Agile Revvy CPQ Customization Part II: Requirements Definition

TRUE or FALSE: Complex products/services cannot be automatically priced with a Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) tool.

We say FALSE because we have successfully integrated Revvy CPQ with over 1 trillion possible product configurations for a mid-market B2B. This is their story.

Most businesses in our client’s position are skeptical when we talk about automating their quoting system. Eyes can roll. Receivers go to dial tone. But if the risk is small-to-none, then they give us a shot. So, we have designed a dynamic and Lean CPQ rollout process to minimize upfront investment. This blog series charts the initial leg of that journey.

REQUIREMENTS DEFINITION STEP 2 – WHY REVVY CPQ?

To recap: Step 1 of the CPQ Requirements Definition Phase gave us a deep understanding of the client and the high-level features they would need in any CPQ.

With those primary issues spoken out, we planned to: 1) narrow the vendors to a small pool; and 2) demo our best guess.

As stated in the first blog, we wanted a tool that would “seamlessly integrate with Salesforce.com.” Why seamless integration? For sales efficiency and productivity purposes. The client used a custom Proposal Manager, which required the Sales team to duplicate data entry for fields, such as customer name and address, quote number, quote addressee, expiration date, quote title, etc.

Integrating the CPQ into SFDC would eliminate redundant entry of the above fields and reduce the potential for transposition mistakes and the inefficiency of keeping opportunity information in different systems.

It just so happened that at this juncture, Salesforce.com held a conference in Atlanta, with many of its native CPQ vendors: Apttus, Camelon, FPX, Quosal, Revvy by Model N, and SteelBrick. So in a very short period of time we compared their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and filtered out the tools that did not contain our high-level features.

CPQ DEMO EVALUATION

In general all of the vendors made the selection process easy. Some of the larger players lost interest when they learned that my client only required 15 to 20 licenses. But after retaining management attention, interactions went more smoothly; determination paid off.

All vendors demoed except Apttus, which had to be scheduled afterward. Each of the products looked great, and we heard honest answers about product capabilities and whether or not they met my client’s needs. Three of them, SteelBrick, Camelon and FPX were eliminated because their products were better suited for bundled products and services than highly complex configurable sales environments.

The folks at Apttus indicated that configuration of their tools was a multiple 6-figure, which when factored into the total cost of ownership was beyond what our client wanted.

Revvy CPQ, by Model N, demoed extremely well. One of their goals is a user interface that is as intuitive as Amazon. And they succeeded.

And with that cliffhanger, we will leave you until next week. Come back for the limited test-rollout and our method for creating detailed feature specifications. Thank you for reading!