No matter how great the products and services we sell may be, the biggest driving factor to customer satisfaction is a pleasant customer experience. Approximately 80% of customer LTV comes after the first order. And over 2/3 of deals fall through at the quoting stage. It’s evident that disjointed internal systems not built to scale, will negatively impact the customer experience. So how can we improve customer satisfaction while retaining a sustainable, scalable process for reps? Enter Revenue Cloud from Salesforce.
What is Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Revenue Cloud is a Salesforce product that allows end-to-end revenue management across all channels. With Revenue Cloud, the revenue journey is streamlined from the sales process to revenue recognition. You can build scalable sales processes with guided configurations, pricing approvals, and one-click quote generation. Plus, managing recurring revenue streams is easier than ever with one-time, perpetual, milestone, subscription, and usage models available.
Revenue Cloud consists of two parts: CPQ (Configure Price Quote), and Billing. You can select either based on your needs or current external applications or use both to unify the sales and revenue processes. Let’s take a look at each.
CPQ
The first part of Revenue Cloud is CPQ. Salesforce already provides some quoting features out-of-the-box. But with CPQ, you can now have a seamless product-to-order process for your reps. CPQ users see on average an 83% reduction in total sales order validation time. And in order to maintain this time as well as accuracy, CPQ offers several new features during its streamlined process. Here are just a few examples.
Guided Selling
Let’s say you’re building a quote for a customer and looking for the right product, but you have a lot of products. Even if you know exactly what you need, it’s going to take time to scroll through and select exactly what you need. But with Guided Selling, a guided screenflow asks the rep questions about their customer’s needs and automatically filters the products to show relevant results. Products can also be organized to include pre-configured bundles. If you select a bundle, you’ll also be able to select add-ons, dynamic options (select only 1 in the group), and basic consumables. Using this process, the rep will only be able to select what’s relevant for the customer, and bundle options such as dynamic options ensures that reps cannot select options that don’t make sense for the current bundle automatically.
Discounts
Discounts are another feature that is included with Salesforce out-of-the-box, but Revenue Cloud takes this feature much further. Different discounts can be set for each item, with manager approval warnings automatically kicking in if the discount is too high. And if the customer has a set budget, you can set the exact value and CPQ will handle the rest, making automatic deductions (and again letting you know if manager approval is needed).
The discount feature is highly customizable – and applies to subscription models, too. Want to change discounts each year a customer is subscribed to your product? You can do that. Want to reduce the price in the third year of subscription only? You can do that, too.
When creating quotes, you can also group different items. Let’s say that a customer wants a quote for two different products, and is considering buying one or the other or both. You can also apply a discount to groups – so in this case, we can apply a discount if the customer decides to purchase both products. Or, in the case of having more than two groups on our quote, the more units the customer purchases, the greater their discount.
Document Generation
When it’s time to send out the quote, CPQ again provides some advanced options. You can choose to add custom documents to your quotes, such as a thank you note or a brochure. And if your product has specific documents to be attached to it, you can dynamically include those documents, too. So if you have specific documents for each product or bundle, you won’t need to waste time sending each one out manually – and your reps won’t have to remember which documents to attach.
Now that we’ve taken a look at what CPQ can do, let’s look at the other part of Revenue Cloud – Billing.
Billing
Billing is a one-stop shop for you to understand customer history, view advanced metrics and customer insights, and consolidate the invoicing process, allowing you to collect cash faster and improve billing accuracy. With the Billing add-on, you can generate invoices and manage balances through credit and debit notes. And when the first order with a customer is made, contracts are created as a single source of truth for transactions with that customer, allowing for amendments. You’ll also be able to take advantage of automated payments, whether you decide to take billing information manually or collect it through a third-party software. And to accommodate customer needs, you can adjust payment terms to be more flexible.
Billing also comes with the ability to view customer history into specific metrics such as add-ons and cancellations. And with reports on revenue, you can see how different factors like amendments to contracts impact revenue down the line.
Success With Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Revenue Cloud provides many features that are highly customizable to organizational needs, leading to increased customer satisfaction. But what do the numbers look like? According to the 2021 Salesforce Customer Success Metrics Survey, users saw on average:
- 11% reduction in invoice disputes
- 21% increase in forecast accuracy
- 29% faster quote generation
- 29% increase in cross-sells and up-sells
- 33% pricing compliance
About Roycon
We’re an Austin-based Salesforce Consulting Partner, with a passion and belief that the Salesforce platform’s capabilities can help businesses run more efficiently and effectively. Whether you are just getting started with Salesforce or looking to realize its full potential, Roycon specializes in Salesforce Implementations, Salesforce Ongoing Support, and Salesforce Integrations, and Development. We’re the certified partner to guide the way to increase Salesforce Adoption, make strategic decisions, and build your Salesforce Roadmap for success.