CPQ with Salesforce + revVana: Enhancing Revenue Forecasting

You’ve chosen a tool to configure your bookings with CPQ, significantly improving how you handle pricing and quoting. But what if you could also configure your revenue outcomes and forecasts based on these custom quotes and opportunities inside of Salesforce? This is where revVana comes into play, filling the gap that CPQ leaves when it comes to revenue forecasting.

Integrating CPQ with Salesforce

Integrating CPQ with Salesforce can significantly enhance the capabilities of sales and revenue operations teams. Here are some key benefits and considerations:

1. Seamless Data Flow: Integration ensures a seamless flow of data between CPQ and Salesforce, providing rev-ops teams with a unified view of customer information, quotes, and order histories.
2. Automation and Accuracy: Automated data transfer reduces manual entry errors, ensuring that pricing and product configurations are accurate and up-to-date.
3. Enhanced Collaboration: Integration fosters better collaboration between sales and other departments, such as finance and operations, by providing a single source of truth.
4. Scalability: As businesses grow, integrated CPQ solutions can scale to handle increased volumes of quotes and orders without compromising performance.

CPQ Products for Salesforce

Several CPQ products integrate with Salesforce, each offering unique features and benefits. Here are a few notable options:

• Salesforce CPQ: Native to the Salesforce platform, Salesforce CPQ offers tight integration and robust features tailored specifically for Salesforce users. It provides a seamless user experience, with easy access to customer data, product catalogs, and pricing information. The solution is designed to streamline the sales process by automating complex quoting tasks, ensuring pricing accuracy, and enabling rev-ops teams to create and manage quotes efficiently within the familiar Salesforce environment. Salesforce CPQ also supports various pricing models, discounting rules, and approval workflows, making it a versatile choice for businesses of all sizes.
• Conga CPQ: Known for its advanced configurability and scalability, Conga CPQ suits enterprises with complex pricing and product configuration needs. It offers a highly customizable platform that can handle intricate product configurations, diverse pricing strategies, and extensive approval processes. Conga CPQ is particularly beneficial for large enterprises with a wide range of products and services, as it can manage complex bundles and hierarchies, ensuring that sales teams can quickly generate accurate quotes for even the most sophisticated offerings.
• Oracle CPQ: Oracle CPQ offers comprehensive features and is ideal for large organizations seeking a powerful CPQ solution. It provides a robust platform for managing complex quoting processes, including multi-channel sales, advanced pricing rules, and extensive approval workflows. Oracle CPQ is designed to support large-scale operations, with capabilities such as dynamic pricing, real-time product recommendations, and guided selling to help sales teams navigate complex sales scenarios. The solution also integrates well with Oracle’s suite of enterprise applications, ensuring a unified approach to sales, finance, and operations.
• SAP CPQ: SAP CPQ integrates well with other SAP solutions, providing a cohesive experience for SAP-centric businesses. It offers a comprehensive set of features designed to streamline the sales process, including advanced product configuration, pricing management, and quote generation. SAP CPQ is particularly advantageous for businesses already using SAP’s ERP and CRM systems, as it ensures seamless data flow and consistency across the organization. The solution supports complex pricing models, multi-language and multi-currency capabilities, and extensive customization options, making it a versatile tool for global enterprises.
• Pros Smart CPQ: Focuses on AI-driven insights and pricing optimization, making it a strong contender for businesses looking to leverage data for strategic pricing. Pros Smart CPQ uses advanced algorithms and machine learning to analyze market trends, customer behavior, and competitive pricing, providing sales teams with recommendations for optimal pricing strategies. The solution helps businesses maximize revenue and profitability by identifying the best pricing opportunities and minimizing discounting errors.

Selecting the right CPQ solution depends on your business needs, existing systems, and desired outcomes. Careful evaluation of these solutions will help you choose a product that enhances your sales processes and integrates seamlessly with Salesforce.

The Limitations of CPQ

While CPQ with Salesforce excels at configuring bookings and generating precise quotes, it is not a comprehensive solution for all revenue operations (rev-ops) challenges. Here are some key limitations to consider:

• Revenue Outcome Configuration: CPQ focuses primarily on the sales process, leaving gaps in the ability to configure and manage revenue outcomes. Businesses need tools that go beyond quoting and bookings to gain a holistic view of their revenue streams.
• Revenue Forecasting: Accurate revenue forecasting requires more than just sales data. CPQ alone does not provide the necessary insights to predict future revenue with high precision. Specialized tools are needed to analyze various revenue factors and trends.
• Comprehensive Revenue Management: To effectively manage revenue, businesses must consider multiple aspects, including billing, revenue recognition, and compliance. CPQ does not address these areas, necessitating additional solutions for complete revenue management.

For businesses seeking the most precise revenue forecasts and comprehensive revenue management, it is essential to complement Salesforce CPQ with specialized tools like revVana. revVana enhances revenue operations by providing advanced forecasting, revenue recognition, and financial planning capabilities.

revVana + CPQ: Configuring Your Revenue

One of our clients needed a solution to forecast product-level revenue from pipeline and completed orders. They were attempting to use Salesforce Product Schedules alongside Sales Cloud and CPQ. Product Schedules in Salesforce are designed to spread revenue evenly over time but lack the flexibility to meet real revenue expectations. They only allow for a single generation and require deletion and recreation for updates, making them incompatible with CPQ, which allows for frequent updates to quotes and opportunities.

revVana addressed their detailed requirements by responding to changes in quotes and opportunities, including pro-rating revenue to the day and customizing revenue schedules. The benefits included:

• Dynamic and Customizable Schedules: Unlike Product Schedules, revVana allows for the creation of custom revenue schedules that can be prorated to the day and updated frequently. This ensures that revenue forecasts are always accurate and reflective of the latest sales data.
• Streamlined Automated Forecasting: revVana enabled the client to automate forecasting for every deal in their pipeline and orders, reducing the time and effort required for manual forecasting processes.
• Accurate and Granular Forecasting: By utilizing revVana data, the client achieved more precise and detailed forecasting for their topline revenue. This improved accuracy allowed for better financial planning and resource allocation.
• Informed Decision-Making: The enhanced forecasting capabilities provided by revVana empowered the client to make more informed strategic decisions, ultimately driving business growth and improving overall financial health.

See just how revVana seamlessly integrates with CPQ below:

Integrating revVana into CPQ with Salesforce not only enhances the core functionalities of CPQ but also brings advanced forecasting and flexible revenue modeling to the table. This powerful combination ensures that sales teams can operate at peak efficiency, deliver accurate quotes swiftly, and adapt to market changes with ease. For businesses looking to maximize their sales potential and streamline processes, the combination of CPQ with Salesforce and revVana is an unbeatable solution.

Contact us today to learn how we can help your unique organization configure not just your bookings, but your revenue as well.