Showing posts with label apttus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apttus. Show all posts
Monday, 21 December 2015
Thursday, 23 April 2015
CPQ - It's never as easy as 1-2-3
CPQ - It's never as easy as 1-2-3
I’ve see an increasing number of customers coming to us asking for a ‘CPQ’ solution and preferably in the ‘cloud’.
‘Can you recommend one?’, ‘Can you implement Apttus?,’, ‘What do you think of Big Machines?’, ‘Will Vlocity meet our needs?’
Typically it takes a short call to discover that what they really need is a solution to (take a deep breath)… take opportunities in their CRM system and convert them to Quotes, run a configurator to build a quote, run some pricing, add some discounts, email a quote, generate a proposal, get a signature, send an order to fulfillment and billing and update CRM… oh and don’t forget all those quotes against existing contracts, new contracts, order changes, updates to exiting assets and complex promotions, bundling and special pricing terms –and it’s got to work for internal sales, via a partner portal and for a consumers self service web site and all this for B2B and B2C customers and products..
That is a lot more than ‘CPQ’, that is a complex, multi-channel, end-to-end sales journey with a multitude of complex processes winding through it.
And this is where it fundamentally differs from SFA (Sales Force Automation) implementations. With a few tweaks SFA apps from Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle can be implemented in a few weeks.
But a Sales Process – from Opportunities to Quotes, Orders to Assets and Contracts back to Quotes – is a very subjective process – every company has their own take on how that process should happen, what the steps are, who carries them out and what makes a step complete. It is the effectiveness and efficiency of these processes that make the difference between getting an order, or loosing it to a competitor.
The sheer number of possibilities means that some real hard graft has to be put into defining and designing those processes. There are no short cuts.
‘Go Buy Some Stuff’
For example, I was in a meeting recently and a person representing ‘The Business’ told the IT architects and designers that they just wanted a website with the same catalog/pricing/delivery functionality as their main competitor. “Go and buy some stuff from them, try it out and build something the same”. That is just lazy and a surefire way of starting a project doomed to fail.
After the initial stunned silence
that person was quickly educated as to how a design process works and what the responsibilities of ‘The Business’ are! There are no shortcuts and there is always room to improve on a seemingly ‘perfect’ process – it may just give you that edge over the competition.
that person was quickly educated as to how a design process works and what the responsibilities of ‘The Business’ are! There are no shortcuts and there is always room to improve on a seemingly ‘perfect’ process – it may just give you that edge over the competition.The Dash to the Cloud
What I have also seen is that the dash to the cloud has meant more apps in the mix. What was once provided as a large, megalithic system from Siebel, Oracle or SAP that had all the capability you might need is now provided by a multitude of niche software vendors, apps and add-ons.
Yes, that move to the cloud has improved the Operational side of the IT department, but it hasn’t done anything to help define, design and implement long running Quoting/CPQ processes that can span these numerous applications and departments.
Process mapping and process integration is key to providing the end user with a sales tool they can quickly understand, easily navigate and see the benefit of using.
Just looking at a recent implementation of a Contract Management solution. We utilized a raft of applications (CRM, CPQ, Document Generation, eSignatures, Campaign Management, Outbound eMail and eMail response, Billing and Fulfillment) as well as an integration platform to hook it all together and orchestrate the process.
Come on, lets learn from our mistakes!
With so many pieces of the jigsaw needed just to provide a quoting/contract solution it is now critical to properly plan and map these process journeys – it’s no longer all in one application, so the “it’s in there somewhere – just need to find it” approach just does not work any longer.
And cloud projects can no longer be just about implementing application features and functions. It has to be about great process design, utilizing deep industry knowledge and best practices and finding the relevant domain expertise. It took a while to get there for CRM on-premise projects with a few disasters along the way – we must learn these lessons and not repeat the same in the cloud – it gives the IT industry a bad name!
So to wrap up, CPQ isn’t about the cloud vs on-premise and it’s not like an SFA project. These can be complex projects and they will take time (and money) to implement properly…regardless of the platform.
So if you’re embarking on a ‘CPQ’ project, please feel free to add a comment below or get in touch if you think we may be able help.
Read more on our website - Configure-Price-Quote
Read more on our website - Configure-Price-Quote
david.moorman@crmantra.com
www.crmantra.com
www.crmantra.com
Tuesday, 31 March 2015
The Apttus Competency - Datasheet
The Apptus Compentency
Read more about our CPQ implementations on our website : Configure-Price-Quote
Monday, 9 March 2015
Apttus Accelerate 2015 – The Quote-to-Cash Event of the Year - Sponsored by CRMantra
Apttus Accelerate 2015 – The
Quote-to-Cash Event of the Year
Don’t miss out on the Quote-to-Cash event
of the year
Join CRMantra
at Apttus Accelerate 2015 this April in San Francisco. Hosted
at the prestigious Palace Hotel, Accelerate is the Quote-to-Cash event of the
year for sales, legal, finance, and operations executives and professionals.
Attend and learn how to leverage Quote-to-Cash in the cloud to drive business
value across critical buy & sell-side business processes, from quoting and
contracting to revenue management.
Event Details
Apttus
Accelerate 2015:
o
Date: April 7th – 10th,
2015
o
Training on April 7th;
Conference on April 8th-10th
o
Location: The Palace Hotel, San
Francisco
About CRMantra:
Founded in 2005, we pride ourselves on our reputation as the top-notch CPQ specialist. CPQ is in our DNA and we are well-versed in Apttus, Salesforce, industry best-practices, integrations, and what ever else it takes to get you Quoting. Our customers call upon us to get their implementations right the first time!
See us in person at Apttus Accelerate, visit our website: www.crmantra.com or download our Apttus Datasheet
Tuesday, 8 July 2014
At the Horizon – Does Cloud meet OnPremise?
At the Horizon – Does Cloud meet OnPremise?
On one of my long flights, I had ample time to reflect on our experiences working with customers on the terra firma (the on-premise world of Siebel) and in the cloud (primarily, Salesforce.com). I was struck by how similar these applications have become.
We
have had Salesforce.com as our internal CRM for over five years and I have
always marveled on how easy it has been to implement. Yes, it required no programming. We were able to configure it within a couple
of hours and our team was fully functional – no training necessary. For Siebel specialists that we are, this was
indeed too good to be true!
Platform
as a Service or On-premise in the Cloud
Simplicity
and ease of implementation has been the engine behind Salesforce.com’s rapid
adoption across many customers.
Salesforce has since released a lot of powerful features such as Apex
programming, Visualforce, Salesforce1, the Force.com ecosystem, etc., to evolve
from an SFA application to an enterprise-level front office platform in the
cloud. These features have enabled
customers to write custom scripts, create custom objects, add custom fields,
and design custom applications, workflows and processes – something commonplace
in the on-premise world. The flexibility
offered by these features in on-premise applications is what got many of them
into trouble.
Insights
from the Field
Indeed
we see customers with cloud-based CRM apps facing challenges similar to those seen
in the on-premise world.
I
was talking to the Director of Sales Processes of a customer regarding
initiatives they have underway. She
mentioned “Reducing Sales Drag” as their main initiative for the year. I asked her to elaborate upon what ‘sales
drag” meant to them. She listed user adoption,
complex user interface, too many approvals, and non-standardized rules as issues
they are trying to address. My jaw
dropped open. These are things we normally
hear from customers who have had on-premise apps such as Siebel.
I
was visiting with another client a few weeks ago. Our discussions touched upon various topics,
one of which was expanding the footprint of salesforce.com across their
organization. The Director of IT was
concerned that a wider roll out of Salesforce would be a non-trivial task. One of their divisions had already used 438
fields on the Customer object! A wider
roll out would hit up against the limit of 500 fields per object in Salesforce.
The
Takeaways
In
each of the above cases, after some further due diligence we uncovered the root
causes for these problems. These are lessons many on-premise customers have
learnt, albeit too late, and are equally applicable in the cloud world.
1. Process Design:
Because it is on the cloud doesn't mean that process design can be ignored. Invest in designing the right processes
before embarking on the implementation.
2. Release Hygiene: Just because it is easy to add a new field, implement
an Apex script, and quickly release it to production, doesn't mean you
should. One needs to make sure the
changes are in line with the process design that has been agreed upon for the
application.
3. Coding Discipline: Cloud is no more about No Software. Apex is the lingua franca across Salesforce.com. One needs to follow the software development
best practices in order to obviate performance and maintainability issues.
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