my group legal and regulatory us focuses on legal and compliance professionals and my role is as sales operations manager I support our business in making sure that the applications that support sales deliver the value that we need Wow that's great so obviously you're an expert in all of this so what challenges were you facing that made you even think about needing a new solution that CPU solution certainly so we have a very disparate sales organization it's actually a lot of little sales organizations selling to a lot of different customers and there's a wide variety of products that we sell that meant that in our catalog based on the types of customers wristlets selling to the type of sales team that is selling to them we might have half a dozen or a dozen different product codes for the same product with different prices attached and that meant that that it was very challenging to get the right price to the right customer for the right type of sale that was being conducted further it also meant that because the quotes were going out inward and the approval process for the quotes was in Lotus Notes there was a joined in the process where rogue discounting could occur so that was a challenge that meant that we needed to find a solution that would help us integrate our quoting into Salesforce mm-hmm and so those can just reiterate the real specific sales rep challenges that you had certainly so if I'm a sales rep and I sell to a particular market I might see half a dozen products that are irrelevant to me but that have a similar the same name as a product that I'm supposed to be selling to the customer I'm talking to and so figure out which products the right one for me to sell was a big challenge figuring out what the right price was for me to sell it at was again big challenge and making sure that I as a sales rep have the proper approvals before I send a quote out mm-hmm and in addition making sure that the right terms and conditions were going out with my quotes and the customer was seeing exactly what they were buying in terms of a subscription it was very important mm-hmm yeah so how did you go about looking for the right cpq solution well we looked internally at what were other business units within Wolters Kluwer doing and we also did research at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference because we really needed to understand what was available in the market we were looking for an application that either played well with Salesforce or was actually built on the salesforce.com platform there were a number of cpq solutions implemented within Wolters Kluwer but none that we're on the Salesforce platform and when we looked at the market we were finding that there were toolkits there were full-bodied solutions and that there were some fairly light solutions also on offer and we needed something that could handle all of our different pricing and quoting requirements so we were looking for something that had a lot of sophistication in the way in which it handled pricing models but that wasn't a toolkit because that was significant in terms of administrative overhead so you had Salesforce already with in Wolters Kluwer and you're looking at a cpq solution and I understand that you selected Aptus so how did you bring those two things together well we were a sales for customer for about ten years prior to implementing Aptus and in the year previous we had taken a number of disparate salesforce platforms and other CRM platforms and standardized on one salesforce implementation and that was important because it meant that we then had a commonality of language around our sales process and around our reporting that we could use to communicate with the executives and that we could then use that foundational layer that salesforce provided to make sure that we're implementing best practices across all of our different sales processes so when we started looking for a cpq we needed to find something that would play within that environment and Aptus gave us the best combination of configurability and ability to address the various different complex pricing rules that we had user based pricing quantity based pricing tiered pricing so that we could get those quotes out to a customer and have the right price on the customers quote is that 100% what made up just the right solution for Wolters Kluwer it was it was that plus the fact that we had an administrative ongoing administrative requirement of looking at what we would have to do to support that solution and we found that the the benefit of Aptus being on the force.com platform meant that we could take an existing Salesforce administrator train them on Aptus and then have them extend their capabilities to support the app to solution whereas some of the other tools that we were looking at we would have had to hire an additional FTE or one-and-a-half FTEs specifically to support the CPQ and so that combination of flexibility fullness of the solution and being on the force.com platform meant that Aptus was the right choice for us perfect [Music] you [Music]