CPQ Need More Innovations

Over the last few years, CPQ has evolved as an inevitable sales process automation tool. Every organization is endorsing CPQ in some or other forms. CPQ Vendors are also doing commendable job by bringing new features like OOTB integration with other Quote-to-Cash (QTC) components, integration with other in-premise or cloud solutions, predictive analytics around pricing and margins, quotation intelligency and many more. However, I feel, still from salesrep perspective, using and adopting CPQ solutions need more innovation & simplicity of use. CPQ solutions are still a bit complex and need larger learning curve for users. CPQ solutions seeking more innovations!

Let me add few more points which I discussed recently with few active CPQ users.

1. Intuitive User Interface – Most of the Salesrep appreciate simpler user interface, which requires minimal navigation & clicks to create quote. Unfortunately, most of the CPQ solutions still have complex UI. Features like dynamic filters, type ahead & smart search, faceted navigations etc can highly reduce the complexity of navigation across multiple screens.
2. New Generation UI – UI technologies have evolved greatly in last decade. Usage of features like drag & drop, collapsible trees/sections can present more information on single screen, and make interface simpler while still serve more content to the user.
3. Performance – Performance has been a key demand for cloud CPQ solutions and, deplorably, it is still one of the top issues in CPQ implementations. With advanced browsers, which provides more caching and storage capabilities, and new generation JavaScript frameworks, its technically much more feasible to provide faster user response with light weight UI components. 
4. Mobility – SalesRep need mobility and Offline mode, if possible. It can greatly improve their efficiency of sale.
5. One-click Configurations – Many Salesreps sale same or similar configurations most of the time. Features like my configurations, favourite configurations or last sold configurations with pre-approved packages, can make life much easier for them.
6. Proactive over Reactive Features – Everyone loves proactive messages and processing to stop users from making mistakes, rather than allowing them to proceed and then showing error at the last. Similarly showing more accurate selling price during quotation, probability of approvals and sale, can help reduce the quotation time to a large extent.
7. User Friendly Messages – Don’t provide shock with highly technical system errors and messages. Render simple, easy to understand messages and information.

Conclusion – Let the salesrep focus on sale, and have CPQ as a simpler solution to enable them, rather than have a complex software for them to learn every other time. 

Apttus CPQ - One Click Configuration

“One Click Configuration” has always been one of the most demanding features in CPQ world. For complex and bigger product configurations, this feature can be a real boon as it not only saves time but also mitigate chances of out-dated configurations.

The August’16 release of Apttus CPQ introduced this long awaited and extremely important feature called “Favourite Configurations” in Apttus terms. This feature enables sales rep to save their commonly used configurations on cart and re-use those in other quotes in a “one click” notion.

Let see some of the salient features of this functionality:

1. User can save one or more products on cart as favourite configurations. These are typically the configurations which are commonly used.

2. Favorite configurations can be saved with private or public scope. With later, it would be available for other sales rep as well, while former will make it scoped within the given price list only.

3. While creating new quotes using saved favourite configurations, sales rep has flexibility to carry the saved manual discounts or not. In other words, favourite configurations can be brought to the cart with or without discounts.

For more blogs on Quote-to-Cash, please visit my blog site: http://quote2cash.blogspot.com

7 Features of Apttus CPQ you might not know

7 Features of Apttus CPQ you might not know

Apttus CPQ is undoubtedly one of the front runner CPQ solutions in the market. Apart from the standard CPQ functionalities, it provides some of the extraordinary features to comprehensively support enterprise’s CPQ business processes. Below are list of some of these features which are beyond general CPQ needs but adds tremendous value to the overall CPQ process.    

Incentives & Promotions

Apttus added a new promotions and incentive modules in its CPQ suite. It has capability to server all needs around promotions and incentives.

Asset Based Ordering (ABO)

In the context of complete Quote-to-Cash process, Asset management play a key role in the overall customer journey. Apttus CPQ provides Assets creation, Asset actions (renew, terminate, swap, change etc), Asset based pricing, Asset based rules and many more features to support complete assets management process.

Quote Collaboration

Recently Apttus added Quote Collaboration feature to support complex quote process for enterprise customers. This feature allows multiple people and teams to work simultaneously on a single quote and collaboratively contribute to different aspects of it.

Product Management Console

It’s a brand new console to manage the product life cycle inside Apttus CPQ. It provides highly intuitive and responsive user interface to create/clone products, manage pricing, rules, attributes and bundles/options inside the same page.

Full Cost Module

Not only pricing capabilities but Apttus CPQ only also provides feature to calculate complete cost. This is highly desirable for Manufacturing and Engineering industries and help in real margin analysis.

Quote Intelligence

Apttus has started porting some of the key functionalities in its own intelligent cloud (Apttus Intelligent Cloud), to overcome the platform limitations and providing more intelligence around quoting process. The machine learning capability of the intelligent cloud would help sales rep in intelligently quote products and services for customer. 

eCommerce Platform

Apttus has revamped its B2B eCommerce platform and provided some of the key features and APIs to make it more user friendly and self-serviceable. 

10 Needs from a Modern CPQ

Gone are the days when CPQ tools were considered as mere replacement of Excel sheets. CPQ is becoming an inevitable part of organization’s sales process and playing key role in meeting the sales targets. Modern CPQ solutions, hence need to be equipped with much more advanced capabilities and features to serve the augmenting expectations.

This short article in not a list of core CPQ capabilities, like product configuration, pricing, quote life cycle, constraint/rules etc, but this is a concise list of the advance needs from a modern CPQ solution.

1. Intuitive User Experience – Think of CPQ as a driving software for salesrep, rather than yet-another application to be learned. Screens should intuitively present the needs of the users through messages, hover-effects, collapsible blocks, popups etc. Avoid user navigation to multiple screens for the simpler cases. Present all information upfront – recommendation rules, promotions, net pricing, outdated options etc.
2. One-click Configurations – Modern CPQs are now expected to know the frequent salable versions of product and facilitate minimal selections to configure the same. System should be self-learner and intelligent to help user quickly configures the products.
3. Favorite and Shareable Configurations – Another need is to make your configuration as favourite and save those as template during configuration process. Similarly there should be a comprehensive configuration sharing mechanism to allow other salesrep in organization to leverage each other’s experience and selling capabilities.
4. Collaborative Quoting Mechanism – For many big Enterprises, quoting is not single person’s job. It’s a teamwork. For e.g. Salesrep creates the 1st level of configuration and pass on to product specialist or Engg manager for configuration refinement. As 3rd step, configuration is then passed to pricing team for financial verification and so on. This way a complete quote is the outcome of collaborative efforts from multiple teams. Only few CPQ systems in market today, including Apttus, supports Quote collaboration to a full extent.
5. Pricing Analytics – Modern CPQ doesn’t appreciate static pricing mechanism but seek more dynamic and analytical pricing methods like predictive and prescriptive algorithms.
6. Enterprise Integrations – In the enterprise software landscape, modern CPQs are placed at a very strategic position. And hence they can’t exist alone, but need smooth integrations with many other software including CRM, ERP, e-signature tools, Product Life Cycle Management (PLM) tools, external pricing/configuration engines, Order Management, Contract Management and many more.
7. Internationalization & Localization – For global enterprises, I18n & L10n are simply unavoidable. They expect modern CPQ to support multiple currencies, dates/text localization and I18N to support product information, quote output templates in multiple languages and so on.
8. Ease of Data Management – Salesreps today want to spend more time in selling rather than managing applications and data, isn’t it? Modern CPQs are expected to provide simple mechanism to export/import and update data like price lists, rules, products, attributes etc. As a simple example, updating price of a product across multiple price lists, should be a simple one- click task for admin users.
9. Stop Outdated Configurations – Many times the quoting/configuration is a longer process and meanwhile the product models or prices may change in the background. Modern CPQs are expected to stop users from making mistake of working on out-dated configurations and prices, and avoid issues in later stages of sales process.
10. Intelligent Deal Guidance – Every sale is independent, but play a cumulative role in the organization’s financial targets. Modern CPQs are expected to be embedded with intelligent deal guidance algorithms to help salesrep indicates the margins and probability of the deal.

Top 10 Salient Features of Apttus CPQ

Top 10 Salient Features of Apttus CPQ

Apttus CPQ is one of the front runner CPQ solutions in enterprise space. In recent time, it has been accepted by top enterprises as standard CPQ solution over SFDC platform. Likewise an ideal CPQ application, it provides the capability to configure complex products, smart pricing methods and quick quoting process. But if we dig the ground further, it has lot more capabilities and functional richness to help organizations get most out of CPQ process.

This article is not about outlining the general CPQ features of Apttus, but the focus is on some of the salient features, which are not widely known in community. The list could be very long, but I’ve chosen top 10 features, which you should be ware while implementing Apttus CPQ.

1. Numeric Expressions

Apttus provides a custom expression builder to help writing expressions which are similar to SFDC formulas but are much more powerful and controllable. These expressions are evaluated at runtime and provide more dynamics to product configuration and rules. The expressions can be used to set the values of product attributes, min/max quantities of option groups and min/max/default quantities of option components inside those groups. Numeric Expressions can also be used in writing highly complex rollup summaries and used those to set the option quantities or prices at run time.

A simple example could be the scenario where value entered in one or more attribute would define the default quantities of option components in the configured product.

As a more complex example, the value of an attribute could be driven by a complex arithmetic formula involving values of other attributes, and finally use this value to define the quantities of multiple option components within configuration.

This is an extremely powerful feature which provides high level of dynamics and avoids static configuration restrictions. Please see my blog on Apttus Numeric Expression for detail on this feature.

2. Attribute Based Configuration (ABC)

The client–side Attribute Based rule framework is the latest feature in Apttus Nov’15 release. It provides a highly flexible rule based framework to define attribute dependencies and governing rules. For e.g. depending on the value selected in Attribute A, the values in picklist of Attribute B can be restricted. Also selecting certain values in Attribute A can mandate Attribute C, while disable Attribute D and default a value in Attribute E.

This feature brings the Guided Configuration to higher level and provides an easy way for error-free, compatible and correct product configuration for complex models.

3. Promotions and Incentive Management

Apttus provides out-of-box promotions and incentive capabilities. Comprehensive promotion schemes can be defined (for e.g. Buy X get X, Buy X get Y etc), with complete control over applicability, limits and when to apply. Also comes with provision to generate and manage coupons codes.

4. Asset Based Ordering (ABO)

Apttus CPQ provides comprehensive Asset management functionality and capability for cross/up sales through customer’s purchased products and services. The new Asset Based Ordering (ABO) interface provides functionality to cancel, suspend, change, swap and move assets, along with mid-cycle upgrades/downgrades of usage based subscriptions.

5. Guided Selling

Apttus provides rule-based Guided Selling feature to help sales rep and customer narrow down the product catalog and expedite the quoting process.

6. Advanced CPQ Approvals

Apttus Advance Workflow & Approvals (AWA) is a new generation approvals framework which supports almost all possible scenarios of configuration, pricing, operational and legal approvals. The CPQ approval package provides required approval capabilities for CPQ, covering quote/cart approvals and Personalized central interface for all approval actions.

7. APIs

Apttus exposed all key operations through APIs for smooth integration and interfacing with external systems. As example, creating a cart, adding products, copying carts, price/reprice/finalize a quote, generate quote document, sync with opty, submit for approval etc, all key functions can be achieved through APIs.

8. Extended Configurability

Apttus has been designed considering Configurability as a key factor. Most of the features can be controlled using custom settings. This gives an easy interface for admins to control the behaviour of the system without any customization or IT involvement.

9. eSignature for Proposals

Apttus DocuSign Integration package facilitates the e-signature of generated Quote by DocuSign, from within the Apttus interface.  

10. X-author for CPQ

X-author is Apttus proprietary protocol for communication between MS office applications and SFDC. As example XA-Contract can used to define templates in MS word and use the same to generate real-time proposals/contracts with values inserted from SFDC data. Similarly XA-Excel can be used to migrate data from one SFDC instance to another or load data in any instance.

Guided Configuration – Key for Quick and Error-Free Configuration

Guided configuration is not a new term in the world of configurators, but with augmenting complexity of products and services, it is playing a critical role in reducing the configuration time and improving error-free quotation process.

So, what is Guided Configuration & How is it different from Guided Selling?

Guided Configuration is the mechanism of using attributes, not as adjectives to product, but as questionnaires to help sales reps reach to a configuration which is near to final. These logical and relevant set of questions help system to narrow down the configuration options and auto-include or exclude product components and set quantities based on answers.

While Guided Configuration is to narrow down product components within the configuration, Guided selling helps sales reps or customers narrowing down the product catalog. By answering guided selling questions, user gets the sub-set of product catalog, which is more relevant to the customer and has better chance of selling.

In nutshell, Guided Selling works on Product Catalog, while Guided Configuration works on underlying Product Configuration.

So, the next question is Why Guided Configuration?

In the competitive sales world, 2 critical factors to increase your sales probability are quoting time and error-free quotes. The increasing complexity of products and services imposed adverse effects on these 2 factors. Guided Configuration is a powerful, yet easy to use, technique to narrow down the configuration process, increase sales rep efficiency and helps generating error-free quotes. The logical and relevant questions ensure that incompatible components are excluded, while mandatory ones are auto-included. Also, if underlying CPQ system supports, it ensures that correct quantities of components are included. As example, while configuring a hosting solution, the set of questions regarding security, protocols, accessibility, backups etc can help sales reps reaching to a near final configuration in quick time.   

So, let’s consolidate the list of advantages of using Guided Configuration.

• For complex products and services, it helps quickly reaching to nearly final configuration. Which means less time for complex configurations.
• It eliminates the incompatible components and ensures addition of mandatory items. This assist in error-free quotes, from composition perspective.
• The Guided Configuration questions are assume to be simple and lucid. Which enables even the naïve sales reps and users from other channels to configure and sale effectively.
• If underlying CPQ system supports, Guided Configuration can also helps in setting correct quantities of product components.

Conclusion

With increasing complexity of products and services, along with urge for speed and error-free configuration, Guided Configuration could be an effective technique to quote faster and error-free.

Advance CPQs like Apttus, provides out of box extensive support for Guided Configuration.

Please wait for my next article on how the new Attribute Based Configuration (ABC) framework of Apttus CPQ, brings Guided Configuration to a much higher level.   

Quote to Cash – Simply Defined

Quote-to-Cash (abbreviated as Q2C or QTC) is one of the hottest topic in CRM world, especially in Cloud platforms. It has been explained and defined in multiple ways, but most of them are neither comprehensive nor lucid enough for non-techie people. Even Wikipedia has a short paragraph on it. This article is yet another effort to define Q2C in a simpler and coherent manner.

Quote to Cash, as the name suggest, is an end-to-end business process which includes steps from product modelling and all the way up to revenue recognition at the end. In between it includes:

• Product Setup – Defining products/service structures, bundles/components, configuration rules and pricing methods.
• Quote Life Cycle - Create quote, configure products, apply promotions & discounts, internal approvals and generate quote output document for customer negotiations.
• Contract Life Cycle – Create and manage contracts, negotiations and approvals.
• Order Management – Create orders and order orchestrations.
• Asset Management – Create and manage assets. Assets based ordering (change orders, terminate/renew/close assets).
• Invoicing & Billing – Generate invoices and manage cash collections.

These steps are not new and has always been part of complete sales process, but the noticeable point is that these were accomplished by independent and silo systems in enterprise landscape. As example, excel sheet could be used for quotes, a custom developed application for order management, while a renowned COTS product for billing/invoicing. But none of them were native to CRM system. Being technically and functionally disconnected, each of these applications/products needs integration to complete the process. Also, these siloed pieces bring lot of inefficiencies and delays in sales cycle and may result in wrong product configurations, erroneous quotes, incorrect orders/invoices and ultimately loss of revenue and customers.

The advent of CRM cloud platforms enabled companies to build the complete Q2C solution stack natively on CRM and overcome cons of having Q2C process as disintegrated. This provides a close integration of Q2C with CRM system, 360 degree view of the customer across functions, single source of truth for products/services, synchronization among different sales channels and many more. Let’s detail out some of the key benefits of adopting CRM native Q2C process:

1. Q2C process impacts every function of the organization including sales, finance, legal and operations. It enables all functions performing their job efficiently in the complete sales cycle and have a 360 degree view of the customer journey.
2. Automated Q2C process avoids incorrect product configurations, erroneous quotes, contract issues, order mistakes and revenue losses.
3. Speed is the most critical aspect of any sales function and Q2C helps in improving it. Quick quotes, speedy approvals and digital contracts help sales reps sell faster and improve revenue and margins.
4. Q2C process in CRM platform assist in maintaining the single source of information across sales channels. In addition to this, it provides better control over pricing and visibility of products across different channels.
5. With 360 degree view of customer, sales reps get ample opportunities for cross/up sales and customer retentions.   

In modern sales process, Q2C is becoming a de-fecto in laying the foundation for company’s margins and market presence by contributing heavily in smart and quick selling of products and services. Organizations are ready to invest in bringing their complete Q2C process on CRM platform to sell more and get competitive advantage. So, are you ready to join the stream?