CPQ & Billing Keynote: Power Your Quote-to-Cash with the Customer 360 Platform | Salesforce

Hey, Jim, I'm using a driver in my office. Isn't that awesome?

Working hard, sales.

I'll call you back. Yes, finance. As a matter of fact, I am working hard. I'm building a rapport with one of my customers.

A rapport?

Yes, it's a French word that means. Look, it's just French. Sava.

I thought we were getting along.

We are getting along. We are getting along.

Well then, Lance, I assume you're familiar with the brand new product, the digital subscription. A key part of our digital transformation. It has a highly innovative and elegant revenue model.

I've heard a word of it, yes.

Do you know how hard I've been working to ensure this company's long term success? And you haven't sold a single subscription?

Deal.

You keep selling the old way.

Well, selling the old way last year, for your information, got me to this. And that's club.

Well.

Speaking of blunt force, do you even know how the quoting tools work?

Which one? There's like 10 of them. Every time they launch a new product, there's a new quoting tool. You know which my favorite is?

Enlighten me.

The back of a napkin. Old school. Gives me all the flexibility I need to do the deal and get it done the right way. My way.

I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that. Lance, you need to calculate the prorated pricing accurately.

Look, quoting the digital subscription requires all this complex figuring and calculating and ratios. I mean, what is that, math?

Some of us call that math.

And I'm supposed to use an Excel spreadsheet as a quoting tool?

Yes.

Yes, you are. And to make it easier and faster, we've employed some sophisticated macros and vlookups.

Vlookups?

Whoa.

Now we're using a dating app as a quoting tool. What is that? Lance, that's insane.

Lance, you know what you are? You're a very well paid, one trick pony.

Well, you know what? Maybe I am. Maybe I'm just an old sales horse in this wild corporate circus who only knows one trick. You know what that trick is?

No. It's not math closing.

That's my trick. I close big, big deals under the big top.

Lance, listen to me. There's a whole new generation of customers that are emerging and they have a different set of expectations and they expect us to deliver a seamless buying experience with flexible pricing. And if we don't adapt, we're going to.

We're going to.

We're going to.

What?

What were you going to say, Bianca?

Lance, if we're not careful, we're gonna get disrupted.

Disrupted.

We're gonna get u.

Hello, everybody. My name is Pascal Yuvin. I'm the general manager for Salesforce CPQ and billing. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to our keynote where we're going to talk about how you can manage your quote to cash transformation. Similar to Lance and Bianca, many of you are here because you're going through some similar type of change in your businesses. We've talked to many of you throughout the last few years and we understand those pains that you're going through. And we feel confident that with Salesforce, we can make those types of changes easier for you and for your future. And we've seen it work so many times with thousands of customers around the world. Many of you who are here today. We have our CPQ trailblazers around the world have configured over 45 million quotes already. And our billing trailblazers has generated five and a half million invoices. That's revenue, that's growth, that's value that you've created for your companies. And that's just within one year. And for everybody here who's thinking about how you handle your transformation, you too can have these results. And we're going to help you get there. But first, I want to say thank you to all of you, our customers. Thank you for partnering with us on such an important journey. We are so humbled by the trust that you put in Salesforce for such an important area. And thank you for the feedback that you've shared with us throughout your journey because that feedback makes us better and helps the rest of our customers. And to our partners, the systems integrators and the ISVs who are here, thank you for for creating the capabilities and the expertise to help all of our customers be more successful. And the industry has taken note of our success. We're honored to be identified as a leader in CPQ for the third year in a row by Gartner. This accomplishment is tremendous recognition of all of your work in helping get your companies through the transformation. Today we're going to talk about quote to cash transformation. We're going to share some stories of customers who are going through those processes now. And we're gonna share some of our product innovations and hear from customers directly. But first, I wanted to give you some context. Context in terms of how we look at quote to cash in context. We've heard directly from you over the last few years. Just like Lance and Bianca, most companies, some point in time started as a simple product, single product company. It may have been a year ago, a decade ago, or a century ago. But as you grow, as you succeed, you start to look for ways to scale and expand your business. Take advantage of innovations to make sure you stay ahead. Just like Bianca adding a subscription product, you may be doing something similar. Or you could look to expand using your channel strategy, or you could look to expand through acquisitions. Spent time with a customer just a couple weeks ago who acquired four companies in just one quarter. Each with different systems, different processes and different go to market models. They need to figure out how to make those four work as fast as possible. The problem that we see with these types of changes in your business is that your quote to cash systems struggle to keep up. What worked for you when you're a single product company. Doesn't work as you grow and as you diversify. So what do you do? It's usually some form of duct tape. Find a way to make it work. We've all been there. We've all seen it over and over again. Just like Bianca and her Vlookup tables and macros to calculate prorations. Or you could throw bodies at the problem by trying to create teams to manually review edit quotes or orders. Or as a company I mentioned with four acquisitions, they're managing four different billing systems, four different point solutions to invoice their customers and report revenue. The problem with these short term fixes is they create quote to cash debt and eventually that debt gets bigger and bigger and mounts to a tipping point. We call it the quote to cash tipping point. This is a point in time where your quote to cash is so convoluted that your business agility stalls. The symptoms of the quote to cash tipping point may look different for every one of you, but usually follow similar themes. There's a customer we're working with now who's experienced this tipping point after adding on debt and debt. And they started seeing it in the form of revenue leakage first. And as a result of not having a unified quoting system, compliance and controls around pricing, they started to see that hit their bottom line. So they did the natural thing. They threw people at the problem. Created teams of people to review orders and quotes and make sure they can try to prevent that leakage. But those teams got so big that everything was taking longer and they started hitting their margins and the customer experience suffered. Not only were orders taking longer to get fulfilled, but invoices weren't matching their quotes. The problem with the quote to cash tipping point when you get to that point is you start to not only lose your Business agility. But you're also your customer. Experience suffers and it gets harder and harder to get out of it. As Salesforce, our goal is to help you create long lasting relationships with your customer. That's why we built the Salesforce Customer360 as a leader in CRM. We bring your sales service, marketing, commerce, finance, all your functions together under one platform with the customer at the center, allowing you to create orchestrated customer experience from end to end. And with Salesforce, CPQ and billing as a part of the Customer 360, we serve as a bridge between the front and your back office, sales and finance. And allowing your entire company to be focused on one thing which is your customer. We can configure a deal, negotiate prices, generate a quote, submit an order, send an invoice, collect payment, all in Salesforce. And because we know that you're constantly evolving your businesses, we can support all revenue models and transaction types. So for the customer who went through four acquisitions, they know they can support all four of the different go to market models. And more importantly, they know that they are future proofing their business because they have more acquisitions coming and they need to plan for that to avoid more debt. They also get the benefit of a shared and common data model. Data like product pricing, account contract orders, all the data that drives their customer experience in one platform allows them to achieve, scale and get value from those acquisitions sooner. And with the Salesforce platform and the Mulesoft anytime platform, they can also easily integrate to their back Office with their ERP and GLS. With a Salesforce Customer360 with CPQ and billing, you can orchestrate every customer touchpoint. You can create the buying experience that your customers expect, the buying experience that your customers demand, and you can differentiate yourself. Now if you're here today because you're going through these changes and you're looking to figure out how to get out of that debt. Look for any of the people here from Salesforce. Look for any of my team. We can help you. We're gonna talk about how we've seen thousands of customers do it already and we can go through that with you. We're here to help through this process. We understand that these changes are not easy to make and we're investing to make sure that you're supported along the way. Our customer success group has grown significantly in the last year. We have CPQ and building specialists, architects and we've over doubled our global support team. We have thousands of apps on our app exchange, including many that we've created in Salesforce Labs like a Dunnings and collections package that allows our billing customers to expand and extend their capabilities. And we have thousands of certified consultants around the world who are ready to help you. And our trailblazer community is amazing. We already have over 150,000 trails completed by you guys. And as a result of feedback that we've heard from you, as part of our customer advisory board meeting, we had just this summer, we launched local trailblazing events where we bring people together in the local communities. We had three in the last quarter, and we look forward to doing more in your local communities with our solution. With our support and the great partners around you here, we can help you achieve success in your Coach Cash Transformation. We're going to see some product innovations. We're going to hear from customers to see how they've done it. But first, I think everybody in this room would agree that we should check back in with Lance and Bianca.

Yet another episode of Days of Sales. Lance, you're a sales savant. Finance wanted you to sell the digital subscription, and that's exactly what you did. Partner.

Mind vit off.

Bianca, what's wrong?

I thought you'd be happy.

So did I.

Stop. Stop running.

This is insane. I'm wearing a turtleneck.

I'm wearing heels.

Please. I'm confused. Bianca, I sold the digital subscription like you asked me to. I hit a hole in one.

You shanked it, Lance. You miscalculated the price on the quote. Did you use the spreadsheet?

For a while. Then things got a little complex, so I decided to.

What?

You decided to what?

I winged it.

You winged it?

I winged it. I went full napkin on this deal. Figured they were halfway into their term, so I prorated at about 50%. You're welcome.

Do you even realize what you've done? We have a whole specialized billing system for the digital subscription. Subscription? Let me see your napkin.

It's right here.

See? The quote and the invoice don't match. They're off by 7 cents. All because you can't do simple math.

Now, look, Bianca, the deal I closed was a monster deal. Who cares about a few pennies?

A few pennies? Thanks to you, I can't close the books, collect payment, or recognize revenue.

Well, that's a lot less work for you then, right?

Speaking of work, how hard is it to get all the information from the customer before they sign the deal? We don't even know where to send the bill.

Google it.

I can't scale that process. And don't get me started on your negotiation. Skills, you folded like a cheap lawn chair. You're a pushover.

Lance, I'm a player.

You gave a huge discount. We have no more margin.

Look, Bianca, I'm like a puma. I saw I could close my sales jaws on a deal and I pounced.

Well, Mr. Puma, in order to fund basic company operations, I'm gonna have to claw back some of that healthy commission.

Well, too late. It's already spent.

On what?

Oh, come on. Do you think this just happens up here?

Yes.

Yes, I do.

Come on, Biancs. No matter how much these looks affect people and how good these locks look, I've got a hole in my heart where the wind blows through.

Oh, Lance, I don't even know what that means.

It means I'm lonely. Well, back to you only coming to me to get an update on the status of a big deal or to yell at me for blowing it again.

Okay, now I know what you mean.

Look, all I want to do is help people. Sometimes I swear, I can't do anything right. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Look, Bianca. Help me. Can you help me to help you to help me to help our customers.

I hope that guy back there is all right. You always have to look out for bad golf shots and tech conference keynotes. It's a real problem. I think Lance needs a couple golf lessons. But that's for later. My name is Greg Gazelle, and I run our product marketing team here for CPQ and billing. This is my 14th Dreamforce, and I think we can all agree it's been the best one yet. So today we want to talk about CPQ and billing. CPQ and billing help our customers do two things. First, it helps you scale distribution across every channel. And second, it lets you automate on one unified platform. Let's start talking about scaling your distribution. When I talk to customers, one of the main challenges to actually scaling your distribution is configuring and pricing complicated deals. I talk to customers that have thousands and thousands of SKUs in their product catalog and. And they need to do quotes that have hundreds of line items on them. You can only imagine how complicated it is to scale a business process like that. Einstein Pricing makes creating pricing for these complicated deals so easy. Einstein looks at your entire company history and generates a recommended discount approval so that you can get that deal approved the first time and meet all of your customer needs. And the second thing that makes scaling distribution hard is actually pricing multiple revenue models. Usage based pricing is an incredibly popular revenue model that we're seeing more and more of our customers take advantage of. It means that your customers only pay for what they use. Now within Salesforce cpq. Now within Salesforce cpq, usage based pricing includes configurable rate cards. Configurable rate cards give your sales reps the flexibility they need to actually configure that deal to meet all of your customer requirements and bring the rate cards out of the back office and into the front office. Now I have something that every admin out there is going to love. Within many businesses you're closing and configuring big complicated deals. But what about this streamlined, simple use cases or budgetary quotes? Lightning Flow for CPQ is brand new at Dreamforce today. Lightning Flow for CPQ is a builder that gives you the ability to create tailored quoting experiences for all of your different sales use cases. Everyone out there is going to love it. Now when I talk to customers more and more I'm hearing that alternate revenue sources are emerging within the four walls of your company. It's not just the bag carrying sales reps that are generating business for your company. And we see this across all different industries. Take healthcare for example. A healthcare customer calls in to service they need to get one of their products fixed. The service agent can troubleshoot that issue then at the same time renew their contract or create an add on order. Or in manufacturing I was talking to a tractor manufacturer pretty recently they go to market exclusively through partners. They're using sales cloud PRM and Salesforce CPQ to provide unique pricing for every individual distributor and that's allowing them to scale their sales. But not every sale needs a sales rep. More and more we're seeing self service emerging. Take that tractor manufacturer for example. Now say one of their customers just needs to order a replacement part, a tire. That customer can go in thanks to Salesforce B2B Commerce and go ahead and use an e commerce experience to create that order. No sales reps involved, but it's using the same Salesforce platform. So when I think of a customer that's blazing a trail to quote the cash transformation, I think of Google Cloud. Google Cloud is the division inside of Google that sells enterprise software to businesses. And Google Cloud's story really reflects what Pascal was saying earlier. They started with a single product, then they evolved to a subscription with G suite and then they evolved again to have usage based pricing with Google Cloud platform. We are really lucky today to have Elizabeth Guerra, who's the head of cloud sales systems from Google here to join us at Dreamforce. Elizabeth, welcome. Welcome to Dreamforce.

Thank You.

So hello everyone. Why don't you start tell us a little bit about your role.

So I am the head of cloud sales systems. Our focus is on the strategic systems roadmap as well as providing the capabilities that our sales reps and our channel sales folks need to be productive and successful. I too have been at Dreamforce for quite some time. This is my sixth year and I've been working on the platform for over 10 years.

Excellent. So let's start by talking about our two companies.

Sure.

We have two partnerships within Google and Salesforce. First is our strategic technology partnership and the second is around our joint commitment to help fighting climate change. We're all aligned on sustainable development goal number 13, which is climate action, so that we can help start to reverse the negative effects.

So on the first point, the strategic technology partnership, we have a great partnership with Salesforce that features productivity, marketing service and cloud platform tools to help our customers understand their customers better. On the sustainability side, Google's really committed to fighting climate change. All of our new buildings are LEED Platinum and we are offsetting 100% of our energy consumption in our global operations through renewable resources to maintain carbon neutrality. I think what's most exciting is that even our customers are getting the chance to offset their carbon usage by achieving a 65 to 85% IT energy deprecation by using things like G Suite, which is Mail Drive and Hangouts.

That's great. I love that our two companies can come together to not just focus on doing well, but also doing good. So let's actually talk about your transformation. You went through a huge transformation project recently at Google. You guys called it Project Vector.

Yep.

Tell me a little bit about the project and your goals.

So when I first came to Google, we had a 19 year old Salesforce instance.

Company's only 20 years old.

I know, I know, it's kind of, kind of old, old oldie. We started with a Salesforce Instance we inherited from an acquisition. We then went through multiple different reorgs. Teams came in, teams came out and our systems ended up with a ton of tech debt. The team, it just wasn't supporting the way our sales reps needed to work and they definitely couldn't understand their customers needs. Most importantly, we're going through another transformation right now where we change the way we actually think about our products in services and bundles. And it's really important for our customer, our partner, our product team and our sales rep to know what the product is and how we're trying to sell it.

Excellent. So when you took on this project, what were your main keys to success?

Oh, Google's full of lofty goals. We like to really aim high for the clouds, I'd say. So our first lofty goal is that we're trying to achieve at least 50% of touchless orders. So this is no touch processing. And for us to be able to do that, I mean, lofty goal to say the least. But you have to have people who really understand the problem. But you don't get that by telling people what the problem is. You need a, a community of people who actually know what the problem is. I was lucky enough when I came to Google to meet a gentleman named Chris Vivesh and he really understood probably where all the bodies were buried, but more importantly, he understood what the problem really was. And I was very lucky to get him onto my team. And he's actually still leading our CPQ development today.

That's fantastic. We're actually really lucky. We have Chris here to walk through some of the details of this quote to Cash Transformation. So Elizabeth, thank you for sharing the story. Thank you. And let's welcome Chris.

All right.

Chris.

Hi.

Welcome to Dreamforce.

Thank you very much.

So you know where the bodies are buried. Like Eraser said, you've been at Google for a long time.

Yep.

How did you know it was time for a cpq?

I know where the bodies are buried because I buried most of them myself. So you know, Google Cloud, just like Pascal said, we grew fast and we grew big. The challenges was our processes and our systems did not grow at the same rate. And so our quoting process was really informal. We used Google sheets, we used Google Docs, but those things don't implement business rules. And that meant a sales rep could send out a non compliant, non bookable quote to a customer, get it signed, execute the contract. And we only found out when order management tried to book the order. And we'd then have to go back to the customer and go, sorry, can we sign it again? It's a really bad customer experience.

Yeah, I think going back and asking a customer to re sign the contract is probably like the doomsday scenario.

Right.

So let's take a look at a demonstration of how Salesforce CPQ helped you tame the chaos. We have Russ and we have Kaylee here helping us out with the demo. So let's start by looking at this demo through the eyes of a sales rep at Google Cloud. So we're looking at an opportunity now and this opportunity is for Ohana Incorporated. So the sales rep is ready to create a Quote So she can just click on the new quote button and she's immediately presented with guided selling. Guided selling inside of CPQ allows the rep to answer a few simple questions and the guided selling actually recommends products for the rep to sell to the customer. In this case, we could see that guided selling has recommended a number of products, but most importantly, it's recommended products with different revenue types. We see one time we see subscription and we see usage products and they all exist on the same quote. So this is the main quoting screen. This is where the rep can really start to work that deal. We call it the deal making canvas. So the rep's gonna start by applying a 20% discount across the board and when she puts in the discount, Salesforce CPQ automatically applies all of Google's business rules to this quote. So we can see that every individual line item has an approval level on it. And we see that two of these different line items are actually in the red. They require a director level of approval. So the rep could go in and actually adjust these discounts down to 15%. And so now everything's in the yellow and this quote is ready to be approved. It's so easy for the rep to know exactly what it's going to take to submit this through. So how is putting all these business rules in CPQ helping out Google?

So this has been a game changer for us. Before cpq, you needed a college degree in our business rules just to understand them. Whereas now CPQ ensures that every quote is compliant and gives feedback to the rep on the level of approval that they need.

That's great. So what have been some of the benefits you've seen so far?

So it's benefited both our sales team and our order management team. So for our sales team, they can create a quick compliant quote within CPQ and it automatically keeps their opportunity and their forecast up to date. For our order management team, they used to have to validate all these contracts and that could take like 30 minutes. Now they know that every contract that comes through CPQ is going to be valid every time and they can put it in less than five.

That's amazing. So it went from 30 minutes down to five minutes. It's an incredible transformation. And that all happened in phase one. So you guys are live with 8,000 users now, right? So what are you looking forward to in phase two?

So in phase two, we want to allow our sales rep to quote our more complex Google Cloud platform usage based products and we want to get more intelligent about our pricing and our discounting.

Excellent. So I have some really cool things to show you that you're going to love for phase two. So let's look back at the demo and if we look at that first product on there, it's the Google Cloud platform commitment. And so this is a usage based product. And as you can imagine these deals get quite complicated. But the new configurable rate cards that we talked about earlier make this so easy. So the rep can click in and this is where they can actually configure the consumption schedule. And so Google's not only charging for usage but multiple kinds of usage. They charge for API calls and data usage and both of those can be configured independently on this one screen. So now the rep can come in, they can adjust the discounting in one of the bands, click save and update. And now the forecast is automatically updated, the quote is ready to go and it's going to meet all the customer's needs. I know you're a big fan of these configurable rate cards, so what are your thoughts?

So I'm a big fan of configurable rate cards and it's something we've been asking for for a while. But everyone said this is part of billing, this isn't part of quoting. But the reality is these rates have to appear in your ela, in your contractual customer. So you need to move it up front. And putting that in the power of the sales hand, the sales reps hands just gives much more empowerment to the rep. That's great.

I love when we can pull things out of the back office and put them in the hands of the sales rep. So let's talk a little bit about pricing. So let's look at that second line on there. That's a subscription for G suite. You remember earlier the rep kind of went in and moved the price down from 20% to 15% just to get it through. But I think we could be more accurate than that and let's turn to Einstein to do that. So when the rep clicks in, Einstein pricing guidance is going to look at all of Google's history and make a recommendation of 12% for the price. That's going to get this deal approved and get it won. So the reps going to trust Einstein. Go ahead and click accept. Now the discount's been updated and the approval level has also been changed. How do you think intelligence is going to help Google with their pricing?

So that's really great. Sometimes sales reps can be a little bit siloed. They don't know how their deal is Comparing to other deals, having this guidance in the system and lets them see what is the right amount of discount compared to the rest of the territory, compared to the region and globally for that product.

That's great. So most of the things we've talked about so far have been around automation and that was a huge goal for Project Vector.

Right.

What were some of the other unintended benefits that you found from cpq?

So the biggest thing about CPQ is data. You know, when we started the CPQ project, my bosses said, what's the return of investment of doing that? And to be honest, I couldn't tell them currently. How long do our quotes take? What's our average approval rate? How long does it take to get an approval? We didn't have any visibility into that. CPQ enables us to have that data and make data driven decisions.

That's great. So I think we actually have an example dashboard.

Right.

This is all sample data, but why don't you walk us through what we're looking at here?

Yeah. So you can see this is all data that is driven by CPQ based on any attribute in Salesforce, to be honest. So you can see the average time to approval, the overall discount, the quote cycle time. But also I can drill down on those things later if I want to and see what the quote cycle time is in different regions and different segments. So I can see there's only blocks of deal velocities in certain areas.

So let's take a look at that bottom chart. This is one that we were talking about before. So what this is showing me is it looks like in your early stage deals you don't have a lot of products attached to them. It's a problem we see across a lot of companies. Tell me a little bit about that.

Yeah, so I'm a big advocate of cpq, but let's be honest, it's. It's a lot of clicks for a budgetary quote. And the reality is sales reps often won't do that. So what you end up is they'll just stick an amount in the opportunity amount. But you don't have any idea what products they're actually selling to the customer.

Sure. So let's take a look at the brand new Lightning Flow for cpq and that's gonna solve this problem. In order to look at Lightning Flow for cpq, I'm gonna put on my admin hat and so let's look at the admin experience. And Lightning Flow for CPQ is a builder and it allows you to set up tailored experiences for all of your different sales use cases. So in this use case we can see on the top line that we have one set of criteria and set of screens for an existing customer because we know what they own already. But for a new customer we can add in additional questions, allowing the rep to select from a limited set of products to do that quick budgetary quote. And since it's available on the Salesforce Customer360 platform, it's immediately available to be deployed on a mobile device or on a desktop. So let's take a look at what this looks like for the actual sales rep. So we come back over here to the opportunity in that bottom left hand corner. Now we can see create budget quote and here the rep could come in with just a few clicks, select the products, adjust the quantity, click save. And just like that, products are now added to the opportunity. The price is updated, the forecast is accurate. How do you think this good clap. So how do you think this is going to impact Google?

This is great. We're going to get the products onto the quotes, onto the opportunity sooner. It's also going to be really useful for our SMB teams who often do much less complex quotes and also for our inbound sales. I love that it's mobile ready.

That's fantastic. Chris, thank you so much for sharing the story and thank you for being a trailblazer.

Thank you very much.

Now I'm happy to welcome up our VP of product, Kylie Fuentes.

Thanks so much Greg. Thanks so much Greg. My name's Kylie Fuentes and I lead the product teams who are responsible for building all the cool stuff that we get up here and talk to you about. So we've just heard from the team at Google on how they are using CPQ to to scale distribution across every channel. But that's only part of the story. So now we're going to go a step further and have a look at what happens after the deal is done. And we're going to introduce you to a second trailblazer, Valpack, who is using CPQ and billing to automate their entire quote to cash process. We recently asked our customers and the customer advisory board to tell us what was top of mind and they were really clear. What they were consistently grappling with was how they can adapt their business models to account for new business models like subscriptions or usage based pricing. The kinds of questions that they're dealing with are things like, well, what do I do when I need to make an amendment to a customer subscription? Or how do I recognize the revenue if my customer is only paying for what they use. See, here's the problem. What used to be back of house functionality is now squarely part of the customer experience. Which is why we believe the best way to solve that problem is by building out that capability to solve all of these things. On top of the world's number one CRM platform, which is what we did with Salesforce Billing, we believe it coupled with CPQ is the best solution for customer centric businesses to solve their quote to cash problems. And you've responded. Since we launched billing at Dreamforce last year, we now have over $30 billion worth of revenue under contract, which is incredible. So to our early trailblazers, thank you so much for trusting us to help you transform your business. And we continue to listen to make sure that we're innovating in the areas that you need it most. So directly after this session at 3pm we're going to do a roadmap review for those of you who want the juicy details on all the upcoming features we've got in store for CPQ and billing. Now, when it comes to managing subscriptions, one of the things you tell us loud and clear is that it is difficult to see what your customer actually has today, especially after multiple amendments and renewals have taken place. Which is why we're very excited to share with you that we are launching a new feature called Customer Asset Lifecycle Management which gives you visibility like never before into what your customer assets, well I guess what your customer assets were yesterday, what they are today, and also what they are going to be in the future. This out of the box capability gives you more insight than ever before into your customers transactional data and we're going to do a bit of a demo on this later so you can see what we mean. In addition, we are investing heavily in expanding our ecosystem. Many of you have told us that you have a need to integrate into multiple payment gateways, which up until now has meant building and maintaining different integrations for all of those payment gateways that you wanted to use, but no longer. The team have built out an API enabling payment gateway partners, people like Chargent, DocuSign, PayPal, Stripe, amongst others, to build their own applications and make them available to you on the app Exchange. So as of today, with clicks and not code, you can now seamlessly integrate Salesforce Billing with these payment gateways. And we're really excited to continue to expand this network into the future. So why don't we meet our second trailblazer? You probably know Valpak because they are the ones behind those blue coupons, the blue envelopes of coupons that we receive in the mailbox each month. But what you might not know about them is their scale. They send around 40 million of those envelopes out to households across North America every month, which is incredible. But they started much smaller than that in a garage, actually sending coupons from local businesses to local communities with the idea of connecting them both. It's clearly been a runaway success. They have since introduced a franchise model and they've expanded into digital channels. Innovation, technology innovation has been at the heart of their story from day one. They've invested in sophisticated automation for their manufacturing facilities and more recently partnered with Salesforce to automate their entire quote to cash process. So their ambitions are big and they've done some amazing things, but also have some big goals for the future. Rather than talking to you about what they've done and what they have in store, Russ Kayleigh and I thought it would be way more fun if we could show it to you. So for the purposes of this demo, I'm going to wear my Valpak franchisee sales rep hat. So I've been out on the road. I've been talking to a new prospect, Ohana Inc. Things are going really well. So I've given them a quote, but they want to play hardball and they tell me they'll sign on the dotted line right now if I can give them a 10% discount. Ordinarily, this would have been the end of the meeting for me. I would have had to have gone back to the office, created a quote, tried to get approvals. This could have taken days, if not months.

Weeks.

Not months.

But not today. Because I am using cpq. I'm gonna do all of this right here on my iPad in front of the customer. So here's the first thing that you're gonna notice, because Salesforce Lightning now works beautifully on tablet. I get that desktop experience I've come to expect right here in the palm of my hand. Right, let's look at the bottom corner of the screen because I'm going to open my deal desk. Chatbot valpack have taken full advantage of the Salesforce platform, and they've gone and implemented a bot powered by Einstein throughout their quote to cash process. This is going to save us even more time because I can simply ask the bot a series of questions and it's going to answer me just like we're having a conversation. Because the bot knows exactly which quote I'm working from. I can directly ask if the 10% discount can be applied. Okay, so it looks like a discount of this size is going to require my manager's approval, but I can apply an 8% discount immediately and have that pre approved based on my discount approval matrix. So I share this with Ohana Inc. And they like what they see. So we're going to go ahead and accept that right here within the bot. And what you can see is that my quote has been updated automatically to reflect those new totals. So now it's time for us to prepare a full proposal for our customer to have a read over so they can get familiar with the terms and conditions. In the old days, this meant for me writing things out on a piece of paper, carbon copy paper in fact. But no longer. We're going to do all of this right here within the iPad. I'm going to create a beautiful PDF for my customer to have a read over. And what's more, I can actually get them to sign on the spot using E Signature. But we're not going to stop there. As a Valpack sales rep, I get paid on cash collection and what that meant historically is sometimes going from door to door to my customers to get paper checks so I could get my commission. But because valpack is using the new Salesforce billing payment apps, I'm going to be able to take payment right here embedded within the PDF. This is phenomenal because not only am I getting paid immediately, it is also PCI compliant and I can also enroll this customer into autopay, meaning this transaction is going to go through immediately, but so will their future transactions with with me. Voila. So in just a few taps of a screen, we have been able to generate a quote, we've created a proposal, we've got it signed and we've been able to take payment. Not only am I closing this deal fast, but I'm getting paid in record time. Okay, so now we're going to, we're going to flash forward a little bit into the future. And I'm saying, sitting at my desk looking at Ohana Inc. S contract because business is booming and they've called me to say they would like to add some extra neighborhoods, which is awesome. Means I need to make an amendment. So they've told me they want to add another five neighborhoods and they would like these changes to take place effective on the 1st of March. This is great because I'm going to do all of this right here within cpq. Ordinarily I'd have to try and do all of this math myself or on a piece of paper or Excel. But CPQ is automatically calculating my proration based on my coterm date, which means I can confidently tell my customer that their new total is $1,181.25. There is no going full napkin on this one. Now we know that an invoice is a critical part of that customer experience. So why don't we have a look at what the invoice is going to look like in March when we send it to Ohana Inc. Here's what you're going to see. The total of my invoice matches perfectly to the quote we've just given the customer earlier. That's because Valpak is using CPQ and billing for a seamless quote to cash expense experience end to end. You might also notice that this invoice is already marked as paid. That's not a mistake. It's because we'd previously enrolled this customer in autopay and therefore as soon as we generated this invoice I was automatically able to take payment. Right. We're going to do some time traveling again this time many months into the future. And Ohana Inc. Has made a number of different amendments over that time because of changes to their marketing calendar. So I want to think about, I want to have a look at, well, what is the current status of my commercial relationship and my commercial agreement with Ohana Inc. As it stands today? This is really cool. So by going to Ohana's account page and clicking on this new tab called Asset Manager I am going to get a complete view of my customer's order history. So why don't we click on the two sided coupon which is the item that we amended earlier. And here's what we can see. When we started with this customer they'd I think purchased 10 neighborhoods and then remember we made that amendment, increased it to 15 in March. I can also see that in August to do a back to school promotion they added another 10 neighborhoods. And I can see all of this here at a glance. What's more, I can see that as of today's date, my monthly recurring revenue with this customer is $131 and the total order amount is 5179. Now I get all of these insights at a glance. Previously I would have had to have calculated this using my customers transaction data. So the net outcome of all, all of the things that I've walked you through this afternoon is that Valpak have been able to realize one of their very own lofty goals. The only paper being used throughout the entire Process, quote to cash and actually all the way through to fulfillment. Is the paper being used to create those coupons and envelopes that we get in the mail every month? I think I'm getting a special delivery actually. Oh, I'd like to introduce Chris, Kate, who is the chief operating officer and chief information officer from Valpak, up to the stage to tell us a little bit more about their journey.

Hello Kylie.

Thank you so much.

I have a special delivery for you. A Valpak envelope with your own local coupons and deals for the Bay Area.

I am so excited.

All the way from St. Pete, Florida.

Thank you. This is the only paper used. Thank you so much for joining us, Chris. It's great to have you here and to hear a little bit about your story. So you've been at valpak for around 20 years. In fact, I think even a little bit more. So over that time I'm sure you've seen a lot of transformational changes. I'd love to hear a little bit more about what that story looks like for you and how technology has placed.

Sure. So I've, I've had been fortunate one to be involved in many of the Valpak transformations over the years. You know, starting with the traditional back office ERP systems, you know, back office automation, business process automation. Then in 2008, you mentioned about our manufacturing facility. We actually created a state of the art manufacturing facility that's totally automated. So we have cool robots running around handling our product. So you're actually the first human hands to touch those coupons when you pull them out of your envelope at your house. And we hit about 40 million homes, homes a month.

So phenomenal. I mean these are big company changes and I can only assume that the number of stakeholders that are involved must be phenomenal. So help us understand a little bit about how you keep them engaged.

Yeah, and so we talked a little bit about, you know, up through our manufacturing process but you know, that was really transforming the back end of our process. So fast forward to today and we're really transforming the entire front end of our process, our sales process, our lead to cash, everything from Pardot on the Salesforce platform all the way through CPQ and Billing now. And so to do that type of transformation, you do not do it in a room by yourself. So stakeholders from sales, marketing, operations and even our franchisees had to be involved in this transformation over the the year. So, you know, definitely a big conglomerate of stakeholders. We also brought the Salesforce customer service group in to help us. When we started Our journey. So how, you know, we began mapping our as is processes and also allowed them to help us vision A to be with CPQ and billing in the. In the middle of that. And so what we were trying to accomplish, our goal was moving from a paper based product or a paper based process. We were moving literally writing contracts, getting signatures, collecting checks, as you mentioned. And now through the Salesforce platform, we're able to put that into an electronic fashion. And one of the best quotes I heard from one of our sales reps is they said they get it now because they got a lead on a Saturday. They were at the beach, they had their tablet, they were able to go ahead and do that deal, get it electronically signed, and ultimately collect payment electronically. So all on the Salesforce platform.

So, I mean, that's an incredible success story. We were chatting a little earlier about how both of our companies are aligned on sustainable development goal number eight, which is really about kind of decent work and economic growth. Tell us a little bit more about what you do in that space.

Yeah, so we love to say that we help people save, that we help businesses grow across the US and then we help neighborhoods thrive because we have a local presence in those neighborhoods. And so that's kind of our mantra at our corporate facility of what we do. But we also do more than that. So we do what we call campaigns of caring. So last year, we turned our blue envelope pink for breast cancer awareness. This year, we also partnered with the United Way Worldwide to really raise funds for local communities because we're a local business as well. And then, you know, we partner with United States Postal Service every year on stamp out hunger campaigns. And that's really about filling up food pantries across the US and so a little sneak peek. Next year we're partnering with Red Nose Day. And so actually I have another delivery of a special sneak peek of our red nose envelope next year. And that's helping to try to, you know, help with child poverty. And we really try to get our local businesses and consumers engaged in that.

This is truly inspiring. Thank you so much for sharing your story with all of us here at Dreamforce. Why don't we check in with Lance and Bianca and see what's the latest in their story.

Excellent.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Featuring Pascal Yamim as the caddy Chai Scalp Young. Well, you've really done it this time, Lance. Instead of going to club, you should be going to flub.

Rough day, Lance?

Yeah, you can say that again. You a ghost?

Nope, I'm just a simple caddy. Here to help you with your golf game, carry that heavy load and make sure you pick the right tools for the job.

You're speaking of metaphor. You sure you're not dead?

I'm alive, Lance. I just see things. I see that businesses have to make changes with their environment. Why can't you and Bianca just do that without getting mad at each other?

I tried.

I thought we were getting along, but then.

Just ditch that napkin and the spreadsheet. Get on one platform?

I think so, yeah.

Why don't you call her?

Okay, look, man, I don't know what to say.

Just call her.

Hello?

I'm only answering so I can hang up on you, Bianca.

No, no, don't hang up.

Tell her that you understand she's negotiating a complex business model transformation.

I understand you're negotiating a complex business.

Model transformation, and I understand you're just trying to help customers, Lance. And that Excel spreadsheet we gave you.

Is hard to use.

It isn't a great quoting experience.

Now tell her that you both need advice from an expert.

Look, Bianca, we both need advice from an expert. Like a caddy or a ghost.

What?

Bianca, I have a message for you. The answer to your company's problems is Salesforce, CPQ and Billing. It's built for companies just like you going through business changes. Bianca, be successful.

Salesforce CPQ and Billing helps companies configure complex deals fast, automates the revenue life cycle and unifies sales and finance. How did I know that?

It doesn't matter. All that matters is that you know, no matter what changes you're going through, Salesforce CPQ and Billing is here forever.

Yes.

Thank you.

Thank you all for joining us today. For those of you who haven't go to the sales lodge at the Marriott Marquis and configure your own Astro CPQ, there's a roadmap session in 30 minutes here at the Marriott Marquis. And if you haven't, go try our trail mix on trailhead. Thank you all for joining us. Have a great day.