On October 14, 2021, FinancialForce released its brand new estimation tool called Services CPQ solution. What does it do? In a nutshell, this new feature helps FinancialForce to deliver a complete business solution on the Salesforce platform.
Dan Brown, the Chief product and strategy officer of FinancialForce states this proved to be easier to use than expected. This is because many of the concepts for Configure, Price, Quote, or CPQ solution were prebuilt in the old Professional Service Automation or PSA solution. For example, the concept of quantifying elements such as risk and contingency is the same. Estimation templates are the same as Project templates, and so on.
The new solution also works well with Salesforce CPQ and complements Salesforce Revenue Cloud. The best part is, it does not run on a separate system, but adds additional workflows to an existing Salesforce solution. This eliminates the need for integration and maintaining multiple copies of data elements.
“With the release of Services CPQ, FinancialForce is making it easier for organizations across the board to standardize and streamline the services estimating process—and achieve a higher level of customer-centricity. Services CPQ enables our customers to deliver accurate estimates, complete with resource demand, that creates a tight handoff between sales and service and facilitates delivering services projects at scale.”
-Scott Brown, CEO at FinancialForce
What is Services CPQ?
FinancialForce Services CPQ enables organizations to estimate projects based on existing best practices. Can you also integrate your own customized templates? Yes, you can. This offers what-if capabilities to the sales teams so they can model different margins and deployment options for remote working. This positively influences your expenses, and more.
Services CPQ makes use of the existing rate cards within FinancialForce PSA. As the rate cards are updated within the PSA solution, the estimates on jobs will rise. This is the first iteration of the solution and uncertainty remains regarding whether future rate cards will be used as part of the estimation process for longer projects. Dan Brown awaits further development based on customer feedback once the solution is deployed to its many interested customers.
Resource requests and tasks can also be included in estimates. Once the estimate is complete, it can be submitted for approval using Salesforce CPQ or FinancialForce CPQ. Importantly, these estimates are tied to opportunities within CRM (customer relationship management). The PSA solution can then be used for resource management and forecasting. The analytics built into the solution allows business leaders to see how the sales function is performing and what resources they might require.
Conclusion
Even though this is the first version of the module, it does not disappoint. FinancialForce Services CPQ complements the Salesforce CPQ solution and delivers an end-to-end opportunity to revenue solution.
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