Is now the right time to tackle CPQ?
The Salesforce CPQ Journey Series
CPQ seems like the right tool for us, but is it the right time?
There is so much else that you could be doing. Let’s talk about how to decide what to do first. We “Keep It Simple” in this three step process:
Step 1: Identify Possibilities. What could you do?
Separate Support requests from Innovation requests.
Innovation: Ideas that drive business growth or close existing gaps
Support: “Run the Business” requests such as small tweaks (picklist change, email alert) and user questions
Typically, users will report mostly Support requests because these are an immediate pain to be resolved for day-to-day functionality. They also tend to be smaller in scope and cost. These are important to solve to keep the status quo but to move forward, you need to innovate. Most innovation ideas are larger in scope and take longer to complete, costing the organization in time, resources, and sometimes dollars to invest in the right partner.
To identify Innovation possibilities and effectively prioritize your roadmap, make it easy for your stakeholders to ask for what they need (for example, don’t have a long form with a lot of required fields at the first stage). Build and utilize your relationships with Leadership, Mid Management and Front Line Users. Here are a few suggestions:
Leadership
Most organizations have an annual reset on strategy to identify organizational objectives and targets. Once your leadership team shares, review the company objectives and identify what Salesforce solutions may help support these goals. Proactively suggest these changes to leadership by demonstrating the value the changes could bring to the organization.
Mid Management
Quarterly, review the feedback you collect from front line users with management. Check in to see if they are able to manage their teams from Salesforce or if they have spreadsheets. Always ask about the spreadsheets. These are some of the easiest places to find innovation opportunities.
Front Line Users
Schedule a meeting with one end user a month. Spend 30 minutes asking them what works in Salesforce and what is painful.
As you see opportunities, log these as innovation ideas.
Step 2: Expand and Rationalize. What should you do?
In step 1, you collected ideas and have a variety of information about each. Now, make sure you have enough information that anyone can understand the idea when reviewing it. Focus on the potential value that the idea can generate and the cost to implement the change. Otherwise, you’ll be reviewing this again in a month and thinking, “What did this mean?” Been there. Done that.
To better help you know which items are support vs innovation requests, it’s helpful to categorize. Below are some examples of support requests, if an idea doesn’t fit into one of these groups, ask if it is actually innovation.
Required Upgrades
Examples: Release & Security Updates, App updates, Integration maintenance.
There isn’t a debate about keeping the business running. Slot these as high priority based on their end date and get them done.
Business Capabilities
Examples: Departmental or larger initiatives, Multi-level involvement (Manager and User), Stated goals
These are typically driven from leadership and management and likely have an executive sponsor.
Usability
Example: Team or person interests, Non-critical, Often not formal in request or scope
These ideas likely come from front end users. Ideally, work with an executive to explain the opportunity and gain a sponsor.
Step 3: Prioritize. What should you do now?
How do you decide what should be done first? You could listen to the person yelling loudest. You could throw a dart at the dartboard. Or, you could make a data driven decision using our weighted prioritization template. (Request a copy of our template here.)
With this template you will:
Identify tangible metrics to evaluate ideas against. These can be customized for individual businesses.
Objectively evaluate how you expect an idea to perform against each metric. (Questions about the ROI of a given project? Let’s chat.)
Calculate a weighted priority and reorder the innovation ideas
After running all innovation ideas through weighted prioritization, you have a recommended order to start from. This can be used as an objective guide to start the conversation with stakeholders about the top few items and decide where to focus first.
New ideas can be added and the list can be reshuffled when you have space to take new things on.
Fun Facts:
Cloud Giants uses Weighted Priority internally to make sure we work on the most important things first.
You can combine Weighted Priority with Sizing and Expected Burn to predict delivery dates!
Wrapping Up:
Make sure you find all possible ideas. Make sure the ideas make sense. Use Weighted Priority to order them objectively so you are confident that you are getting the biggest bang for your buck.
Now that you have confirmed CPQ makes sense given your other business priorities, check out these concrete next steps to get ready for CPQ.
Holly is the Chief Operations Officer at Cloud Giants. A 5x Salesforce certified professional, Holly has a passion for helping global companies optimize processes, systems and tools.
Holly is a Salesforce Certified Administrator, Sales Cloud Consultant, Platform App Builder, CPQ Specialist, and Service Cloud Consultant.