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How to Make Better Pricing Decisions in Salesforce

The pricing decisions you make in Salesforce depend on real-time data accuracy

Key Takeaways:

  • Fast, accurate quotes are the key to a great customer experience and increased profitability
  • Business logic, pricing, inventory, etc. are stored in SAP while quotes are created in the CRM and sales reps struggle to get the accurate information they need
  • Middleware solutions often create more problems than they solve
  • The enosix lineup of pre-built Salesforce integrations makes quoting easy by pulling in real-time information directly from SAP
  • The enosix solution pulled Sonny’s out of a middleware quagmire that was hampering business growth

It is Monday and a typical day at your manufacturing company. A desirable new customer hears about your great products through the grapevine and wants a quote. It’s a huge, complex, custom potential order with plenty of repeat business, so both hope and expectations are high.

It is now Wednesday, and that customer still doesn’t have their quote. They are sniffing around the competition. Your sales rep is sweating bullets, the sales manager is pacing the office, and everyone is trying to get all the information they need from SAP to develop pricing that includes all of the customizations and will also return a tidy profit.

Because your Salesforce front end is not integrated with the supply chain, business logic, and resource details that live in SAP, there are really only a few possible scenarios: Your quote is so late that the customer moves on to your competitor, you lock in pricing that you cannot support, or you have to go hat-in-hand to your customer later and discuss modifying the quote.

This is a huge problem for all manufacturers, and one that can be easily solved, quickly and at a budget-friendly price with the enosix lineup of pre-built Salesforce integrations.

Inaccurate two-way communication is at the heart of pricing issues

When your pricing, inventory, custom configurations, and business logic are in SAP and your front-end is Salesforce, you likely have a sales team that loves how easy Salesforce CPQ is to use but struggles to get the information they need to produce accurate quotes there.

Many try middleware and many are frustrated with the results, finding that things sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t with common problems that include:

  • Mismatches in products listed
  • Products not listed at all in one system or the other
  • Pricing differences between systems
  • Items falling off of quotes

In essence, middleware just contributed to the problems rather than solving them. Using middleware to solve chronic problems related to business agility and ongoing flexibility is, well, not the best solution.

Manufacturing companies don’t need more or better middleware to make their CPQ system work the way it should have from the beginning. Instead, it’s time to step back and adopt the modern solution that sets up your unique business for success by providing the technology it needs.

Accelerating the speed to revenue

It’s all about the customer and the accurate pricing that brings in the revenue. To provide what both you and your customer need, you have to leverage the very best of both SAP and Salesforce. However, integrating the two systems can take months with middleware solutions that don’t work well anyway.

Savvy companies are turning to enosix for fast deployment and time-to-value. CPQ is the revenue engine that keeps your business going, and enosix’s slate of pre-built integrations means a seamless, real-time integration between Salesforce and SAP ECC or S/4HANA with no custom code development or maintenance.

This enables manufacturers to reach new levels of ROI with their powerful, integrated system at a budget-friendly price. With the enosix CPQ solution, Salesforce users can create accurate quotes in real-time from SAP with no moving, replication, or exporting of data and logic.

Complex SAP pricing rules and product configurations, including variant configuration (VC), stay in SAP so your sales team can build valid quotes based on the data in SAP. Because you leverage SAP VC, you likely have thousands of configurable products with hundreds of thousands of characteristics and characteristic values available for any given product line, and you need all of that information readily available in Salesforce

The enosix prebuilt integration reduces implementation time by 70% to 90% and delivers the must-have functionality that’s just not possible with other approaches.

How enosix solved Sonny’s middleware nightmare

First, some background. Sonny’s is the world’s largest manufacturer of conveyorized car wash equipment, parts, and supplies. It is a global leader in the car wash industry with 11 distinct lines of business that touch on every aspect of the car wash industry and has over 1,000 employees nationwide. It supports professional car wash investors, owners, and operators with a single source to help them both simplify their operations and drive profitability.

But what about Sonny’s profitability? Profits depend on accurate pricing, and that wasn’t happening at Sonny’s. Tim Elhefnawy, general manager and vice president of sales, was frustrated. They were having a lot of difficulties, not only because of things that weren’t configured properly from the beginning, but with ongoing serious issues with connectivity between their core ERP, which is SAP ECC, and front-end system.

Problems were rife. Sales reps would have to go into SAP, then work with the middleware to connect to their CRM to create quotes. The result was double work and lots of testing. Sometimes things worked and sometimes they didn’t. And even when they did connect, there were mismatches in pricing and items would appear in ECC but not in the CRM. They needed to bridge the gaps and tighten things up, but how?

Sonny’s credits enosix with bringing everything together. The new process was “pretty seamless without significant headaches,” according to Elhefnawy. They are now delivering faster, getting more accurate information from the beginning, and providing a far better customer experience.

Sonny’s salespeople once struggled to get pricing and inventory data, but now the enosix platform means they can get the information they need exactly when they need it – in real time. They can quickly and easily provide a quote by pulling up the information they need. They can simply log into Salesforce and rest assured that their information is up to date.

With enosix, companies can unlock live SAP data without the need to re-create configurations and price books in Salesforce. Combine the power of Salesforce’s CPQ platform with the configuration and pricing rules you already have in SAP. Get every quote right, every time, and create every order immediately in SAP.

Faster integration. Accurate quotes. enosix.

Leverage SAP data with Salesforce CPQ integration and eliminate dual maintenance, poor quoting accuracy, and improve not just the overall quoting process but the customer journey as well.

Learn more about how enosix can help streamline your quoting process and provide the kind of customer experience that rakes in the revenue. Schedule a demo today.

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