Streamline Your Sales Process with Complex Sales CPQ in IT Architecture Documentation

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okay I think we can get started hello everyone and thank you all for tuning in to the webinar um we're going to be talking about simplifying and streamlining your Tech architecture to boost business performance uh which is a topic of real importance in these economically troubled times uh we'll be taking q&as at the end so if anyone has any questions at any point please use the Q&A button that you should see at the bottom of your Zoom console and we'll get to them at the end um and before handing over to our speakers who will take you through the presentation I'm going to give them a quick introduction myself so we have uh FY farz the principal Business Solution architect at Cloud sense and one of our founding members and we also have Vish Kumar Cloud sensor VP of Industry Solutions who has previously worked with the liks of Opus and Telstra in fields raging from sales and operations to finance and business Improvement uh so without further Ado I'm going to hand over to them uh so take it away Vish and FY thanks Ed So today we're going to talk about a few things um about keeping it simple and the reason we want to talk about that is the market that we're in right now there's a lot of transformation we're talking about and the business transformation is still something that's highly contested in terms of what is going on in the CSP Market when we look at the business Transformations that we're focusing on right now we can see that the focus is around the end to-end journey and how how do we actually remove a lot of waste in that endtoend journey and ensuring that we can keep our salese on the run and moving but also providing a different experience for our customers which is something that they've been demanding for a very long time one of those key elements with that is around self-service and ensuring that we lead with a full digital experience but also enabling them to do things on their own in their own time when they want how they want and that's some of the key things that we've come to at cloudsense so cloudsense comes with a pedigree of digital transformation uh we are a team of over 350 people spread right across the world and we've got some really key customers that we've worked with over the years especially in the Telco space where we've made some substantial Transformations where we can see them now come to life in multiple different ways especially in that B2B Market and hand to fousy if and he's going to take us through some of the key things that we should look at for ter for digital Transformations thanks fish um so before I guess we get into uh the architecture and how to simplify things we wanted to have a look at some of the pitfalls some of the problems of that encounter the that these Transformations encounter I should say uh when when organiz ations embark on such large Transformations um the first thing that comes to mind is quite often people are trying to recreate what they already have rather than start thinking from a blank sheet what it is that is the problem that I have and how to solve that problem that try to recreate what they have maybe with a little bit of uh tweaks to it and that obviously shackles you to what you had in the past and the problems of the past um quite often we are technology Centric we do EV we do evaluations of of software that promise a lot and we focus on uh technological buzzwords uh to bring into our space because that's what everybody else is doing uh rather than actually focusing on what it is that is actually going to bring us business value um looking at features rather than the value that we're bringing in with whatever solution we're actually bringing in uh so focusing on I need this particular feature rather than what do we want actually the business to benefit from and how do we want the business to run in the first place as a business process um other other uh organizational problems that uh that these Transformations encounter is everything must be changed at the same time the whole endtoend process needs to be changed all in one go uh whether that is in the billing system in the provisioning systems in the um commercial systems and we should not do anything in uh in isolation even though some things could be improved on their own without actually the other parts needing to change at that time but we shule ourselves with all the problems of the other parts in order for us to say that we've done the whole thing end to end and then finally uh again from an organizational point of view uh committee decision making we basically try to run these Transformations as a democracy because we fear that they're not going to be accepted because quite often change is not accepted and we end up having to do those uh by asking everybody whether they agree or not but that is not really uh beneficial for the organization what you do need to do uh from that point of view is think about how can I drive change into the organization and what level of change can I drive and who is best position to actually drive such change how can I Empower certain sets of people to simplify my business processes but at the same time drive that change into the organization because they are trusted I'm not going to concentrate on the last two because they are organizational change and we can talk about them in other webinars if you if you like but what we are going to concentrate on are the first three items which are really uh system focused and architecture focused uh and and this is where uh we wanted to talk to you about uh today and where Cloud sense can bring value to you but I don't want to initially speak about Cloud sense I want to speak generically about uh these Transformations and what you're trying to get out of them quite often organizations talk about cpq driven trans informations what exactly do they really mean and why do they use cpq in in that sense what is it that we're trying to actually achieve in these Transformations it can be boiled down to three main things if you think about all the problems that you might have if you can focus on delivering these three main goals then you would solve these problems because all of these problems typically will funnel into one of these channels these your organizations are trying to innovate ahead of the competition what do we mean we want to be able to commercially innovate and generate commercial offerings to the market combine our offerings uh bit uh together uh form bundles of things uh combine them with products that are from within our organizations and products with from outside of the organization to bring Innovative offerings to the market to be able to compete in the marketplace to be able to be ahead of the competition in the marketplace and to be able to react quickly to the to changes in the market so that we don't lose our customers to our competition at the same time we want to ensure that our salese and our customers when they are through coming through self-service channels are focused on the commercials initially at least in order for us to be able to close deals quickly we want to ensure that the user Journeys that they are presented with are commercially focused so that they focus on closing deals and and ensuring that the customer is signed up but to do that the offerings themselves need to be commercially focused and the user Journeys that drive the uh the user through uh the auto capture process need to be commercially focused and then finally you need to be able to deliver accurately because if you can innovate and you can be so commercially focused your amazing user Journeys uh Drive deals so quickly but if you can't deliver them those deals will dry up very quickly we need to be able to send down to the provisioning systems and to the billing systems uh the right information so that we can actually deliver and build the things that we are selling if we can achieve these three things then we we are in a pretty good position so we call this quite often so we've got these goals and we quite often say we want to do a cpq transformation to achieve this but what exactly is cpq it is simply configure where you're configuring a set of products uh selecting them from a product catalog and configure in them so that they are exactly what what you want to purchase or what you want to sell price them and then quote them that itself is a very simp small part of actually what you need to implement as a process as an endtoend solution in order for you to be able to deliver on the goals that we just talked about because if you don't have have a product catalog a commercial product catalog that is focused commercially uh that feeds into the cpq and the auto capture uh Journey uh the uh the uh ability to decompose that order that you captured into commercial components that can then be sent down to Downstream systems and delivered then you will not be able to actually achieve this because if you have just a cpq that then needs to be able to communicate with foreign objects and foreign entities that that are part of your ecosystem then you start needing to integrate all of these components and they start needing to understand each other and that's difficult that's not simple and this is one of the places where things start going wrong in these Integrations but even this process is not on its own sufficient to be able to deliver what we just talked about the these goals that we just talked about it is actually even more complex than that because you need a place within this process to be able to enrich these commercially focused deals with information that are required for you to be able to deliver data and you need to be able to speak to the downstream systems but you need to be able to speak a language that they will understand because if can't understand what you've done then you can't deliver it accurately and so we get into here a problem of how do we deliver this if we don't speak the language of these Downstream systems and the downstream systems don't know what we've innovated on on top of that we need the system that allows us not just to place orders but to be able to modify an order even when it's in flight meaning we haven't delivered it yet the customer has submitted the order but they decide that they want to make changes or indeed we decide as the people provisioning as the service provider we decide that there's a change required here we need to speak to the customer about and we need to affect the change into the order and then carry on but you might have already started the provisioning process the delivery process and you need to somehow Now understand where you're at in that process affect the change that is required and then continue the process with a sensible um entry point so that you're not actually jeopardizing the consistency of the order that you have accepted from the uh from the customer in the first place and the provisioning process that you've initiated and then certainly what because as Telos we are selling uh mostly subscription products we do sell other products as well but mostly subscription products we need to run the life cycle of those subscriptions we need to manage the lifetime of that subscription and changes to that subscription and that entails speaking back to the catalog to the cpq to be able to make effectively make those changes price them correctly ensure the uh the uh right choices are being made and the right upgrades or downgrades or ceas or renewals are being done correctly apply the correct pricing and then go from there so the process itself is fairly complex in order to achieve such Transformations and um boiling it down to just simply saying cpq transformation sets you up for disappointment later because your uh your not really putting into your uh your uh plans exactly what it takes to deliver such a um such a transformation but also it focuses you on the wrong thing from a technology point of view and then thinking that everything else will just simply hold together quite nicely because you've already got pieces in place you need to think about these things when you're starting these Transformations but systems are great you can you can uh you know purchase something off the shelf and they have lots of promises that tell you you know we're going to deliver all of this to you but there are some architectural principles that need to be followed regardless of the system that you're that you're in if you were to deliver on the three goals that we just talked about earlier that will enable your transformation to be successful then you need to actually ensure that these architectural principles are actually at the heart of the system or systems that you uh you are engaging with to affect this transformation to implement this transformation so what are these datadriven product modeling how are you going to actually enable Innovation if you don't enable your business users to be able to actually innovate themselves if every single time a business user wants to innovate and get something out to the market a new bundle a new price a new uh commercial offering uh even just renaming and repackaging certain technical uh products into a new commercial offering they would need to go to it run a project in it to be able to effectively do that and we've seen such projects uh that take six months just for a small change to happen in your commercial offerings you need the ability for the system to allow business users to change data that drive the system Drive the models Drive the rules that actually then implement the commercial offerings and implement the rules around those commercial offerings but you need the commercial the business person to be able to innovate in that way via data and drive the system with data we need to be able to ensure that while we're commercially focused and we're building our commercial offerings and the user Journeys associated with them to be commercially focused and hone in on the deal making we still need to be able to capture information that is non-commercial it's non commercial but essential to the delivery of the of the of the deal if you don't capture it and you don't capture it at the right time in the process by the right people then you will jeopardize your uh ability to deliver or your focus uh not being commercially focused in the first place to do the de and so where you model these uh these uh non-commercial information and how you expose them in your user Journey is really really important and then finally intelligently decoupling your systems what does that really mean why am I decoupling the systems they need to speak to each other well let's imagine a a world where you've got your commercial catalog and the uh and the um business um um the product managers and the uh proing managers are innovating in this catalog and they create weird and wonderful things in that catalog but we need to be able to tell the downstream systems what those things are and typically what has happened in the past is that we have had to model those things in the downstream systems or model them in the commercial system in the image of the downstream systems in order for these systems to be able to speak to each other that is called very T coupling between the systems and what you get with very T coupling between the systems is lack of innovation because as soon as you say in order to release a a new commercial offering or a change to commercial offering you need to make a change into this system this system this system quite often systems that are very difficult to change then basically you've completely inhibited Innovation and that's a problem we need to intelligently decouple these things and then recouple them in a way that makes sense from the point of view that we're not going to affect and inhibit commercial Innovation and commercially focusing the user on the thing that we want them to do which is deal making but at the same time we want to pass the correct information down to the downstream systems so how should the architecture think about that we need to be able to decouple them but then give the responsibility to the commercial system which is where the change is happening very often to speak down to those systems that don't change very often like the provisioning system and the and the Billing System to pass the information in the language that those systems actually understand because only like that will your three goals be able to be achieved only like that will you be able to achieve True commercial Innovation that allow you to release products in hours and days not in weeks and months only like that are you able to collect not just the commercial information that is important for deal making but also the non-commercial information that is important for delivery and only like that will you be able to make sure that even though the systems are not being updated the downstream systems are not being updated when the commercial system is being changed you are still able to send the correct information down to the downstream systems in the correct language that they understand it's really key that we look at this these architectural principles in whatever system we're evaluating in order to ensure that we achieve the goals of the transformation because if we don't do that we're not going to achieve the goals of this transformation so now let's talk about Cloud sense a little bit that's exactly what cloud sense does cloud sense looked at what architecture is actually important first before we delivered our system we based our systems and our endtoend process and our endtoend solution based on these principles because we were trying to not deliver a system to our customers not deliver components of systems to our customers we were trying to deliver a solution to our customers through these components and so we deliver the commercial product catalog that is able to be uh to drive with data the cpq and Order capture process from a uh from a rules point of view and from a user Journey point of view in order for you to be able to focus the the um uh user on Deal making and a product catalog that is able to allow product managers and procing manages to use data to uh effectively uh change the catalog and change the offerings within that catalog to decompose a deal into its commercial order and to manage the delivery of that commercial order to enrich firstly I should say to enrich the order and then decompose it and to ensure that all of that is done via configuration you configure these elements and then you drive them with data and you drive the user Journeys with data so that you can basically control uh without the the uh the process without having to make it changes every step of the way as you grow and as your business grows then to run the activation process and at the same time run in flat changes while you're activating the these Services while you're delivering these services and your subscription in life changes as well at the same time ensuring that we are speaking via what we call data orchestration to the downstream systems and sending them the language that they understand that translates the order the commercial order and the commercial aspects of the order plus the non-commercial information into language that the downstream systems understand whether that is the provisioning system the billing system or any other system that you need to speak to we will be able to send the entities that they understand and the characteristics of those entities in the right format down to those systems so that all you need to do is just simply know your language and we will speak it and you will be able to execute on top of that just at a at a 60,000 ft view of the architecture so where does cloud sense then live it lives in the Salesforce ecosystem I'm not saying force.com because it doesn't just live on force.com we have quite a few of our components on the high performance Heroku layer within within the Salesforce ecosystem but we integrate very well and very tartly with Salesforce where there's a need to integrate with Salesforce and we augment the functionality of Salesforce and the performance of Salesforce where that functionality and per performance needs to be augmented and at the same time we speak to a layer an integration layer above or ahead Upstream of the order capture whether that is availability checked address check stock checked and so on and downstream of the order with your provisioning system and your Billing System and we ensure that data flows between these systems are streamlined so that they can feed into the order capture process and the change processes to give you not just a a um the ability to place new provide orders brand new orders to the to for your customers but to change your uh your base whether that base by the way is uh is uh sold through Cloud sense or indeed through Legacy systems because if we don't give you a system that allows you to um uh to carry out changes on your existing base then we failed that is that needs to be also at the heart of what the system and the architecture provides to you to you this type of architecture provides you Simplicity because it allows you to independently make changes in your uh commercial system without uh affecting the other systems without having to make changes to the other systems and it allows you to ensure that you simplify your Integrations Because the actual system that you're that you're implementing is no longer just a cpq it needs to be a cpq that understands how to speak to the order being delivered and the order being alive or the the subscription being alive and wanting to be changed and all of those things need to be hand inand together and if they're not then you're creating complex Integrations and that's a problem for you I'll I'll pass over to um to V to talk to you about uh something that required excited about uh that that helps with this uh with this processes thank you fy um yes this is something that we are at cloudsense extremely excited about so what we are introducing is cloudsense Telco one now Telco one is a solution as opposed to a product or a platform the solution provides a full endtoend solution for the Telecom industry focused mainly on the B2B sector we provide you with this solution uh with a fully documented uh business high level design technical designs as well um and even user instructions um and functional configuration documents for using this particular solution this is something that cloud sensors spent a lot of time thinking about and working on over the years and we really really proud to introduce you today but let me take you a little bit deeper in terms of what you actually get from Telco 1 and how does it actually assist your business so Telco one provides a solution for your whole B2B Channel you're assisted and your partner channels are built into the platform or into the solution itself the Telly supporter your Telly sales teams is also supported within the solution you've also got some inbuilt processes that fies are already talked about that leverage our core platform so you have new you have macd and you also have inflight pre-built and to work with all of that you also have the product models that we've focused on that we see typically within the B2B space around sdw mobile uh ipvpn connectivity uh hosted voice and voice but we also have built pre-built integration so knowing that your your architecture is going to need need to integrate Downstream upstream and then also to those other things to help you in your sales Journey all the way through coming soon we will be adding our online apis to this as well so we provide you a full omn uh Omni Channel experience out of the Telco one solution but none of this goes away um in terms of our core Cloud sense cpq solution selling Advanced pricing deal optimization product life cycle side of things all the core products that you've grown to love over the years and what we're known for doesn't go away they become the key things that enable us to have this fantastic solution available in the market but when we dig deeper in terms of what does that really mean for your sales process Telco 1 looks at your process not just from the point of the configuration time when we need a price and when we need to order we looked at it all the way through from when you actually start talking to your customer in the lead stage so when you are in Salesforce and you start uh configuring that lead and starting to work through and nurture that customer Telco one starts looking at those key things and allowing you to start doing quick budgetary quotes right from the lead and then it supports you all the way through through all of those key things that you require as a B2B Telco right the way through just subm the order and managing that particular customer for their life cycle with you so Telco one covers a lot of key things that we would expect out of a B2B and we've built them all in you have three built Journeys quick quote capability so from a lead we can actually start quoting customers just on budgetary side of things uh we have built-in address management so you can manage your address right from when you need to to in the journey as opposed to keep going back and forth between the CRM or um and into your journey you can actually do it from inside when you're actually configuring a customer um multisite service qualifications one of the biggest bug Bears we've heard over the years is the ability to manage hundreds and thousands of sites and making sure that we can actually deliver our products to them Cloud sensor Advanced profitability side of things we've enhanced that and built that in the platform the solution also allows for variations but also it comes with all the great things that we've launched over the years pre-built in as well so thirdparty quoting box subscriber management and frame agreements just to name a few as we keep going through um Telco one itself so I guess to to talk through it I'm just going to let the video talk for itself with Rising operational costs customers cutting spend and competition from hypers scalers telecommunications businesses are under pressure to evolve their business models but many struggle to achieve their targets held back by Legacy ecosystems and outdated architecture Telco W by cloudsense optimizes and future proofs every stage of the concept to cash life cycle allowing businesses to break free from system constraints avoid common delivery pitfalls and effortlessly handle the high levels of scale and complexity demanded by the modern industry landscape honed over 100 plus successful Transformations our delivery methodology guarantees lower risk shorter implementation times and an increased average customer value from day one launch products faster provide more accurate quotes plan more rigorously and deliver value sooner with Telco 1 by Cloud sense all right well thank you f init thank you for that we'll get to some questions before we wrap up uh there are three questions here to go through I think this first one uh would be for fousy uh so uh what is the place of Enterprise product cataloges in an architecture and do they result in Simplicity or complexity thanks thank thank you for the question um if you think about what our Enterprise product catalogs are trying to achieve they're trying to basically say that in one single catalog you should be able to Define everything about the product and then push that information down to multiple systems that need to then act on that product what does that really mean from a from a the point of view of these different systems that need to then execute on these products it means that they need to that the interprise per catalog either needs to understand uh exactly what these other systems are capable of and be able to know how to model things uh through the lens of those systems which is obviously unachievable or they would have to go down to the lowest uh common denominator between them in order for them to be able to then achieve this and so as soon as you bring in an Enterprise product catalog uh you're adding complexity into your system because you're trying to um to um uh put something into the architecture that is artificial because your your your um commercial system needs to be able to be flexible and uh and agile and needs to allow you to make changes quickly and those changes to be able to drive the uh commercial user journey and commercial processes if you're doing that from the from the Enterprise product catalog you've already Shackled your ability to innovate in in this way your uh your and the same uh is is true for the uh for the technical system your ability to do things in the right way from a and decompose the product in a technical way the way that the technical system understands is Shackled by the fact that that technical representation of the product is actually driven from this Enterprise product catalog that potentially has no linkage with the technical system and the same with billing so you're already putting in an artificial element into this architecture that doesn't really bring value as much as it brings this concept of uh I want to be able to do everything in one place and push it everywhere but is it really an architecture that actually delivers Simplicity no it really delivers complexity because really what you end up having to do and we've seen it at quite a few of our customers where they have gone with this uh this uh notion of um architectural Purity or technology focused um focused um approach to the transformation uh where you've had to in insert this artificial element into your architecture and then translate the language of that artificial element the Enterprise product cat log into the individual systems that are actually doing the work in your architecture and so does it bring value no we haven't seen it bring value and I think it's quite demonstrable at many in many Transformations that it hasn't actually uh brought the value that the uh that this uh puristic view of the architecture um has um has portrayed um in in the recent years I hope I hope that answered the question I don't know V whether you want to add anything to to that no I think you covered it okay great thank you uh so another question you mentioned intelligent decoupling and its benefits but how will it work with my centralized catalog will it force me to duplicate for example well no that's the beauty of of this you're not actually duplicating anything your if you think about it your commercial your your technical product catalog right is your is the products that you actually deliver and these things have been there for ages right you have had Products technical products that we are delivering in the market uh for for a long time some of them last for many many many years some of them are new as in you know they're only a few years old and so on but they don't change very often and they have a certain representation in those Technical Systems that make sense to the Technical Systems so they can be delivered repeatedly right while in the commercial system the the way you speak about your commercial offerings and and the way you present your commercial offerings changes all the time even if it is just a name change you've just changed the name of what you actually have put forward as a proposition to the to the market and you potentially have bundled it with somebody something else or you've uh you've defaulted certain bolt-ons and add-ons to that proposition as part of your commercial offering and you've called it something completely brand new one day you might call uh business internet business internet and another day you might call it the Big Kahuna uh or you can call it something else right but the technical system doesn't need to know about these things what you're really modeling in the commercial system is these commercial relationships and these commercial offerings what they map to to the technical world is quite often exactly the same so you're not replicating by creating this architecture in fact you're freeing your commercial system to actually innovate one of your main goals is to be able to innovate because if you can't innovate you cannot compete in the market and so by freeing the commercial system to innovate yet giving the responsibility for the commercial layer to speak the language of the technical layer when the time comes to actually send down an order is what actually frees you up to do Innovation to be commercially focused yet to be able to send the correct information down to the downstream system in their language so they can accurately deliver it only this architecture can actually deliver the uh the desired outcome of the transformation notice I'm not saying only Cloud sense I'm saying only this architecture because I want you to to take this away I guess as a as a as a clear point I'm not talking about Cloud sense here I'm talking about generically the architecture and only this type of architecture actually delivers you these freedoms or the freedom to deliver the Transformations and the goals of that transformation anything else that links those systems tightly together like an Enterprise product catalog that that uh says I'm going to actually have the products all modeled in one place and then deliver them everywhere to all systems you're either ending up going uh having to model the system in the technical uh view or you're having to model them in uh in a in a view that is not commercially focused so that you then have to create custom logic custom applications custom user Journeys to be able to to commercially Focus the uh the um uh the the user in during order capture only this architecture that I described actually deliver these benefits to you and and and allow you to uh achieve your goals if you don't that's what causes your complexity in your Transformations that's what causes your transformations to fail you can survey any of these transformation you'll see that these are the points of contention that have caused transformations to take years to deliver anything and then still they don't deliver the value that they have promised this is why many people these days uh question whether cpq what they call cpq Transformations are actually um are actually um uh beneficial well they're not beneficial if you just talk about cpq and they're not beneficial if you over complicate your architecture uh and and the systems that are required to deliver or you emit systems from that and they're not beneficial if you don't implement the correct architecture so you can actually get the aims that you're actually that you're aiming to achieve out of these Transformations I hope I hope that answered that okay great thank you so I think uh one more and then we'll wrap up and I think this is one for Vish so great news on Telco one uh on there was a slide that mentioned quick quoting capability uh can you recap what that is and how it's different from a normal quote great question so quick quote is um I guess a common thing within most Industries where we get a customer that Rings us and says hey I'm looking at an internet service but you know I need some pricing and I need it quickly um can you tell me how much a 10 Meg 10 Meg is a 20 meg 20 meg and maybe uh 50 meg 50 meg just need to get some pricing um you've got the basic details of that particular customer uh you don't you don't really have all the full configuration details but it's a conversation or workout whether the customer is real or and they're also working out whether they want to buy from you as well so to save time on both sides what you end up doing is looking at your price list and emailing it to the customer or telling them over the phone or sending a text message so with quick quote what we've done is built that in the lead function so we're enabling you to browse your catalog select the line items you like create a PDF document and send them to the customer uh the difference now is that it's tracked now in your CRM you can report on it but for the sales user it means that I don't have to go through the full config configuration Journey do all the full sqs etc for it or do all the details I need to enter to get to that quote I only need to do a few steps and I've already given the customer a quote that means now when I do my I log my call and followup things it becomes a lot easier um to have those conversations with a customer and we can also track them now in the system to say okay this particular customer calls us every 3 months we know they're just going to be kicking our ties as opposed to here's a customer been speaking to for two months let's see how we're going and we can actually track this out to get to a formal quote and look at all their sites for them so it's an assistant it's a short version of a quote it doesn't have discounting it doesn't um have all the fand angle detail components that you would expect out of a full quote but that's not to say we can add discounting it's about saying here we go here is a really quick quote to give you a guidance on price points and also against the um the products that you're actually asking for okay great so um just want to say thank you uh to Vish and fousy one more time and also to the audience for joining uh and listening in uh obviously over the coming uh weeks and months we'll have various announcements uh and releases related to Telco one which we'll be sure to uh keep you updated on uh but I uh will sign off by saying I hope you enjoyed the presentation and have a lovely day thanks everyone thanks