The company relied on a quoting and configuration Solution that was largely code-driven. In 2022, PFIO moved to a more configurable solution. Still, quote-to-cash processes didn’t improve significantly because a lot of the required complex validation and configuration accuracy features could still not be easily achieved.

PFIO always innovating as a company and introducing new products, and at one point they were managing multiple teams of developers because that’s the capacity that it took to ensure that system was capable of supporting all of the new product initiatives,” said Mary, who now manages PFIO salesforce platform.

To build custom solutions to support sales we lived in a world that was heavily dependent on IT and it looks like a lot of cycles, honestly. There wasn’t a lot of flexibility, this slowed things down

It required instead to provide sales reps with an intuitive, business-administered solution that would streamline the quoting process and result in a better overall user experience.

It’s the major need of their sales team to be providing solutions to customers rather than being ruined by data entry tasks. Need a system that becomes its key.

When the evaluation was another CPQ solution in the final stages, PFIO discover Salesforce was launching Salesforce CPQ. At that point, CCI paused and wondered if it made sense to continue with their first choice, or if it would be better to rely on a solution built natively on the Salesforce platform.

Salesforce is the best and most great company with innovative products. CCI loves its invention, and CCI knows that we can depend on its product roadmap. PFIO was excited to see how it was going to take CPQ to the next level. This made Salesforce CPQ the best choice for PFIO.

In previous practice, whenever PFIO sales reps would enter an order in the system, and if the configuration was invalid, the deal desk or order management teams would have to fix it on the back side of the process.

It reduces time wasted communicating back and forth in the process. With approvals and validations, Salesforce CPQ immediately notifies the sales rep if a quote has an invalid configuration and tells them what to fix.

The sales reps are much more confident in building out the solution now. They estimate the number of dirty orders – orders that were not complete enough to go forward – have been reduced by 50% or more.

In the past, PFIO SKUs contained full attribution, including things like volume band, support country, and subscription term. Salesforce CPQ has allowed PFIO to condense its SKUs and streamline the pricing and configuration process.

PFIO also has richer data now, such as details within the approval management process, which was previously done through email and couldn’t be analyzed.

At the start of this year, PFIO launched a new subscription model for customers. It is important to the continued growth of the company to provide that option to customers but managing the different configurations and options would have been very complex without Salesforce CPQ.

Salesforce CPQ has really simplified management of that and set us up for the future.

it’s time to address other sales process inefficiencies with a CPQ solution in place, it’s time to address other sales process inefficiencies. That means deploying salesforce billing, which will equip PFIO with a flexible, scalable billing solution and automation that does not exist today.

This is something that business stakeholders are not pressuring for yet, but CCI knows it’s going to be needed where PFIO going as a business. This is our opportunity to get ahead of things instead of being in a reactive state.