A scalable solution is the key to any business’ long-term success. Like many businesses out there, throughout the years, processes, products and customer commitments are evolving and the need for businesses to keep up is paramount. Cloud Peritus, a boutique Salesforce consulting firm understands this, and recently helped one of their strategic Hitech clients transform their outdated and fragmented sales processes using Salesforce CPQ and maximizing the latest Salesforce technology.

Our client was looking for ways to improve the efficiency of their sales team to ultimately close deals faster and more accurately. Additionally, the client's dated Salesforce system required excessive admin/maintenance to keep up with sales teams' tasks, sometimes delaying the sales cycle. Their sales team spent a majority of their time completing repetitive tasks and had little confidence in the system/data. Anytime a new account needed to be created, reps were required to swivel-chair between systems to confirm accurate account data was pulled in. Without a clear, standard sales process for different departments, the client was seeing excessive stage drops (movement from Closed-Won, back to an open opportunity), skewing reporting, and required a data stewardess to complete a manual, data analysis to gather correct figures for the clients leadership.

Cloud peritus proposed a multi-pronged solution that focused on providing a reliable system to streamline the sales process and improve reps productivity leveraging Salesforce CPQ. Key areas of this include the establishment of a unified sales process for all teams to adopt, integrations with several 3rd party tools, technical debt remediation, purging of bad data, automation of repetitive tasks through the implementation of advanced CPQ features. Cloud Peritus proposed and implemented a holistic solution that includes the following key strategies to address the client’s challenges:

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1. Account Hierarchy: Established a new Account Hierarchy structure to enable an Account 360 view from an executive perspective.
2. ‍Advanced Customer/Prospect Search: A streamlined UI tool that allows reps to search and select the appropriate account/contact to create a new opportunity against, ensuring data accuracy.
3. ‍ZoomInfo Integration: An advanced, custom,  no-swivel chair,  integration to ZoomInfo to ensure accurate account creation with the click of a button all within the Salesforce application.
4. ‍Streamlined Sales Process: Establishment of a single unified sales process for all globally diverse divisions/teams/products eliminating the complexities of disparate sales processes.
5. ‍Guided Selling: Incorporated Guided Selling to reduce the complexity of a vast product mix (subscriptions, consumption based,  or one-time cost) to reduce the rep onboarding/training and expedite product selection and the quote creation process.
6. ‍Automated Renewals: Established automation to create renewals and new quotes months in advance of contract expiration date, allowing reps to focus on renewals in a timely manner and improving accuracy of sales forecasting/planning. 
7. ‍Order Management: Incorporated an advanced and comprehensive system for managing Order Information and a solution for the order processing team to finalize an order.
8. ‍Advanced Approvals: Utilized Salesforce’s newest Advanced Approvals tool to address complex quoting approval and routing rules as well as approval reminders.
9. ‍Discount Automation: Systemized discount automation depending on key client/sale indicators to remove the reliability of reps remembering to do so.
10. ‍Currency Change: Developed a custom solution that allows reps to adjust currency with a click of button rather than having to rebuild (standard CPQ does not accommodate this) an entire opportunity/quote.
11. ‍Account Relationship Data Modeling: Enabled and automated the creation of complex many-to-many relationships to accurately represent the connections between partners and customers as well as their respective contacts across hierarchies.
12. ‍Enhanced Partner Portal Integration: Enhanced the client’s existing partner portal to accurately relate partner and customer data leveraging a many-to-many data model.
13. ‍Process Automation: Configured Salesforce automation such as data population, approval kickoffs, contract ending actions, task creation, email automation, etc. to prevent redundant/repetitive rep tasks. 
14. ‍Technical Debt Cleanup: Completed purging and rebuilding of old and outdated automation (process builders, flows, validation rules, etc). In addition cleaned up profiles, roles, permission sets, and completed a thorough field/object rationalization that enabled scalability.
15. ‍Data Cleanup: Completion of extensive data evaluation to confirm duplicates, inaccuracies and impact assessments that ultimately resulted in the merging or purging of data.
16. ‍UX Overhaul: New, simplified, and client branded UX across the platform including layouts and LWCs to improve user adoption.

The implementation of the new solution resulted in -

1. Huge decrease in the sales cycle timeline: The implementation of the new solution resulted in a remarkable 53.5% reduction in days to close a new business deal.
2. Improved rep efficiency: Reps are seeing a striking 75% reduction in the number of clicks to renew a customer contract. 
3. Streamlined Activities: Reps are also no longer required to transition between multiple systems to access data, resulting in 100% removal of swivel-chairing between external systems.
4. Increased Data Reliability: Confidence in the system has soared with over 21,000 accounts purged or deduped.
5. Ease of System maintenance: The internal ticketing teams have seen an 81% decrease in resolution time of internal user requests. This is due to the new and improved optimized solution architecture.

For more information and to book a free consultation on how we can help transform your business. Contact us at info@cloudperitus.com