This is the second post in a 3 part series: for the next post, please follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter, or register for our Webinar on July 17th.
Leading this project were Glen Thayer and Kurt Thompson. The majority of the content in this blog series was created by these two colleagues. They administered our partner organization Tenzing’s sales tools prior to our merger, and have been leaders in merging processes and tools as the organization has become more intertwined. As they were evaluating the continued use of Oracle Big Machines Express (BMX) as our CPQ tool, they determined it was time for a change and decided to compare the CPQ tools from SAP, Oracle, Verenia and Salesforce.
Our Method
Glen and Kurt set up a requirements matrix and met with stakeholders from Finance, our Solution Architects, Sales Operations, IT, Customer Service, Marketing, and our Regional Sales Directors to determine what we need out of these solutions. Then, the team went to G2Crowd – a crowdsource site with reviews of software, consolidated into rating systems, to help you make a recommendation for a product. With this information, Glen and Kurt were able to create a decision matrix to help make the final decision, and present their arguments to the executive team.
Evaluation criteria
|
Top Level Requirement |
Goal |
|
Ability to use current public cloud pricing |
Have a system that programmatically queries the APIs and update all costs (MRC and OTC) for all services and products that our organization offers. |
|
Ability to quote both PS and MS |
Generated SOW pulls, orders & group products description detail in a professional-looking document |
|
Support Intacct Integration |
New Quoting tool creates Product (SKU) list with prices that match what we want to invoice and adds them to the Opportunity Product related list. |
|
Support Salesforce Integration |
The billable SKUs must be synced with Salesforce Products (and by extension, with accounting systems) |
|
Have user-level security controls |
• Product aligns with a list of possible SSO solutions that are being proposed for the merged organization |
|
Support Advanced Deal metrics |
Allow discounting of quote wide or line item level, and changes to term length, and to see multiple deal metrics |
|
Support Multi-currency |
See prices and costs of all our products and services in a variety of monetary currencies |
|
Generate customer-facing proposals |
Ensure the publishing capability is self-intuitive and no coding skills are required to design a customer-facing document |
|
Support line item and whole quote discounting |
Discounting that doesn’t reduce any one individual line item below required profitability. |
|
Suggest upsell/cross-sell |
The tool can suggest upsell and cross-sell based on platform and infrastructure |
|
Allow for Self Service quoting |
We can allow a limited set of items/kits to be sold by non-SA team members |
|
Relatively easy to administer |
• To have a tool that is a light touch to run |
|
Minimize sales and finance process changes |
Process changes are minimized. The tool fits into how we and authorized partner organizations do things now. |
|
Supports quoting workflow |
Workflows are available and enforceable |
|
Supports alerts for products missing from quotes |
We can set a premade list of items that fit into an architecture. The tool determines that some of the list is missing and alert us about it. |
|
Ability to bulk load products |
The tool should have the ability to bulk load products through a spreadsheet or via API |
|
Ability to intake all the current quotes from BMX |
Have the ability to use or migrate existing quotes in the tool |
|
Needs to be able to produce a WO with line item pricing |
Any product can be represented by a line item price |
|
Needs to be able to produce a report on costs for a quote |
Be able to have a cost listed for any line item in the quote |
You might notice that one of these areas was “integrates with Salesforce”. All the CPQ tools that were considered provided integration with Salesforce (it would be kinda strange if Salesforce itself didn’t). BMX was no longer going to be able to support the Salesforce Lightning Experience Interface, which, as outlined in the previous post was a major catalyst for this decision to switch.
Glen and Kurt invested significant time in evaluating each platform against these requirements. Next week, we’ll publish another blog post to tell you what they discovered – but if you want the scoop before then, we invite you to sign up for our Webinar on implementing SAP CPQ.
Watch our webinar
This webinar covered:
- The creation of their decision matrix for re-platforming to SAP CPQ
- The evaluation of multiple platforms, including SAP CPQ, Salesforce CPQ, Verenia CPQ, and Oracle CPQ
- Pivotree’s strategy for extending their re-platforming to include CRM with SAP Sales Cloud
- Pivotree’s Strategic Operations’ strategy for re-platforming
Watch the recording now