Ever heard the phrase, “Whatever you do, don’t do it halfway?” This phrase can apply to our careers, passions, beliefs, and even our hobbies. If you’re going to try and attempt something, attempt it fully or you may regret what might have been–
What does this have to do with Salesforce Configure, Price, Quote and SpringCM Contract Management technologies?
Let’s start with Salesforce CPQ. Once you have a Lead that has been converted to an Opportunity in Salesforce, you start to have more in depth conversations with that prospect/client regarding what products or services they need. This is where we can utilize Salesforce CPQ to guide the Sales Reps through these conversations. Guided Selling, Configurations, and Bundles facilitate the Sales conversation by recommending Upsell and Cross-sell opportunities. As an added effect you can even see Sales Reps in the field utilize Mobile Quoting on the spot and turn around an executable contract in minutes. At a high level, Salesforce CPQ looks to do two things: Faster and More Accurate Quoting.
Let’s paint a scenario. Your Organization’s Sales Rep has generated a proposal in record time with Salesforce CPQ and sends out a contract to the Client for signature. If only it were that simple– As I’m sure you’re familiar with the client’s legal team most likely will chose to update with some redlines to the contract. On top of that, your legal team needs to review those redlines and make some updates of their own. So much for speed and accuracy. Manual edits are being made offline. There is no reliable version control of the contract as it goes through multiple redlines and manual approvals. That wonderful contract created in Salesforce CPQ is a shadow of its former self, and your Sales Rep has to spend a lot of time reviewing the contract as it evolves as well as pinging those that he or she is waiting on.
This gap is where the addition of SpringCM needs to be considered as your “System of Agreement” solution. Someone in Sales shouldn’t have to follow up with legal teams back and forth through a redlining process. It is a poor use of their time. On top of that, those manual edits can come back to bite you or your clients if errors were made or old versions of the contract were used at the wrong time in the redline process. In addition, this extended duration will have dramatic effects on deal forecasting, resource planning and potential lingering implication on fiscal budgets.
Salesforce CPQ ensures accurate Product Configuration, Discounting, Approval Requirements, and more. It integrates right into your Salesforce Opportunity. So, ask yourself, why would you allow your investment in this robust technology fall short when contract negotiation comes into play?
Here’s an alternative, integrate Salesforce CPQ and SpringCM technologies. Generate the Sales rep’s proposal using SpringCM directly from the Quote object in Salesforce CPQ. SpringCM will take care of the redlining process and version control. No more offline editing keeping you up at night. Now the risk of an inaccurate contract is reduced to none. Better yet, you can store the redlines that you’ve made on this contract to your Account record in Salesforce for Renewals and Amendments in the future. This will save the Sales team a lot of time and speed up the redlining process for your Legal team. They’ll be much more inclined to act quickly on redlines that they don’t need to edit manually and confirm against a previous version. From an operations standpoint point you are cutting sales cycles times, improving visibility into deal forecasting and ensuring streamlined and unified process is followed across an organization.
Planning for an integration between Salesforce CPQ and SpringCM is something you’ll want to do up front with a implementation Partner. We have seen many clients take a phased approach to starting with Salesforce CPQ and then moving on to SpringCM, but this will balloon your implementation budget. Salesforce CPQ handles Document Generation very well, but only the initial version. Your implementation partner will need time to build your proposal, contract, MSA, and other documents that you want generated out of Salesforce. Once your Salesforce CPQ project is complete and you look towards a SpringCM integration, you’ll have to redo a majority of the template work in SpringCM. We highly suggest our clients consider an integrated solution up front, and you’ll save time and money. There’s no reason to do the same work twice, and there’s no reason to wait on the full value that an integrated Salesforce CPQ and SpringCM solution can bring your Organization
With Salesforce CPQ, you speed up the quoting process from hours or days to minutes! And with SpringCM, you’ve reduced negotiation and redlining from weeks or months to days. Lastly, you have unified your sales and operations teams to be in lock step when running highly competitive sales cycles where one wrong move or lengthy move can cause negative outcomes. Why choose just one of these technologies? They are married to each other in their value proposition of accuracy and speed. Whatever you do, don’t do it halfway.
Spaulding Ridge is a certified Salesforce and SpringCM partner that can handle your Salesforce CPQ and SpringCM solutions, end-to-end. We specialize in integrated technologies in the Quote to Cash space and Contract Lifecycle Management. For more information reach out to Eric Jacobson ([email protected]).
Please keep an eye out for our monthly thought pieces on additional business cases, cloud technologies we support for our clients and the many services we provide to connect finance driven decisions with Sales and Marketing initiatives.
Founded in 2018, Spaulding Ridge is a top management consulting firm, dedicated to client success and helping organizations implement and adopt best-in-cloud technology to solve their most pressing challenges. We provide the office of the CFO financial clarity to Sales and Operational complexity by integrating financial and sales SaaS Platforms.
We help:
• Finance gain control ” Increasing financial effectiveness, insight and impact
• Sales increase Productivity ” Hitting quota more quickly, consistently and efficiently
• Operations increase Competitiveness ” Through productivity rates, customer service outcomes, and efficiency
