Sofon presents CPQ solution at Salesforce Event ‘Dreamforce’
09 September 2011
I spent last week in San Francisco where the 9th annual global Salesforce event was held: Dreamforce. More than 40,000 visitors came together at the event to find out more about what Salesforce and Salesforce partners have to offer. The event was a very positive one with a great deal of positive energy – and a high level of interest in Sofon.
CPQ: Configure, Price, Quote
As a Salesforce ISV Partner, Sofon was one of the Dreamforce sponsors. Our sponsorship placed us in a position to come into contact with Salesforce prospects and customers in search of what is increasingly coming to be known as CPQ: Configure, Price, Quote functionality (which at Sofon is part of our Guided Selling solution). We also met a number of our own customers who are also Salesforce users.
Bottlenecks
What struck me most over the past several days was that there was a lot of talk about technological innovation as a driver of new end-user applications. In addition, much consideration is given to the applications of social network functions within enterprise systems and mobile computing. At the same time, the results of the many discussions that we held with prospects indicated that their current systems often still fall short in their support of the primary (sales) process. In our field of expertise (Configuration, Calculation, Pricing, Quotation generation and Contract generation) the bottleneck in the current systems often turn out to be caused by the fact that the systems are unable to effectively handle the complexity of these systems. This can include, for example, the many product options, prices and customer agreements.
Cause
Does this mean that the current systems do not possess the functional possibility to handle the daily complexity? This will be the case for a portion of the systems. In my opinion, however, we must mainly look into the fact that many current systems have been developed in such a way that they cannot be properly implemented by users from a business perspective. This shortcoming is often dealt with using extra consultancy and custom work, which results in unacceptably high costs, difficult to maintain systems and tension between business and IT.
Solution
During the development of our software we consistently put into practice the vision that software must be implemented and maintained by end users. Among our customers, the combination of functionally complete standard software (read: no custom work), relatively light implementations (read: low consultancy costs) and high user autonomy (read: low maintenance costs) has led to high satisfaction rates, as demonstrated by a recent customer satisfaction survey. For that reason, we will continue to propagate the vision that software must be able to be set up and maintained by end users.
Marijn Schouten is Director Business Development at Sofon - supplier of sales support software. As Marijn has a lot of contact with clients, he has a clear insight into how companies that deliver customer-specific products and services can realize improvements within their sales and quotation process.
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