Configuration Management Product

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that much has changed since my grandfather’s sales days. Back then, he would travel to customers and prospects with a heavy bag of products so he could demonstrate how the product worked and interacted with its various components. Over the years, sales professionals started to move away from this approach – in part due to the back breaking pain it caused. Instead, some started to carry paper catalogs. While not as heavy to carry, these were (and still are) pricey and much more difficult to use for new and existing customers in terms of visualizing how the product actually worked.

Today, sales professionals have a new sales bag – the iPad. With the third generation iPad in the hands of more than three million people, it is having a huge impact on the way we do business – and the sales department is leading their companies through this transformation toward mobility by using the iPad and other tablets as a sales tool while out in the field. Sales professionals are using the iPad while in front of their customers to have a conversation about their products’ features and options, providing an opportunity for product configuration on the spot.

In fact, here at BigMachines, we recently conducted our Second Annual Benchmark Survey, which takes a look at the state of the sales industry today. The findings show that sales mobility is continuously growing with 66.7% of respondents currently using a tablet or mobile device for selling while on the road.  More so, the survey results indicate that face-to-face contact still provides the greatest success with prospects and customers. Taking both those points into consideration, this next statistic shouldn’t be too shocking: a total of 62.5% said their mobile device is important for completing complex sales.

Here are just a few instances as to why the iPad is enhancing the face-to-face interaction between the sales rep and customers and prospects:

• It provides easy access to critical data on-the-go. The more information a sales rep has about a particular customer or prospect going into a meeting, the greater the chance ofclosing a deal.

• It enables quick and professional price quotes on the spot. With the proper applications, an entire proposal can be generated in front of the customer and terms quickly negotiated.

• It adds an extra degree of transparency to the deal, which customers appreciate. As quotes and proposals are generated in plain sight, they have full visibility into what is being negotiated throughout the process.

• While closing deals faster is an obvious plus for sales reps, it is also advantageous to the client. The faster a customer is delivered the product or service it needs, the better off it will be.

• The iPad can minimize, or even eliminate, the confusion that often accompanies complex orders. It is equipped with adequate software applications for pricing and quoting in real-time, enabling sales rep to walk a customer through an entire order in-person, all while allowing the rep to easily explain and iterate through all of the options available right in front of the customer.

It’s pretty incredible how this new, lightweight sales bag is revolutionizing the way the sales professionals do their jobs better while on the road – ultimately leading to increased productivity and an improved bottom line.

So, tell me, is your organization rolling out the iPad to the sales force? What does your sales bag look like?

Tim Handorf

VP of Product Management

• The improved Migration Management Center allows customers to easily transfer changes between their BigMachines test and production sites. Customers can easily compare changes between two BigMachines instances, filter results, and select specific components to update. The new migration management center allows for greater visibility of changes and speeds up the migration process.

• BigMachines’ new Configuration Layout Editor allows customers to create complex configuration and search layouts with an easy to use drag-and-drop editor for pixel perfect control of the page layout. The results are web pages are easier to design, faster to load, and allow for richer functionality.

• BigMachines updated Commerce Rules Wizard now provides customers with a centralized location to create and edit all commerce rules.  The new functionality adds more flexibility in the BigMachines commerce process and improves the user experience by providing a more scalable, standardized way to create hiding attributes, constraints and validations within BigMachines.

• Customers ideas via the My BigIdea innovation web portal
• Interactions at Regional Customer Success Forums
• Votes on most-requested enhancements during BigIdeas in the United States and Europe
  

• Intuitive drag and drop interface allows for high quality UX layouts of configuration pages.
• New AJAX commerce rules enable dynamic updates without the need to refresh pages, resulting in a rich end-user quoting experience
• One stop migration center administration provides enhanced ability to compare data between local and remote instances as well as seamlessly migrate data
• Enhanced step administration user interface simplifies management of workflow set ups

2011 marks BigMachines' third annual Customer Innovation Awards, presented at our Annual Customer and Cloud Computing Conference, BigIdeas. BigMachines customers who show significant innovation in the usage of their BigMachines Selling Platform, ROI, and contributions to BigMachines product enhancements can be nominated and win one of three awards: Big Innovation, Big Success, and Biggest Idea.

Previous winners include:

SPX Process Equipment, a leading manufacturer, who won for implementing an innovative use of BigMachines within their company. SPX used BigMachines to quickly adapt their sales processes to change across a wide range of products; from commodities through highly engineered equipment, and to streamline sales of these products through multiple sales channels.

Acme Packet, the leader in session border control solutions, who was recognized for its use of BigMachines in significantly reducing both its order error rate and the time to produce a sales quote. In addition BigMachines has increased accuracy of their price book, streamlined their approval processes and improved cross-functional communications.

Williams, a leading manufacturer of highly customizable engineered products for the HVAC industry, who won for their use of BigMachines to power the company's channel partner portal resulting in 400% sales growth within two years without increasing the numbers of sales managers, applications engineers or customer service personnel. Williams feels that they now have the most advance sales and ordering tools in the industry.

Want to join this innovative group? BigMachines customers may self-nominate or be nominated at www.bigmachines.com/bigideas/big-awards.php for two of three awards: Big Innovation Award and Big Success Award. Our third award, Biggest Idea, goes to the BigMachines My BigIdea community member that contributes the most innovative idea to enhance BigMachines' products; the honor is awarded base on the most number of votes received in 2011.

1. Have "tribal knowledge" product and sales experts create detailed documents of rules, constraints and insider knowledge. Once you have this information, filling in the "blanks" to create configuration workflows and approval automations becomes much easier!
   
2. Understand approval thresholds for quotes - including what modifications are ok or not, what discounts are acceptable or not, and other situations where an approver or multiple approvers are required. After these thresholds are defined, you can then eliminate bottlenecks with rules for approval workflows and move quotes and orders which mean pre-defined conditions automatically through the process.
   
3. Document EVERY technology, system, tool and manual process that is involved in the inquiry-to-order process. If you miss even one manual process, you risk losing buy-in from your sales/engineering/order/management teams. Engaging the do-ers of cross-functional teams is essential to deploying a successful CPQ solution.

If you sell directly to other businesses or consumers, you already know how important speed, accuracy and presentation are to close deals.

BigMachines offers a variety of solutions to add speed and accuracy to the quoting and proposal, and order process. Here's how a BigMachines Customer utilizes product configuration, quoting and proposals to sell more and sell faster.

Configure products and services in minutes instead of days using BigMachines Guided Selling, which organizes product specifications as a series of question menus to guide users through the configuration process.

Send custom, validated, configurations on for review and approval via automated workflows. Sales Management, Product Engineers or Finance teams can approve sales quotes on the go via email and eliminate bottlenecks.

Once approved, use BigMachines Document Engine to send a dynamic, personalized sales quote, proposal or contract to customers. Easily add product datasheets, custom terms and conditions, customer logos and more via print, email, or fax in MS Word, Adobe PDF, and/or HTML format.

Need your document signed? BigMachines supports integration of leading electronic signature vendors to provide convenience and fast turnaround for your customers.

When you're ready to submit, use BigMachines to eliminate manual order entry and send approved quotes automatically to back end accounting or ERP systems; orders can even be routed through another approval process as needed with the electronic workflow.

Finally, take advantage of BigMachines Reporting and Analytics to stay on top of the pipeline by generating reports to help you improve quote management, forecasting, and product management.

Now what? Let BigMachines help streamline the renewal process for your existing customers. Quickly and accurately repackage or extend agreements for service and support, software licenses, subscription annuities and more.

In the field and on the go? Generate quotes even when you're offline from the Internet using BigMachines Unplugged. Offline users can configure, price, and generate quotes as well as go online to upload and download quotes to and from a central database.

Ready to extend your reach? BigMachines eCommerce Engine allows you to build a self-service, guided selling and configuration platform for your B2B and B2C customers to shop online.

During the second quarter of 2011, BigMachines also released the newest version of its award-winning SaaS software, BigMachines 11.1, enabling sales teams, channel partners and resellers to easily configure products, generate quotes and proposals, manage complex pricing, generate legal contracts, submit and manage orders more efficiently and securely. With BigMachines 11.1, customers enjoyed real-time upgrades, ensuring that they quickly received the benefits of the new release including a faster, more dynamic user experience, increased flexibility in creating sales documents using the BigMachines Document Engine, and many more enhancements. BigMachines also continued to drive innovation through the accelerated adoption of its My BigIdea web portal, where customers submit and discuss product enhancements and interact directly with the BigMachines product team.

Will Wiegler, Vice President of Marketing at BigMachines shared with me that, "A large contributor to our growth as a business has been our dedication to customer success. In 2011 we have held a series of five Customer Success Forums around the United States, engaging more than 150 customers to share best practices, learn and provide feedback on our product roadmap. As we continue to grow BigMachines, our customers remain the core of our business."

In addition, BigMachines is preparing for its biggest event ever, the BigIdeas Customer Success & Cloud Innovation Conference, taking place in Chicago on October 23-25, 2011. I look forward to meeting more than 500 BigMachines customers, partners, and industry experts during the conference, who will come together to learn about and collaborate on the big ideas that will streamline their sales processes, reduce costs and increase revenues. 

BigMachines interactive training classes are designed to teach administrators and users the fundamentals of setting up, customizing and maintaining their BigMachines software solution. Yellow Belt certification classes provide the building blocks for implementing and administering BigMachines, and are a prerequisite for more advanced classes that lead to Blue Belt certification.

“Our customers and partners can feel confident that a BigMachines certified administrator will have the skills required to expertly implement and maintain their BigMachines platform,” stated Tim Handorf, Vice President of Product Management, BigMachines. “Our new training programs ensure that all BigMachines certified administrators achieve the same expertise, whether they take classes in person or online.”

BigMachines customers and partners can choose to take certification classes in the way that best fit their schedules, learning styles and budgets.  Classes are offered at BigMachines’ training centers in the United States and Europe, can be given at a customer’s office or can be taken via the new online learning platform. The new online option allows each customer to learn at his or her own pace, save on travel costs and still receive the same high level of administration training that an in-person class offers.

“Our company makes extensive use of Configuration, Commerce, and the Document Engine for guiding our users to a complete quote,” said Jason Parpart, Systems Administrator, Schenck AccuRate.  “As our company’s BigMachines administrator, comprehensive training in all aspects of BigMachines administration was a must.  After taking the Yellow Belt training, I felt confident in my ability to tweak and maintain our site as it went live.  After completing Blue Belt training, I now feel like I have a vast new set of tools at my disposal to make just about anything possible.  The training team has done an excellent job of putting together a rigorous but well-paced curriculum and they teach it well.  Training up to at least the Yellow Belt level should almost be a requirement for any BigMachines administrator.”

To learn more about BigMachines training or to register for a class, visit www.bigmachines.com/training.  Additional training opportunities are also available at BigIdeas Chicago, October 23 – 25, 2011.  BigIdeas Chicago is one of the largest cloud conferences targeted for B2B sales professionals and offers new insights to help them optimize their sales processes to sell more and sell faster. To learn more, visit www.bigmachines.com/bigideas.

"Sell more, and sell it more quickly" is the mantra for many an industry. But if there's one impediment to rapid selling, it's product complexity. Buy a PC online today, for example, and you may have to navigate through 500 core options — some top-level, others stemming from choices you make — not to mention an array of accessories and add-ons.

To tame this product complexity and proliferation for salespeople and customers, and to streamline proposal generation and price quotes for products, many companies work with Innoveer to integrate a "product configurator" with their CRM system. Top candidates for such technology include anyone selling goods that come in various shapes, sizes, bundles, and with "similar but different" names and SKUs — from businesses in the high-technology and manufacturing sectors to over-the-counter pharmaceuticals and even financial services.

To discuss how and when to use a configurator, I spoke with Melanie Gipp, Director of Marketing for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at configurator developer (and Innoveer partner) BigMachines.

Which industries typically have the biggest product configuration challenges?

Gipp: Industries in which companies have products that are very complex or have very large product catalogs. We started in the manufacturing industry, but now we have customers in the high-technology, software services, telecommunications and even finance, amongst others.

For example, BigMachines is being used by Kodak to configure the large, commercial printers it sells, as well as the services associated with them. Kodak has integrated BigMachines with its Oracle CRM On Demand software, which enables in-house salespeople to more easily create quotes and close sales.

Other businesses are using BigMachines more for e-commerce purposes. For example, AGCO — a manufacturer of tractors and farm equipment — has opened its systems to distributors. So, dealers that want to buy an AGCO tractor can configure it through the AGCO website and order that system. That’s a relatively new use case for us.

If companies aren't using a configurator such as BigMachines, what are they doing?

Most often, we replace Microsoft Excel and Word. And that's shocking to hear — how these really large corporations have binders with price books that never get updated. Furthermore, every salesperson creates their own proposals, there's no standard corporate design even on them. Plus prices may be wrong, product descriptions inaccurate, and products incorrectly configured.

During a configurator implementation, do you face resistance from salespeople?

Sometimes, but that resistance comes with any new system that you’re implementing. Our goal is to design the BigMachines application for salespeople, and make it — and their life — as efficient as possible. That’s so they can more quickly produce accurate quotes and give better data to sales managers for planning and forecasting. That, of course, gives managers better control of their sales team. All of which can create friction, obviously. But these are the same challenges that a regular CRM implementation would bring, no doubt.

How much time does BigMachines buy salespeople?

BigMachines customer Siemens reports that they were able to reduce the time required to generate a quote by 65%, and at the same time increase quote volume by 25%. Other advantages for the sales person are the ability to more easily create an error-free quote, and the guided selling process, which eases their workload and allows less experienced staff members to create valid quotes.

Likewise, one of our customers that develops financial software, Bottomline Technologies, found that using BigMachines increased sales productivity by 25%. After 18 months, it also led to a two-thirds reduction in the company’s 90-day debt, meaning that the company was more quickly invoicing customers, and thus getting paid. Likewise, it saw an 85% reduction in accrued revenue, which does wonders for cash flow.

Learn More

What's the number-one challenge when implementing product configurators? As with implementing CRM software, it's to ensure that users not only adopt the new software, but embrace it. Accordingly, when implementing a configurator, balance management requirements (price enforcement, standardized reporting) with must-have capabilities for salespeople (faster and easier quotes and sales, easy pricing).

Meanwhile, while product configurators help organizations streamline and automate their product configuration and pricing, many companies also stand to benefit by cleaning house. Namely, they should always clamp down, aggressively, on creating new product names, options, bundles, SKUs and configurations. Master our related, top tips for controlling product proliferation.

• Fast, dynamic user experience utilizing new AJAX configuration rules enables  dynamic updates without the need to refresh web pages.
• Intuitive drag and drop interface allows for easy reordering of product and part line items during commerce process.
• Streamlined Document Engine administration provides enhanced flexibility in designing document layouts for proposals, contracts and other sales documents.
• New workflow approval delegation options allow approvers to easily delegate  approval authority.
• Simplified document migration for faster deployment and upgrades.
• Expanded access to pricebook data in configuration rules.