Salesforce CPQ Solutions for Solar Energy Sector

Objective

The USA based customer uses Salesforce Sales Cloud for managing new Leads, Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities as a CRM solution. We have successfully implemented Salesforce CPQ as a complete quote to cash solution.

Challenges

The client used Salesforce only till managing opportunities and after that the product configurations and pricing were stored on Google docs to share information on active opportunities.
The final quotes were created manually by copying information into the quote template document.
The quotes created required a lot of rework and there was no way to track the current status of the quotes.
The approvals on the discounts offered was not being tracked thus resulting in loss of income.
Customers use Excel sheets to prepare Quotes for their different products and are very used to the flexibility it provides them to copy line items, put custom cell level formulas etc. though it is error prone and lacks standardization.
Thus the biggest challenge for the project was not only to configure CPQ per the business need, but to also customize CPQ such that it enables a mind set change which helps them to adapt to a system driven Quotation process using Salesforce CPQ.
In the as-is process there were multiple sheets in which cost data was managed. Salesforce CPQ had to be set up so that it not only supports all the existing functionality in the excel sheet but also reduces errors during quotation by standardizing processes.
Each product has a different header so to maintain different headers for different products was a challenging part.

The Solutions

The GOC team understood the current processes for the client and all the manual activities performed by Sales Reps.

1. CPQ Configuration

Configure Products based on business needs
Salesforce CPQ was implemented, and delivery included highly customizable templates, validation testing and prompts to successfully guide customers throughout the buying journey – including flagging products that should not be bought together
The client now has a fully integrated quoting and ordering process with a 360-degree view of its customers, including which products they’re using, payment terms and processes, quotes in progress, suggestions for other products, and account and conversation history.
The Salesforce CPQ and Billing license was selected as the most viable solution to configure products and create bundles, configure price book with setting up complex discounting rules for volume based pricing.

2. Customizable quote templates

3. Produce proposals & contracts

Quickly & easily Choose products & Eliminate errors Multi Dimensional Quoting Add-ons & renewals
Quickly create accurate quotes & proposals in multicurrency.
Configure a Product with multiple Price dimensions.
Allowing each dimension segment to be priced independently
Automatically generate renewal opportunities and quotes.
The integration with Salesforce CPQ resulted in increased efficiency with quote creation and approval time being reduced to one tenth of the original time and errors dropping to less than 2%.
As all data was now stored in Salesforce the sales managers could analyse using reports and intuitive dashboard to check how much revenue is realized for the quarter.
As the Salesforce CPQ is completely native to Salesforce the training time for the Sales Reps was less than a week with the new cloud based tool.