Order Management vs. Quoting by Adam Kleinberg How Order Management critical in SRM. Much time is spent documenting the needs for quality pricing, better discounting, and of course sales cycle streamlining. The overlooked challenge is the requirement to commit resources, deliver services, and ensure the initiation of the billing process. With revenue recognition floating like a sword over the head of the COO, the quote becomes worthless if the delivery fails to meet the subscriber's expectations. How did quoting and service delivery become connected, and why is it overlooked? It is very simple actually. When the traditional CRM sale cycle of…

When to choose CPQ, Billing & SRM. by Adam Kleinberg Many people are now getting confused between what each of these systems does,  what their approach is and which one fits their needs.  Do not assume all are the same or perform the same function.CPQConfigure, Price, and Quoting systems were first brought to the Salesforce community by companies like Big Machines. These were designed to allow companies with hundreds or thousands of price altering elements to be structured into Recommends, Required, Inclusions, and Exclusions which can then be discounted and finally presented in a proposal.  A good example would be…

The Essentials of Order Management by Adam Kleinberg As the flavor of CPQ (quoting) begins to wane, the market for Billing begins to stratify and specialize. It is important to understand the critical and yet foundational part of the subscriber relationship. Some call it, “on-boarding,” others call it, “fulfillment” and many refer to it as “change management.” It all boils down to, “Order Management.”How a new solution request is processed is arguably where the rubber hits the road. It doesn’t matter how you select the products and what the pricing model is, if the end subscriber never gets what he…

SRM Validated by Salesforce’s “The Internet of Things by Adam Kleinberg Salesforce promoted examples of “The Internet of Things”. The idea that common daily items in our lives can feed data to us to better enhance our usage and create efficiencies. This idea is not exactly new since Disney’s EPCOT (Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow) center has been talking about it for years yet opened October 1, 1982 and was dreamed up by a man who died in 1967. The work that GE, SONY, Frigidaire and others have been doing all these years is finally being put into practice now…