When Salesforce sales reps sell the CPQ solution to their customers, they always recommend that the customer engage with a partner. But some organizations have highly technical people on staff and generally don’t need or even want the vendor to come in, do the deployment and leave (with a large check!) the problem with “going at it alone” is that there will be bumps and frustration on the road to understanding the CPQ product and it would be great if some amount of learning curve could be shortened. And, of course, the organization is left better in control of its own destiny since it ends up self-sufficient with the product.
What we do
This is the aim of the Goativity “Staff Enablement” service . In a typical staff enablement engagement, we would deliver / lead the following:
- In conjunction with your operations team, we interview stakeholders in Product Management, Sales leadership, Order Processing / Revenue Operations, and Finance. The aim is to identify and document the desired state of pricing, quoting, and approvals, ordering, renewing and integrating with your ERP. Besides just documenting requirements, this is an ideal time to design the future state of these important processes.
- We then build out a CPQ architectural roadmap of what needs to be done by your own staff using the widely available Salesforce learning resources (Most notably, Trailhead). Architectural roadmap includes how requirements and features discovered in the first phase should be implemented in CPQ using the normal configuration and generally without any code
- We set up a standing screenshare meeting schedule with your staff as a placeholder for any questions that arise and to make sure that everything stays on track.
What it Costs
The cost structure of this service is done as Time and Materials – pretty much billing by straight hours. The more self-reliant your staff is, the more you’ve saved relative to any other CPQ partner out there.
Benefits
The benefits to this approach are fairly compelling. For starters, involving all stakeholders in the design means that you will have a better process that is automated, instead of automating a possibly outdated process. And we think that you’ll find the ability to access Salesforce CPQ experts in a targeted fashion to verify choices and reinforce understanding as a huge time-saver. The peace of mind of knowing that the implementation path for each user story will not be a dead-end after several days of work. And finally, having the institutional knowledge of the workings of the CPQ system from the inside out will pay time dividends down the road as the business constantly evolves.
If this sounds like how you want your organization to be involved in your CPQ deployment, contact Jim at Goativity