Experience the Power of Complex Sales CPQ for Supervision

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hey welcome everyone joining in on the call thanks for joining us here uh we just opened up uh the webinar here so we're gonna give it a couple minutes and give folks a chance to join and we'll start here in just a couple minutes past the hour again thanks for joining really excited to have you all on on the call here i see a bunch more uh people joining now just wanted to uh reiterate what i just said thank you all for joining uh we're going to start here just a couple minutes past the hour get folks another minute or two uh to join up but thank you all for jumping on right here at the hour and we'll get started here shortly awesome just one last time because i see some more folks jumping in here now thank you all for joining we'll get started here in just a moment as we give the last few folks a chance to to jump on here but thank you all again for joining and we'll get started here shortly okay i think we have enough folks here joined in on the call that we can get started so once again thank you all for joining us here on our webinar today uh hosted by logic i o in salesforce i'm really excited for this session today we have two awesome speakers who are veterans in the cpq space i'll say uh who i'll introduce in just a moment um but i'm really excited for them to talk on our topic today on the five pitfalls to avoid when selecting and implementing a cpq solution uh with really a focus around future proofing your business by making sure that you're getting the right selling tools as part of your tech stack so really excited to hit on this topic today and i think irwin and chris uh have a ton of expertise to share on this topic that we're excited to share with you as well so just to do some housekeeping to start uh we'll set the agenda here like i said i'll go into a brief introduction of our speakers here today we'll then go into those five pitfalls or those five mistakes to avoid based on chris and irwin's experience and we'll go through each of those one by one with some best practices on how to avoid how to avoid those mistakes next time you're evaluating and implementing cpq and then at the end we'll actually go into three ways that you can go about specifically future proofing your cpq technology and where these two see the future of cpq technology going so that you can ensure that you're future proofing your sales tech stack and your sales systems and at the end is when we'll do a q a so throughout the session today as chris and iran are speaking feel free to go leave some questions in the q a box at the very bottom we'll go ahead and address those at the very end but feel free to leave those in as we go another quick housekeeping item this session will be recorded and we will have the slides ready for you um by the end of the day after this session as well so you will have those to distribute with your team as well awesome well without further ado we will jump right into it starting with the introductions of our speakers today so you can see here on the call we have everyone carabell and chris haussler on the call today as a means of introduction here irwin is the senior director of product management at salesforce revenue cloud focused on unquote to cash and billing uh irwin was formally at aptus another cpq company um later acquired by congo where he was the director of sales engineering over there for over six years uh where he oversaw a ton of cpq evaluations and implementations as he does currently at salesforce so across a couple different cpq companies we'll get to hear from those experiences there and then chris housler as well currently senior principal product manager here at logic i o excited for chris to share some of his knowledge here as well because chris spent over seven years at big machines and then even more years at oracle cpq after big machines was acquired by oracle cpq so between our two speakers here today we'll have a really broad range of experiences but really deep experience in cpq evaluations and implementations from all of the years that they've overseen uh many many many of them over time here so uh really excited erwin and chris to have you on the call today um so just to jump right into it i will hand it over to erwan to kick us off and we will get into the topics here all right well thank you uh thank you blake for uh for having me really uh really happy to be here today and share some of some of my experience with uh with the audience um i mean as you said in your introduction and i've been in this space for uh for quite a while now right i think it's been a couple decades now that i've been in the uh in the cpq business and and cpg solutions have you know become much more mature right in the last years uh and i think you know vendors in general have done a great job generalizing cpq and applying uh cpq solutions to pretty much every single industry out there and what we see and what what you folks might see when you are evaluating cpk solutions is that there's a there's kind of a convergence of of capabilities and when you when you look at demos you might you might think that uh cpq solutions kind of look alike and have capabilities that are that are very similar uh but i would i would encourage you to go a little bit beyond what what you are seeing in the demos because cpq sources are actually not equal even though they might be metric the same the other thing that i would like to warn the audience on as well is that even though you might think that cpq has become kind of standardized uh it doesn't mean in my mind that there's a universal recipe that that will make your project successful i i still see you know many ecp projects that fail for many reasons you know one of them is that cpq is complex right there's a lot of things like business processes that the cpk touches uh and getting it right uh is is not always obvious and there's this uniqueness in in every single company right uniqueness in terms of you know product catalog and pricing and use cases and objectives that people have in mind when they when they want to select a cpq so really to identify the right fit for for your business uh you you really have to be very diligent uh and and pay a lot of attention to you know your selection criteria when you when you are to select uh a cpg solution and you have to be very diligent as well when actually designing your your your cpk solution that you have that you have selected uh so um today you know this is uh this is what chris and i want to talk about tonight we would like to walk you through you know five you know common mistakes that we see being made uh when both selecting and and also implementing your cpk solution so you know we'll start with the first one which is regarding administration capabilities and maintenance of your cpk solution right as i said um kind of in my introduction there are a lot of things that the cpk touches right with cpk touches your product offers your pricing your promotions your sales processes your your channel strategy your ordering process and also many other systems that you have in your in your tech stack right cpq is going to integrate with your crm with your erp with your bidding system and particularly with your with your e-commerce solution as well and these things all of these things are changed right so you'll have to adapt your cpc implementation very quickly so there are several things that that i encourage folks to consider right the first thing is it's pretty obvious when you when you are looking at demos uh try and have a look at the administration side of things try to understand what are the what does it take to actually you know create a product what does it take to create a configuration model what does it take to create a role an approval workflow what does it take to implement um a document template for your quote or your proposal for example but also try and go beyond that as well because you have to think about scalability as well right so not only what it takes to create the first product the first bundle the first configuration model and implement the first processes for the first country but also how do you scale from there how do you go from one product to 200 products how do you go from one country to 25 countries for example right and this is where uh kind of the rubber meets the road uh for for many cpq solutions uh so it's really important that you understand how you are going to scale from you know a limited number of products limited number of countries and use cases to many products many countries many use cases many automation that you have to solve uh when you when you are actually at scale so think about uh you know how how am i going to reuse some of the elements of my administration however how am i going to clone sub elements uh are there some capabilities to inherit some setups you know from one product to another is there an ability to load data from excel for example in order to help me uh you know create multiple rules with a minimum reflex or minimal effort for example the other thing as well that that's really important is is you know you will implement you will maintain your cpq solution you know do you want to do this internally do you want to you know do you have resources on staff if you have expertise either in cpu in general or on a given platform uh do you want to work with a system integrator uh does the software vendor force you to work with his own professional services in that case you know you might you know you will be captive so chances are that you know the implementations will be going to be slower and more expensive and also think about you know how these people are going to get trained and is there is there a training program available is there a certification program available how are these people going going to stay up to date in terms of capabilities right you know try simple things right try googling and how do i create a product in the cpu solution for example because google is probably the go-to resource that people will go to in order to get information about you know how to do something in cpq so you know simple things like this help you evaluate you know how easy it's going to be to train your your folks and keep those people up to date in terms of capabilities for the cpq solution that you are about to uh that you're about to select um so chris why don't you uh um walk us through the the next mistake that we have here sure so i i honestly think that this mistake could be worth two but uh we'll we'll keep it at one pitfall so uh settling for a subpar sales user experience so of course you are looking at cpq because you want to uh essentially increase or ramp up your revenue engine right uh so there are a couple of different things that are key so the first bullet on the slide basically says all right it comes down to speed speed can be measured a bunch of different ways there is the speed at which getting a quote out the door that metric at the top that basically says you know if you actually complete the quote first and you get that in your customers hands you're more likely by 60 percent to get that deal that's one measurement of speed another measurement of speed is just how your user interacts with the application uh you know we've come to expect in our consumer lives that you know i'm not gonna i'm not gonna wait for a website that's going to churn for two to three seconds i'm gonna go somewhere else that can give me what i want uh so why should your direct sales staff or your partners or your customers uh you know wait themselves they're not going to so speed is very important and of course you know when you're talking about a lightning fast config like logic does uh of course we're not going to get away without talking about speed um and and i would talk about speed and performance a couple of different ways of course anybody can show you a demo uh that is uh fast and and all of that which is good but demos are not uh demos are not the real experience so i encourage you much like erwin said uh in the prior pitfall you know don't be afraid to get under the hood with the vendor ask questions of current customers ask you know what would i what would happen if i actually uh need to blow this out you know i have a hundred times the rules that you're currently showing this demo actually look at you know what some of your products require and that's going to give you a greater measure of whether a vendor can satisfy your your performance metric now the second part of this pitfall the speed and performance pitfall is implementation there is no end to the number of different ways that you can basically denigrate performance as a consequence of decisions and trade-offs made during implementation uh so and this is speed is kind of like a death by a thousand cuts so every time you were making a decision that you know sacrifices a little bit of user side performance for maybe it's a call out to the back office or it's because some other process is not optimal take a second look at it because that is something that you know those add up and you definitely want to go into your sales experience building your sales experience buying your sales experience in your selection of cpq and your implementation of it uh making speed the centerpiece of of of the overall transaction so the second bullet on pitfall number two is lack of guidance and flexibility so generally it says don't settle for experience that's good enough because generally good enough really isn't um you know on the one hand we've come a long way from you know the back office erp configs that had really just a limited view of how you could ask questions about a product we've come a long way from that but we've also got a long way to go what i've seen happen a lot in implementation is that there's a lack of creativity uh there is sometimes looking at one audience that needs to develop a quote and not at you know the wider breadth of audiences we meet a lot of uh manufacturing customers that have a sales team that has been around for five to ten years and it's good they have been because that's what it takes to become a good rep um they know their sales catalog they know what they sell and they know actually how to make it through a quote uh very quickly but if you're that business and you actually want to grow your top line what is the likelihood you're going to find a ton of those people with five to 10 years of experience just ready to hit the ground running no you're actually going to be building your sales team with a different profile so make sure that you have the flexibility to be able to provide guidance ask questions in a different manner that actually gets to the heart of the product that should be recommended um and you know this is the next step to actually bringing configuration and and self to self-service so your customers can actually work through the the configuration themselves so instead of just relying and it's interesting because we've been put in front of a bunch of these sales reps that are really good at their jobs um and they basically said no i just want to configure experience this way but if you look at it from the perspective of the business that really needs to grow beyond you know that one inside sales team generally you need to to look at how you can actually ask a questionnaire that varies ing to the audience that's going to use it so for this mistake on sales subpar sales user experience it comes down to two things comes down to performance and it comes down to being able to deliver different experiences for different audiences awesome chris thank you uh the next mistake we we we're going to talk about and you'll see that this there's a link between this mistake and the previous one as well we'll talk about that but the next mistake we're talking about is uh not considering that you know all world has shifted tonight and and people expect several things and you'll see in the numbers that are outlining this slide here right that growing up the services revenue is top of mind for most companies these days including manufacturers and also there's an expectation from buyers that you know they can use whatever channel that they are more comfortable with in order to make a transaction with it with a company so there's a you know services and e-commerce are part of almost every single company out there uh so this has to impact the way that you select app you'll see google trend and it has to impact as well uh the way that you implement uh your your cpk solution uh if we talk about e-commerce first and self-service first um there are several things right typically what people will think about is well um if i'm you know choosing a cpk what i want to do down the road is just expose what i have in cpq uh on the cell service channel and i want to expose pricing on exposed uh configuration but things are a bit more complex than that uh obviously for pricing yes we want we want consistent pricing between what you have uh in the sales assisted channel and what you have in cell service and ideally uh you don't want to replicate the pricing logic between two systems right so that that's a that's a given uh but for configuration things are a bit more nuanced than that night you can't just expose a user experience that's you know the best for sales reps you can't expose that as is for you and customers as chris was saying right you don't you want to have the same level of guidance for your sales reps and for your channel partners and for your end customers and chances are you want to expose exactly the same options either right you might want to you might want to restrict choices of the most complex solutions to to sales people might and not let customers try to configure solutions that that you know that would be too complex you know based on their uh based on their level of expertise for example the other thing as well is that what we see more and more is not you know self-service or sales assisted for a given transaction you know we see more and more use cases we see more and more journeys that uh mix channels together right for example you might have a customer uh you know trying to get product information online and start making some product selections online and maybe start configuring something online but at some point they will need some help from the sales rep so at some point you have to think about how do i convert that and how do i trigger a request for quote process for example or you might have a journey that starts with the sales rep for your price negotiation and once we have a price contract with the customer then the customer might be ready to actually self-serve and re-order products you know very easily online right so we see more and more journeys that that mix channels like this uh in order to and in order to make this dribble you have to think about how you are going to actually integrate at the transaction level how you are going to convert a shopping cart into your quote or how you are going to convert an order into your shopping cart for example for reorder processes right so it's important that you think not only about exposing pricing and config online but also how are migraine to integrate at the transaction level as well in order to support those you know channel switching type of scenarios um if we talk about recurring services now um what we see more and more and including in manufacturing as i said is that we see more and more companies that want to offer hybrid solutions that are composed of hardware and services right it could be a maintenance contract or it could be you know a truck manufacturer selling a subscription to a telematics offer for example right so and because of that because we are now mixing you know hardware you know widgets with uh recurring services other types of products you know you can't have those two things minus by two different cpu solutions it has to be a single cpk solution that allows a sales rep to create a quote that contains both types of revenue models and and not all cpp solutions again are designed to support recurring revenue models uh recurring revenue models introduce a lot of complexity and mainly because you are introducing two uh new use cases not only do you have to support the initial sale of your product but you also have to support changes to a contract right amendments upgrades downgrades in the middle of the contract and then a renewal event as well at the end of that that contract and those events uh introduce a lot of complexity so you have to have the right data model in order to support um the the storage of the base changes among the life of the contract and you also have to support the user experience that allows sales people or even and customers to make those changes uh into a given contract and that is not obvious for many cpk solutions the other thing that you have to think about is the financial impact as well when you when you start talking about upgrades downgrades amendments renewals all of those events have an impact on you know how you are going to invoice customers and how you are going to recognize revenue and those are areas where um erp solutions traditional erp solutions are not too good at managing uh you know taking into account this element of time so again think about that financial impact and think about the impact that those who have on your on your rit system as well so it might be worthwhile to explore cpu solutions actually have some capabilities in order to help you manage those uh those financial impacts in your transition to recurring revenue models and with that chris um all right next one so mistake number four addressing the inevitable gap so we've talked a little bit about you know the fact that you have many cpq solutions that uh they're not all the same and you know at the same time uh you also you know the way that you market and go to market is usually a part of your secret sauce so inevitably there's going to be some sort of gap between uh what you want the system to do and what it natively does uh and so part of your goal is to in the evaluation process find you know what are those situations that are not going to be a perfect fit and what am i going to do to mitigate them so this is a fairly deep dive into how you want to sell and and i want to actually focus on that point quite a bit and i think i i don't mean to offend when i said earlier that uh you know people lack imagination or creativity when they get into implementation but what we've seen over and over again is that you go into a a cpq project with uh you know quite a bunch of creativity and then when it comes down to actually getting the implementation done you end up you know maybe an si is going to do the implementation you basically hand over well these are the tools that we've been working with for the last x number of years wrong way to go about it so what you really want to look at is you know what is the ideal way to go to market what is the ideal way to to usher your your different sales teams your customer facing teams uh through a product discussion and that's what cbq should be doing for you so in the evaluation process it is finding that tool that allows you to do as much of that as possible and then you know for those things that aren't perfect uh kind of understand what the workarounds are so that usually means you know find a a cpq that gives you not only just a fit for purpose but also you know not just a an application but a platform that you can build other tools around uh and usually an ecosystem of other sis uh people that have experience in the space especially using the software and also you know handling those those one-off kinds of requests that you may have here and there so this is a bit of you know choose something that has a little more meat around the bone on the application and the the kind of talent around the application that can you get you to uh to actually uh the the nirvana of that secret sauce so we'll talk about this a little bit in in the future as well uh this is key and of course uh you know logic and salesforce are a great combo with logic being very fit fit for purpose you know it is that questionnaire to drive the sales experience with the salesforce platform around it uh providing a lot of different opportunities should there be any gaps in your process yeah thank you chris uh great points and and the uh if the next pitfall will actually i mean we'll actually address some elements that will probably resonate with some of what you which what you shared earlier as well this last pitfall is probably i mean in my mind uh the the the most frequent mistake that we see being made by people selecting and implementing cpg solutions is what we call a lift and shift approach up you know but as we said earlier cpk has been around uh and and you know we see more and more companies that that have a legacy cpc solution that are willing to actually change uh and you know there are you know some behaviors that that we often see um in this case you know when people have a legacy ccp solution uh when when they are actually selecting a cpk solution it's often kind of natural to think about capabilities through the lens of that solution that they have been using for years and therefore just you know focus on the gaps that the solution had uh i i would caution the audience that this is a very very dangerous thing you should not use that familiarity with cpc solution as a shortcut in your in your selection process the other danger is really during the implementation it becomes even more tempting to shorten the requirements gathering phase and and simplify the user story drafting uh because you really have a base of functionality in your in your legacy cpk solution uh and again this is very dangerous for for two main reasons the first one is that you know the way that you your company did business ten years ago is probably very different from the way that you are conducting business now or what you know how you to conduct business now and there are probably you know other reasons that just technical depth that pushes you to consider a new cpu implementation you know for example could be an acquisition could be launching a new product line or could be launching a new revenue model or addressing new markets or launching a new channel and chances are that that you know you will not reach your objectives if you just reproduce you know what was done before and address you know a few gaps the other the other reason why lift and shift is very dangerous uh is that every cpq solution even though you know they might look similar um from the outside when you look at you know a demo um every cpq solution has its own set of of best practices for a given use case and what might be a good or a decent design approach for a given cpk solution it might be a terrible design option for another cpk solution that might lead to a poor user experience a poor performance or a terrible maintenability so it is critical in my mind that design decisions when implementing cpq are done and informed uh and match actually your selected tools capabilities not the previous tools capabilities uh and to that regard there's also something that that's very important in my mind and i think this this will address a question that was asked earlier as well in the q a uh to me even if you are not implementing cpq's typically yourself even if you are constructing a system integrator to implement cpq it is critical to get educated on the cpq solution that you've selected now there are you know in the case of salesforce and logic there are a lot of resources that that you can use right you know for salesforce you can go to 12head.com and get access to a free environment and start you know testing things uh and get trained on some specific areas of cpq in my mind it is very critical that you get educated because during the implementation you will be making some design decisions that you'll have to live with for the rest of your cpq life so it's critical that those design decisions are made based on you know well educated uh knowledge of the cpq tool capabilities um and with that i think this uh this concludes what we wanted to share in terms of pitfalls and and mistakes uh before we we go into q a we wanted to talk a little bit about um you know what's coming as well in cpq what we see in the market uh what we see as future trends and future capabilities that that will be provided by by cpk vendors so uh let's uh let's jump through that now ah sure so uh if you look at the history of cpq it's it's been growing um in this direction for quite a long time i think uh it was some time in the last 15 years that gartner actually coined the term cpq before that it was it was a bunch of either different sales tools or manufacturing configurators that were put in front of uh sales for order taking but generally gardner looked at this and said oh you know here are the common uh the common tasks that uh this tool should actually do and generally the applications that fit into this category grew up through one or another industry and as time has gone on these have kind of come together uh kind of as erwan mentioned earlier so that you know there's there's a decent amount of capability amongst most applications but generally it is still an application uh and i did mention this earlier what we are seeing is that the true cpq that is going to be valuable into the future is going to be more of a platform concept uh because cpq it's interesting cpq in most sales evaluations uh evaluations and vendor evaluations involves a huge number of people because so many different departments uh touch it um you're talking about everybody from finance to sales to sales operations to manufacturing uh they all care because they all have a piece of the pie so certainly uh the ability to actually tie cpq into all of those other systems and uh do it like come up with the the often the the unknown gaps that get discovered along the way that's going to require more than just one application and hence we actually keep on saying you know the platform is it uh and going forward we're going to find much more that cpq is going to be probably rated on the platform that it fits into rather than just the application itself so that's that's the first kind of transformation that we're seeing in the market yeah the second area that has already transformed cpq to some regard and it will continue to transform cpq is artificial intelligence and machine learning uh we've seen ai and ml uh gain traction already for some you know sub use cases in cpq right so you know you'll see solutions like successful that have introduced leveraging ai and ml for things like uh pricing guidance for example or product recommendation uh and and you know many customers are already leveraging those capabilities but i think that the next uh frontier uh the next big thing is going to be leveraging ai and ml on the configuration side as well and there's a there's tremendous value there as well i think we have to manage expectations though uh nine i i you know when when talking to customers right you know i hear sometimes a lot of hope that um you know ai and ml is gonna you know um replace um holes and constraints in their configuration models and therefore make you know cp implementations much easier uh i i don't think that's going to be the case i don't think ai and ml anytime soon will be able to tell you whether a given configuration is manufacturable or whether a given configuration is something that that we can sell for for a given customers you always need those uh those rules those constraints in order to make sure that what's being offered in cpq is actually a valid uh configuration where i think that ai and ml can bring another value is is helping capture tribal knowledge tonight chris was mentioning earlier right sales teams that sometimes have five years 10 years experience this is becoming less and less frequent right you know many factors especially are facing you know huge turnovers in their industries and have been facing huge turnovers lately so this tribal knowledge that you know cell swept used to rely on is is slowly disappearing so ai and ml is actually a great opportunity to actually replace that tribal knowledge uh and capture the tribal knowledge and provide recommendation at the time of of configuration uh i you know i don't think we're quite there yet uh in terms of capabilities to to offer this uh but one thing that we that i recommend the audience to consider uh when both selecting and implementing cpq as well is think about the data strategy right because the way that that you design your cpu solution today right your design decisions today will impact how the data is going to look like better and therefore how applicable this data will be for ai and mml right so again uh you know i don't think that uh for now you know we you know cpu solutions are really ready to provide this level of recommendation at a time of configuration but you can only think about you know how you structure your configuration models and how this impacts you know the way that data is going to look like because the data is really uh the the the main source of information for any ai and ml algorithm so if you have bad data or poly architecture data this is going to make uh usage of ai and email later on much more complicated no matter how smart the ai and ml ever get it's always going to be a human-based strategy that actually drives it home so uh i i've it's been fascinating to see kind of the the hype cycle that's gone around ai and ml and i think you know there's some very valid um uses for it uh but it will never actually replace you know the the true strategy of of how you bring revenue in the door um so another kind of future looking facet is make sure that you're actually looking at cpq as an omni channel opportunity so we've we've particularly noticed that you know the the coven pandemic over the last two three years has has sped this up quite a bit it was already it was already happening that you know whether you look at the changing demographics of who is who is buying uh and and the fact that millennials don't like to talk to people um or uh it is just the need to do uh more faster what we're finding is all sorts of different data that supports the fact that people want to self-serve so what might have previously been a large complex transaction that included you know a bunch of back and forth with uh inside sales or a partner uh and uh someone that is uh that is a a buyer in an organization frequently that buyer just wants to actually self-serve so certainly you're not going to get rid of your your direct sales your partners but an understanding that at least the initial testing and trying out and looking at different options it's probably going to need to be done they need to be able to self-serve that way and then if they actually want help allow them to get that help wherever they are in that process that's part of the omni channel so similarly to kind of what we talked about earlier where you need to have that flexibility for different audiences they build the ability to not only reuse some of that logic that you built for your direct sales but to also repurpose it perhaps in a different experience for your self-service uh your self-service kinds of channels that's incredibly important and i think it's going to continue to be much more important in the future and certainly some cpqs do this better than others you will find that some don't have an ability to do a self-service channel at all some make it very difficult to provide different experiences using the same logic this is something that is good to kind of dip into when you're evaluating a vendor you know let's get some examples about how you would actually present this to a different audience because chances are your business is actually going to need to move that way at some point or another great well thank you chris and erwan for for rolling through those pitfalls and kind of the future looking state of cpq um just a reminder for folks here on the call we'll jump into q a right now after this so please go ahead and leave some questions uh in the in the q a section at the bottom of your screen um and we'll get to those here uh just a quick reminder here um for folks who might not know a lot about logic and salesforce's partnership uh logic i o is what we call a commerce logic engine which for the cpq use case is really focused on the sea of cpq and helping to uh augment the the capabilities of cpq and the partnership between logic and sales force and the integration between the two um has been has been really great to see here and how we've been able to achieve a lot of the things that chris and erwan has have talked about here today in terms of offering fast flexible omni channel experiences uh across platforms so if you do want to learn more about uh about how that works uh please feel free to reach out to us you see the links that we have here and feel free to reach out to us here as well um so thank you all again for for joining here on this call we'll jump into the q a now um erwin you alluded to this question earlier um but you know there's a lot of talk around the rest on this session around the resources that are required when it comes to implementation and maintenance of cpq um and one of the questions we had was that you know to take a step back there is a more fundamental there's a fundamental decision that exists um around you know whether you should be leveraging internal resources versus external service resources and si professional services whatever it may be what are your kind of recommendations on in terms of best practices on how they should assess which direction that they should go in if you're a company assessing your cpq implementation yeah i mean it it's in my perspective it's really a matter of reference there's no there's no right or wrong with any solution uh whether you're using internal resources or or a system integrator for your implementation or whether you're using like an internal resources or many services for the ongoing maintenance there's no there's no right or wrong it's a matter of of preference and strategy so what i would encourage people to do is is when you are evaluating cpu solutions in favor those vendors that actually give you a choice um in terms of you know what was the best approach for um implementation and ongoing maintenance and whatever the decision that that you make again uh get educated not even if you if you don't plan on on actually supporting the solution yourself or if you don't plan on implementing yourself uh which is perfectly fine and there are a lot of good reasons for doing that get educated understand you know what it takes to actually do things in cpq understand uh you know the basic concepts in ctp so that when when you have a partner he tells you hey in order to update this price list you know i'm going to need to do this and this you understand the pros and cons of values options that are going to get presented to you that that's really my my main message today is even if you are not actually implementing yourself even if you are not managing maintaining yourself you need to understand the decisions that are going to be made because design decisions in cpq are critical and designers in another app that are made early are designers and not you have to that you're going to have to live with for a long time that might have very important impacts on ux and scale and performance of your solution so again i i can't stress enough the fact that people need to understand what what their cpq is doing how we socketed it and what are the the best practices for a given use case for for the sap solution got it we had another question and your advice may be similar here as well the question was related to our section around speed and performance and responsiveness right um and how especially for larger customers who have a certain degree of complexity to their pricing or to their product configurations and things like that it can be pretty in-depth and it can be pretty difficult even for a customer that's doing the cpq evaluation for the folks who are doing the the evaluation themselves to really fully even be able to articulate those complexities and be able to translate that over into the requirements for their cpq solution so the question around that is you know how would you recommend that this you know information is captured and how that is actually requested or identified you know whether it's through the evaluation process or through you know a formal rfp or rfq in order to make sure that they're actually capturing all of those requirements and all of those needs up front so that they make sure they're getting that that solution that fits their complexity right i i um so i i i'm a little biased perhaps but i don't think this normally comes out in an rfp or an rfq what it does come out in is in a a a detailed discussion with the vendor uh where you you're basically going to lay out that you know this is my uh either my uh my the complexity of my my product bomb or this is the complexity of my pricing uh can you show me how you've done this before uh and uh in in many ways in many ways that you can actually usually look at a demo that they've done and kind of say all right if i if i multiplied this times x you know uh because of a certain data set that you know of in your business uh let's talk about what that would look like and that will usually bring up some boundaries where you'll kind of go okay so this is going to point you toward a a certain kind of implementation strategy and you can actually have an intelligent conversation about that rather than it being left until implementation when when you know you might be a little further a little too far into your decision so try to ask as many upfront questions as possible and chances are you know uh complex pricing models complex builds material the vendor should have dealt with it previously and should be able to give you uh a nuanced answer about some of the different ways to uh to accomplish it again there should not be just one way but generally when we're talking about speed and responsiveness that vendor probably has a a go-to answer that uh would be good to discuss great i'm going to bounce around to a couple products specific questions too and then we'll go back to some more general questions we had a question around you know the estimated time that it takes to implement salesforce cpq uh for a company that already uses sales cloud r1 so obviously i'm sure the answer is it depends to a certain extent but i'm sure you have an answer there yeah it's a very tough question to answer because the time it takes depends on so many factors such as the complexity of the product catalog the complexity of the pricing complexity of the of the products themselves you know other configurable or not um number of countries that that we are going to all the substitute and the the variation in terms of uh processes between those countries document templates approval workflows those type of things and then integration as well as is a big part of that as well so it really depends i mean this very simple implementation you know could you know take you know six weeks um but you know very complex implementation it could take you know much longer than that and it could take a year or sometimes more for global implementations of very complex processes right so again very wide range here but you know without knowing the context without knowing those elements that i talked about it it's very hard to give it a more precise uh more precise range to that question if i can back on that a little bit erwin i think you know a lot of it is um kind of dependent on the preparation that's gone into it um in my experience and implementation uh frequently you run into situations that the implementer is asking questions that the business hasn't really thought of before and they they kind of go ah we should go back and think about that a little bit uh so that we can provide the best uh the best experience for how how we want to sell in the future and that's you know that is part of uh the fun and the difficulty of cpq uh is that this is an opportunity to actually uh [Music] revise how you get revenue into the business um and that's a very important number of decisions that need to be made so uh frequently the time that is estimated in implementation uh stretches out because you run into those decisions that need to be made and some cycles need to be taken away from hands-on keyboard to to actually get a direction so i do know that you know from a logic point of view one of the things that we've taken as a a guiding principle is you know make this fast make if you have your strategy already baked out make this as fast as possible to be able to get up and running so that the technology is not the is not the the foot on the brake uh between you and a go live uh but you know there are there are there are many decisions that go into a cpq implementation yeah um two questions two-part question here for you hustler um we had a question come in and said is logic better suited for clients uh with just complex product structures and configurations or is it also useful even for clients that might have more simple product structures but are just looking to enhance uh their their experience for their for their sales team and things like that so it's actually the both uh of course we come from uh a bunch of a bunch of folks that are steeped in the super complicated you know uh really difficult pumps and turbines and all of that but we've realized that this kind of guided selling experience is necessary for all sorts of businesses not just the complicated it's it's it's basically helping that user understand and and provide the right inputs that get them to the right product whether the product is complicated or not we have recently been working with a few ecommerce vendors where the product frankly is not uh not complicated but to be able to get the customer to those those solutions that are going to be uh perfect for them uh it takes a few questions and i i find that you know the ability to actually customize your and provide a dynamic uh questionnaire that really presents it in a in an intuitive kind of engaging way for a customer you know that is part of what logic provides not just the complicated gears and and nuts and bolts so it can go both ways gotcha follow up to that hustler um and nr1 here as well uh how do salesforce cpq and logic work side by side do you need to move all of your products over into logic if you're going to use that or can they work side by side and kind of uh teams work alongside each other do you want me to take a stab at that everyone sure all right uh so uh logic is is intended to leverage the salesforce data model uh so you're defining your products uh in the standard you know product two object and logic basically does whatever it needs to do to make that available uh at run time uh you don't have to worry about it uh there is additional you know of course the rules that are going to drive some of your logic are going to be defined in logic but the idea when you are administrating logic.io is it's essentially uh a a bolt-on to salesforce administration so the idea is that it's the same administrator uh and they work seamlessly together yeah and and logic leverage is a capability that we have in sas facility that's called the external configurator plugin which makes the user experience team nets for a user so user putting together a quote is going to seamlessly you know move from a salesforce screen where he selects the product to a logic screen where he can figure the product and without even noticing it and and yeah back to what chris was saying i no there's no replication of complex product structure or complex protocols between says force and logic that's required gotcha to to take a a step back and this is a question i can go to either of you here uh it's in reference to uh the conversation around some you know the the movement to subscriptions and usage-based and hybrid business models uh and the question is around you know oftentimes especially when there are these hybrid business models uh that means that the requirements for the system and that the project uh actually has a lot more to it when it comes to the implementation there um so there's a trade-off that needs to happen sometimes um in terms of do you go for a specific use case and go faster to market with your cp so to speak with your cpq solution uh or make sure that you get the full rich set of functionality in order to cover your your business model um and make sure that you're covering covering your business fully um how do you manage that trade-off or kind of what is your guy what is your guys recommendation on on that approach i mean i mean there are pros and cons with in any approach and that's true for you know any cpq decision obviously i mean the tools should not direct what your strategy is right so if your strategy if your company strategies to implement recurring services then you know you should not change the strategy based on the cpu system or based on the cpq implementation uh so the decision really is whether uh if you are implementing subscriptions whether you are going to implement them in ctq or not and the the rule of thumb i would i would say is i mean it's okay to have a staggered approach in your cp implementation as long as for a given use case you are not asking the sales people to actually use two different tools all right so if if i'm if i'm a sales rep and i'm working a deal for a customer and for this deal i'm going to propose some some widgets and some suggestions then the user experience will just be terrible if i had to use cpq says falsibq and logic for one part of my deal and then another solution or all you know some very manual steps in excel for the other part of the deal so that's really the main guidance i would i would give is for a given use case for a given audience uh try and make it so that there's only one solution that's being used by by the sales rep right otherwise uh the user experience is just gonna be it's just going to be terrible so maybe there are some intermediate options to consider as well i actually if if you want to have a minimal approach right you could you could implement cpq in a way that allows you to actually quote um uh both widgets and services on the same quote but then rely on some manual processes for you know some of the downstream processes for example all right those might be options that that might be worth considering got it i think we have time for one more question here i know we have a few more in the chat um so if we don't get to your question uh we will follow up with you please follow up with us and we'll make sure to answer those questions but for the last last one here we had a question around our our insights that we shared here everyone chris around uh this move to e-commerce right and the move to omni channel that a lot of companies are experiencing and i think we're all seeing that happen fairly quickly the question is you know do you envision that both cpq and e-commerce markets will continue to grow uh together as this shift happens or do you envision that you know the cpq market will shrink as e-commerce grows i would love to to get your thoughts on that so i have a particular take on it and and part of it is the um the nexus or the reason for the nexus of logic we believe that cbq will continue growing definitely but we think that e-commerce is going to grow that much faster i don't think e-commerce is going to eat cpq's lunch because there are actually needs for both and you know one of one of the reasons why logic has come to exist is you know it is that uh that sales experience that can be plugged into both uh it allows the reuse of rules and definitions uh so that you can actually define something that goes into a cpq that might be serving your partners and your your direct sales and uh you know perhaps a different experience that you're putting out in front of your your self-service customers i don't think uh one necessarily it's not a zero-sum zero-sum gain uh they will both be growing great awesome well i want to be respectful of everyone's time here and we're just about at the hour so uh thank you so much first of all chris and erwan for sharing everything that you did here on this call i thought this was a really really insightful session so thank you to you both uh and thank you to everyone who joined us here on the call uh like i mentioned at the beginning of the call we will follow up with the slides and recording uh shortly later today uh and as you see here on the screen please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or follow-ups that you have for any of us awesome thanks so much again chris and everyone very much