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
• To have an easy to use MFA that is common across the 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
• A GUI based/intuitive tool
• Use a tool that is a SaaS service

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