Quote-to-Cash Transformation

September 13, 2016

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Quote-to-Cash Optimization

Quote-to-Cash is the process of driving revenue for our organization. It starts with our buyer’s intention to buy, and ends with cash in the bank for our organization.

Quote-to-Cash connects a customer’s intent to buy and a company’s realization of revenue, and encompasses the entirety of our sales, contract, and customer relationship lifecycles. Because Quote-to-Cash is at the heart of our business, it is the most critical process for our business to master.

Quote-to-Cash touches every department, every channel, and every customer. When Quote-to-Cash is managed correctly, businesses are empowered to confidently adopt new business models, predict quarter outcomes, and meet increasingly complex customer demands—without introducing delays or risk.

There are a few common steps in any quote-to-cash cycle, and there are some amazing business apps that can simplify the entire process, save time for you and our employees, and improve our customers’ experience and satisfaction.

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Quote-to-Cash Preparing the Quote

Our sales team is hungry to make their numbers but can be slowed by quote complexity and clunky approval processes. This is not only a hassle, but can result in stalled or lost deals.

To address this risk of lost revenue, many companies are turning to Quotes & Orders apps that deliver prompt and error-free quotes that meet all company requirements. These apps help manage discounts and pricing options which solidify the trust of our customers and prospects and make your sales team more productive and confident.

Example applications for sales teams, such as Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) by Apttus, and SteelBrick which helps to deliver consistently accurate and optimum quotes quickly and seamlessly.

Theses solutions are built entirely on the Salesforce Platform allowing us to complete the entire quote-to-order phase of your sales process with ease from inside an opportunity in Salesforce, and collaborate more effectively with Chatter.

All of the data and activities surrounding the quote are automatically captured and updated inside Salesforce. Our sales team gets to be more productive and our customers and prospects experience how easy it is to work with us thanks to sophisticated cloud-based CPQ solution.

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Now that the details of the quote are complete and accurate and our customer is ready to commit, it’s time to make it as easy as possible for our customer to execute and sign the agreement.

There is a wide variety of contract management apps to help you close your deals faster. DocuSign, eliminates paper, reduces costs, and gets everyone away from the fax machine for good with their popular eSignature transaction management app.

Our customers will be delighted because they can sign documents securely from anywhere, any time on any device. And we’ll be thrilled because we can send, track and manage documents right from Salesforce!

It’s secure, easy to use, and eliminates the need for re-keying and manual updates because it’s integrated with Salesforce. Using apps for eSignatures enables our team to get out from under a mountain of paperwork, execute contracts, and close deals faster than ever before.

Quote-to-Cash Signing the Deal

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Our sales team moves on once the deal is signed, but our customer’s experience doesn’t end in the front office. It’s important to maintain strong relationships with our customers through every department across our company, including critical back office functions like billing, receivables, and product/service delivery.

Mistakes in the back office can quickly cause headaches and tarnish the customer relationships we worked so hard to build!

Work with finance and accounting to streamline these processes and keep customer satisfaction top of mind for everyone.

Eliminate any disconnect between Sales and our Finance team with seamless integration because they’re all working with the same data (No re-keying, just an automatic “opportunity to cash” process), capturing every customer interaction and transaction.

When everyone in the sales cycle -- from Billing, to Accounts Receivable, to Accounts Payable, to Sales, to Services, to Financial Reporting -- knows what they need to do next to best serve the customer, our customers are happier and our business grows.

An integrated QTC solution enables our teams to get out from under a mountain of paperwork, execute contracts, and close deals faster and easier.

Quote-to-Cash Simplify Invoicing & Payment

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Quote-to-Cash Common Mistakes

Too many sales stages - this happens particularly in industries that have lengthy or complex sales cycles. The result is that on the dashboard it’s impossible to see the wood for the trees when you look at a pipeline chart.Solution: Restrict the pipeline to 4 or 5 key stages no matter how you might perceive the complexity of your sales process. Put other values in a ‘sub-stage’ field using the related picklist function.

Ambiguous or overlapping sales stages - the Opportunity Stage values should represent clearly delineated steps in the sales process. For example, “Needs Analysis” and “Investigation” both imply that we’re engaged with the customer in defining the needs and requirements more closely. Solution: Make sure the sales stage values are clearly defined and agreed and cannot be misinterpreted.

Picklist values represent specific milestones rather than phases in the sales lifecycle - for example, “Meeting Booked” is sometimes used to denote the start of the investigation or discovery process. Or “RFI Received” to indicate that the Request for Information has arrived from the customer. But these terms really describe entry points into sales stages that will potentially require many meetings and phone conversations. Solution: Make sure each sales stage value represents a phase in the sales cycle that will require one or more independent activities.

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Quote-to-Cash Opportunity Stages

Prospecting - This is the earliest stage in the sales process. It reflects the probability that we think an Opportunity might exist but that further qualification is required.

Often the Prospecting Stage is used to create an Opportunity on an existing Account whereas a Lead would be created for a brand new prospective customer.

Investigation, or Discovery - Describes the work we’ll do to find out more about the customer’s needs and requirements so that we can create a quote or proposal.

In some businesses the Investigation Stage will coincide with the receipt of a Request for Information (RFI) or Request for Proposal (RFP). If so then we’ll probably need a field on the Opportunity page layout to store the response deadline date.

Evaluating - The customer is evaluating the proposal. This proposal may not have been in the form of a formal document – it could be indicative costs and pricing. During this stage the sales person will be communicating the value of the proposal through meetings, presentations, re-quotes, phone calls and emails.

Negotiation - In principle the customer has accepted our proposal or quote. Now we’re involved in finalizing pricing and agreeing the terms and conditions.

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Quote-to-Cash Opportunity Stages

Closed Won - The deal is done! - The definition of what constitutes a ‘won’ deal can vary between organizations. The cleanest approach is usually to update the Opportunity Stage when the contract is signed by the customer. However other organizations may chose to allow Opportunities to be set to Closed Won when the fulfilment process starts or the project is handed over for delivery. In either case the important thing is there’s no ambiguity. We don’t want one sales person’s Closed Won to be another’s Negotiation.

Closed Lost - The emotive Opportunity Stage! - There should be no shame in setting an Opportunity to Closed Lost. No sales team on earth will win 100% of its Opportunities. Indeed in many industries, if the win rate is over 30% then it suggests that only those sales deals that are already well advanced in the sales cycle are being entered into the sales pipeline. And this means we’re missing out on pipeline visibility. We can address this by using dashboard charts to measure sales pipeline quality.

In order to soften the concept of “Closed Lost”, businesses will sometimes add additional Opportunity Stages – Not Proceeding for example. This reflects the fact that the customer has not chosen a competitor. They’ve simply not made any purchasing decision at all. But this risks clouding the quality of management information by adding multiple Stages to the dashboard chart. Better to collect lost reasons in a separate, related picklist or text field and then report on it using an adjacent dashboard