Our CPQ Replatforming Decision – Part 1: The Catalyst

This is the first post in a 3 part series: for the next post, please follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter, or register for our Webinar on July 17th. 

Pivotree’s mission statement is to Adapt Relentlessly and help our clients do the same. Our team has always been eager to try new things and adopt new technologies as we grow to improve our work and make us more reliable for our clients. In that spirit, we’ve recently implemented new innovation management software, helping us give power to ideas across the organization; something we believe will supercharge our workforce to maintain and propel our leadership in the market. All of our teams are benefitting from this undertaking, but in this post, we’d like to focus on our sales team’s recent strategic decision.

We’ve had to become a lot more strategic as an organization to not just keep up with advances in technology, but actually stay ahead. Last year, we merged 3 organizations, Tenzing, Thinkwrap Commerce, and Spark::red, to become Pivotree. We did this based on the opportunity we saw in the market to become the only truly end-to-end Commerce implementation and managed services provider and to expand into other areas that would benefit our customers and prospects, like Master Data Management (MDM). What we discovered in this merging process was the importance of consistent tools, and the necessity of change management in order to implement them.

Implementing a new tool is different than merging legacy solutions. When looking at the expansion of our sales organization, it was definitely a relief to know we were dealing with Salesforce across the board, and that for parts of the organization that had never used such a tool, we would gain the ability to use Oracle Big Machines Express (BMX) for Configure Price Quote (CPQ). As long as we were able to give our customers the “Customer for Life” style service we had built our reputation on, we were happy to continue using these legacy tools and investments. However, this soon changed.

With the announcement of Salesforce Lightning came the unpleasant news: BMX would not support the new interface. We were going to have to replatform at least the CPQ tool – but it did present an interesting case for the future of our sales processes: we’re selling and implementing SAP Sales Cloud. Why shouldn’t we drink our own champagne – a more pleasant expression than dogfooding, I’d argue – and use it, too? We took this opportunity to evaluate our sales organization and how we engage our customers better to see if we could engage them more efficiently and empower our sales rockstars to reach new heights and grow.

Of course, changing sales platforms is a huge undertaking, and as strategic technology advisors to huge brands, we understand the discovery process from both buyer and seller perspectives. Therefore, we knew that we’d have to evaluate multiple solutions – doing right by our clients is at the core of our brand, and knowing we are using the best technology for that purpose is paramount in our decisions.

In the end, we evaluated SAP, Oracle, Verenia, and Salesforce. Leading this project were Glen Thayer and Kurt Thompson. The majority of the content in this blog series was created by these two colleagues. In the spirit of transparency, and offering a third-party perspective, we’d like to share some insights from our process, to help other companies in the midst of similar change management. Our organization has certain goals to grow our bottom line and improve our efficiencies. We do not make this choice lightly. Additionally, as a Professional and Managed Services B2B organization, we work with complex deals, develop strong personal relationships with our clients, and have large deal sizes. Having the right CPQ tool in place can transform our business. 

Next week, we’ll discuss the method by which our experts compared several solutions, and why we chose the ones we decided to stack up against SAP’s CPQ tool. Follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter, to make sure you don’t miss it, or register for our Webinar on July 17th.