The sales cycle from lead to cash is ripe for transformation. Just as Enterprise Resource Planning systems provided big productivity gains for the back office in the 90's, automating the sales process can help the front office achieve significant results. We sat down with Bill Veiga, sales executive with more than 20 years experience in the enterprise technology space, to get insight into what this transformation means for businesses in the era of the customer.

Is there really a tremendous amount of productivity to be gained in the front and back offices?

Recent customer surveys showed that by implementing a Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) tool as part of their overall Quote-to-Cash (QtC) process, customers sped up their selling processes and reduced errors across their sales cycle—from quote creation through approvals—resulting in an over 25% reduction in the time it takes to close business. And the findings were pretty consistent across all channels: direct sales, partner sales, and customer self-service.

What is equally important is the impact a CPQ tool has downstream from the quote itself, and the implications this has for reducing friction in distribution and providing the data needed to really understand what is happening in the front office.

What does this remind me of?

Those of us who have been in the software business for, ugh hum, a bit of time, will remember a similar consolidation of processes when Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) was rolled out across businesses. ERP provided integrated processes for Finance, Manufacturing, and supply chains. While the initial implementations of ERP were often rough, there is no denying that ERP systems helped their users work more efficiently by integrating the applications they used to run their business. In doing this, businesses stripped billions of dollars out of inefficient processes over the subsequent decades.

The economic gains delivered by ERP were predicated on something very fundamental, the sharing of critical bits of data across applications. Most important was the consolidation of the customer, the item (or product), and price. It was the shared, real-time access of all users to these three data elements that helped companies understand their customers, orders, and forecasts in way that up until that point had required a lot of “off system” analysis, intuition, and time.

How can we learn from that?

As we fast forward to 2017 and train our focus on the front office, we find ourselves in the same problem space as before—but the challenges and expectations for process automation change significantly. First, our customers and partners now live in an internet enabled world where they expect significantly more transparency in their business transactions. Second, they expect to be able to reach into our systems and modify, update, cancel, or add-on to orders and invoices. And their expectations are continually shaped and raised by their general experiences as consumers (think: Amazon).

The requirements for front office applications are different than they were for back office systems. They allow for casual users; customers might use self service once a year, while partners need to be able to quote for a variety of companies.
If you are going to expose an interface externally and enable others to do your job for you, it has to be intuitive and easy to use—it can't require a lot of training. The tools you give them access to are the way they are going to experience your company, and they need to have a positive experience.

We need to develop the foundation for real-time interaction with our business systems if we want to stand a chance of meeting these higher expectations. We need to present a consolidated view of customer, item, and price, much as we did in the 1990’s for our own employees. To do this, we need to get the data correct at the front-end of the process, and this is where CPQ becomes far more powerful than simply a productivity tool for sales.

Where does Salesforce fit in?

There is no clear way to analyze customer, product, and pricing data in the context of the front office if systems remain disconnected, fragmented, or not fully integrated. While quotes only send bottom line items to your ERP application (because you don't want every line item in your financial system), your front office system should be the place where you own every detail about your customer and everything can be accessed by all of the people who need to.

Here at Salesforce, we have created a common engagement platform for the right data to be presented to the right people at the right time. Information is always up to date, and you're able to interact with it in an interface that makes sense for the task at hand.

When our customers go live on CPQ as part of their Quote-to-Cash process, they strip costs out of their business. It takes less time for sales teams to create quotes, there are less errors, and therefore they send less bad data downstream to be dealt with by Finance and back office teams. Plus, forecasting gets so much better! You can forecast by product; you can see discounts by product or by manager.

While internal teams are more efficient, our customers are also exposing this goodness to their customers and partners through our lightweight interface. They can enable self service for their customers and allow partners to quote, removing friction from their distribution models—reducing costs across the board. They have the ability to sell in ways they couldn't sell before AND still get the visibility and results they need.

Every business strives for faster quote to close. Salesforce CPQ delivers speed by using the common data model and picking up all the innovation that Salesforce already brings you. With CPQ that is easily accessed on mobile devices, fits into Lightning communities, and works with Wave and Einstein, all the value you get as part of the Salesforce community is swept into your decision to manage Quote-to-Cash with Salesforce.