Stop Focusing on the Wrong Problem
Sounds harsh but hear us out. Clients often approach us with quoting, contracting, invoicing, or billing challenges — challenges that impede their ability to bill customers at speed, generate product-level revenue forecast reporting, and more. What those clients don’t realize is that by focusing solely on these challenges, they’re neglecting other smaller, but no less significant, challenges along the way. And in order to fix the big stuff, they have to start with the small stuff.
That’s where VennScience comes in.
It Starts with a Strong Foundation
The fact of the matter is you can’t do everything at once, which is why we’ve staked our success on our VennScientific Method.
Rather than tackle a single, specific challenge head-on, we go back to the very beginning to build a strong foundation for your CPQ and Billing solution. Once we’ve done that, we’ll remain fully engaged to ensure that your foundation remains solid, as well as look for ways to continuously improve it. Ultimately, our goal is to deliver an innovative solution that will not only serve your immediate invoicing and billing needs but will also evolve to meet your future needs and business challenges.
Did You Know…
VennScience offers a number of pre-configured accelerators — that is, custom process flows — for everything from mid-term uplifts to contract amendments.
A Solution for Your CPQ & Billing Challenges.
Salesforce CPQ Challenges
THE CHALLENGE Your Product Catalog Isn’t Properly Configured
Without the right pricing and billing rules in place, it’s impossible to quote products effectively or to route products through the optimal fulfillment and finance workstreams after your sales team closes the deal.
THE SOLUTION VennScience Will Design Your Product Catalog with the End in Mind
We’ll start by interviewing your sales team to learn how you sell your products, how those products are priced, and what discounts you offer. Based on that information, we’ll establish rules and constraints for guided selling, preset discount schedules, and more.
THE CHALLENGE Salesforce CPQ Doesn’t Offer Mid-Term Uplift for Multi-Year Contracts as a Native Functionality
Salesforce offers multi-year contract uplifts through MDQ, but only if the salesperson knows upfront what the price increase will be. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t account for the reality of the SaaS sales model, which frequently has a variable uplift rate written into customer contracts.
THE SOLUTION VennScience Offers a Pre-Configured Mid-Term Uplift and Multi-Year Contract Accelerator
Make your contract renewal team happy with our pre-configured mid-contract uplift accelerator. This accelerator automatically applies price increases to each year of an existing contract term, so you can get more accurate reporting and forecasting for monthly and annually recurring revenue.
THE CHALLENGE Contract Amendments Aren’t Automatically Reflected in Your Renewals
Salesforce CPQ requires businesses to go through a very specific manual process in order to handle contract amendments. This process can be easily overlooked, which can lead to inaccurate renewal opportunities and negatively impact forecasting and your sales process.
THE SOLUTION VennScience Has a Contract Amendment Accelerator
It’s critical that your renewal team be able to produce an accurate renewal quote regardless of where they are in the contract lifecycle. We won’t allow contract amendments — no matter when they take place — to slip through the cracks.
THE CHALLENGE You’re Contracting Too Early
We find that clients often miss a few key steps in the quote-to-cash process. This causes you to contract too early in the process or in the wrong spot (Opportunity vs. Order). Ultimately, this prevents you from being able to invoice at the right time due to fulfillment reasons.
THE SOLUTION VennScience Will Re-Engineer Your Business Process
We’ll work with you to figure out which components of the quote-to-cash process you’re missing and help you understand why it’s important that you not take any shortcuts.
Salesforce Billing Challenges
THE CHALLENGE You Aren’t Sure Which Products to Bill When
Different products require different billing frequencies, even within the same quote. Without a clear framework in place, it’s almost impossible for your sales team to communicate to your finance and fulfillment teams the frequency with which different products need to be billed.
THE SOLUTION VennScience Will Establish Billing Rules at a Product Level
We’ll work with your sales, billing, and finance teams to find out whether you bill your products monthly, quarterly, or annually, or if you bill them in advance or in arrears. Armed with that information, we’ll go back to your product catalog and set up easy-to-understand billing rules.
THE CHALLENGE You’re Creating Invoice Records & Documents Manually
Manual invoicing — whether it’s just part of the process or the entire thing — takes time, which prevents you from being able to invoice at scale. Manual invoicing also introduces the risk of user error, which can lead to inaccurate pricing and dissatisfied customers.
THE SOLUTION VennScience Will Automate Your Invoice Process
We’ll set up automated invoice scheduling within Salesforce Billing, so you never miss a billable event on an invoice. We’ll also leverage leading document generation tools to automatically generate professional, on-brand invoice documents that draw from the same source of truth as your invoice records.
THE CHALLENGE You’re Struggling to Bill for Usage Overages
Your company’s core product likely tracks usage data but, unless you can sync that data to Salesforce, it won’t do you much good. Furthermore, even if you are able to sync that data to Salesforce, you’ll need to find a place to store it within the system and make sure it’s formatted correctly.
THE SOLUTION VennScience Will Integrate Your Core Product with Salesforce
We’ll ensure that usage data is synced into Salesforce through an enterprise-grade integration solution that normalizes the data in a staging environment such as Heroku. We’ll also ensure that your Salesforce Billing architecture is structured to receive usage data accurately.
THE CHALLENGE Salesforce Doesn’t Offer Native Tax Calculation
Your customers expect a bottom line number for your product, and that includes tax. Unless you’re able to include estimated tax on your quotes and actual tax on your invoices, you aren’t giving your customers the full picture.
THE SOLUTION VennScience Will Integrate Salesforce Billing with Avalara
Avalara is the leading automated tax compliance software on the market today. By integrating it with your Salesforce solution and incorporating both your tax quoting and invoicing processes, we’ll enable Salesforce Billing to natively calculate both estimated and actual taxes.
