Salesforce CPQ & Billing Keynote: Build Recurring Customer Relationships | Salesforce

Ladies and gentlemen, we are excited to share the latest Salesforce innovations with you. Which means we may talk about future looking products and services. Because future looking statements are inherently subject to risk and uncertainty, our reminder is that you should make any purchasing or investment decisions based on products that are currently commercially available.

And now, another episode of Days of Sales and Finance. Starring Lance Chandler as sales and Bianca Raphael as Finance.

This is finance. What is it?

Ms. Raphael? Lance from sales is here to see you.

Another sales rep, huh? Wonder what this one wants.

Bianca, I hope I'm not intruding. I just came by to tell you that I think your command of revenue management is so beautiful that it reminds me of birdsong.

Can the smooth talk, Lance. Do you think you're the only sales rep who needs a quote approved? And don't get me started on marketing.

All right, fair enough. Let's drop this charade. It's business time. It's nearing the end of the quarter and I need approval of this quote.

A subscription, huh? Not familiar with this product and pricing model. Customers pay for it monthly. How do we recognize revenue?

Please, Bianca, everyone's offering subscriptions now. I personally have a subscription box of male cologne products delivered to my home monthly. In fact, I'm wearing four of them right now.

I've noticed.

All right, I should have known better. I should have known I was wasting my time coming here. Here to your budget dungeon. Is this where you pinch the pennies so hard you make them scream?

Very funny, Lance. Do you realize the cash flow challenges of subscriptions? Besides, we don't get up front. However will we afford your lavish golf outings?

How dare you disparage golf. It's a game of kings.

I'm sorry, your majesty.

Look, I'm a deal maker, all right? I close.

You're a hopped up quota junkie.

And you're a naysaying, bean counter, prima donna, paper pusher, extrovert, introvert.

Look, Lance, we come from different worlds. This thing between us was doomed from the beginning.

I agree.

But know this. You may think because you come in all big and brash, you can push us around, but remember, finance always has the final say.

Don't threaten me.

I just did.

You know, if your office had a door, I would be slamming it so hard right now.

And if you had a clue, it would be a miracle. Now get out.

And who the hell are these people?

Oh. I said get out. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome senior vice president, general manager, CPQ and billing Salesforce, Pascal Yamin.

Wow.

I love a good drama. But Lance and Bianca have some serious issues to solve. I think today we're gonna be able to help them. It's my privilege to be here and to thank you and welcome you to the Salesforce CPQ and billing keynote. I started as a general manager for this business last year at Dreamforce on this exact same stage. And ever since, I have been blown away. You, our customers, our partners, the thousands of people on the phone, and many customer advisory board members that are here today and pictured here, like Danielle and Allison Lee, thank you. Because you have given us the most important thing that we've asked for, which is feedback. We've heard your challenges, we've heard your struggles, and that feedback is what fuels us at Salesforce to do better. That is what fuels us to be your partner for success. And thank you for that. And you've had a lot of success. 17 million quotes on Salesforce CPQ today. That is a tremendous amount of deals, revenue and growth that you should be excited about. Today we're going to talk about how do you take it further? What's next? We talk about the fourth Industrial revolution as a convergence of technological advancements. These advancements not only allow consumers to behave differently, but it also unlocks you as a business to be able to take advantage of recurring business models, business models that have not been available to you in the past. All industries I have talked to you and to customers around the world. Every industry you can imagine have been able to leverage subscription based models, usage based models, and provide that fast and flexible experience that you need to stay competitive. The one thing that has been consistent in all those conversations, for all of you who are trying to transform your business to leverage recurring business models, is the need to focus on customer success. At Salesforce, we knew that from the beginning. We've been here for 20 years and we started as a software, as a subscription model, and we knew that customer success was an integral part. And we built our process and our model around that foundation. And for all of you who are going through that transformation today, you've shared with us the challenges in making that happen. These challenges that you face in terms of headwinds are not just system challenges. They come in the form of corporate cultural challenges that have been there for decades. Processes and systems that were built to manage your legacy model, shipping products from a warehouse. These processes, these mindsets, those that you've had success in the past with, are not going to help you transform your model to a subscription based or recurring business model. And that is why Salesforce has decided that we needed to invest we needed to be your partner in success. To be your partner in success, we needed to help you overcome these challenges. Today, I am thrilled to be here. My second keynote as part of CPQ business to share with you how you can manage your entire customer life cycle, from lead to retention, all on the number one sales platform, allowing you to manage both your perpetual legacy built business shipping products as well as your new recurring business models in one system with one common data model and engine for your product, your price engines and your contracts. We're going to share with you today some exciting changes to the product, some new features that you've asked for over the course of the last year. And we're gonna share some amazing stories of trailblazers, and of course, with Salesforce, CPQ and billing, being part of the customer success platform, everything we talk about can be extended to your partners with partner communities, to your call center and your service agents, and is powered by the lightning platform to give you flexibility to expand wherever you need to expand. We have been lucky enough to have two amazing trailblazing customers, Hitachi, Ventera and Kronos. They have decided to share their stories with you and we're going to walk through their stories of how they use Salesforce, CPQ and billing and in their transformation. But before we hear from them, I do think we should check back in with Lance and Bianca.

Love you.

Bye.

And now, yet another episode of Days of Sales and Finance. Starring Lance Chanter as sales and Bianca Raphael as finance.

This is finance. What is it?

Ms. Raphael, Lance from sales is here.

Again to see you.

Well, tell him he's not welcome here and that he's overcompensated.

Overcompensated, Bianca?

That's right, Lance. And probably overcompensating as well. But I'm not a therapist.

Okay?

All right.

I didn't come here to fight. I actually came here with some incredible news. I closed that deal.

What deal? I didn't approve any of your quotes.

The subscription deal from the first episode.

This is a signed purchase order.

You're welcome.

I'm sorry, Lance. You're going to have to issue a new quote. This doesn't align to ASC 606.

ASC 6. Look, don't try to bamboozle me with your financial gobbledygook. I can't go back to the customer now. That's a poor customer experience. I could lose the deal and my commission.

I'm sorry, Lance. We had to create a second quoting system for subscription products. You'll have to use that one.

Use A second system.

Look.

Finance is over complicating things.

And sales is lazy with no attention to detail. You're wasting all the company's money.

You're addicted, Bianca. You're addicted to. No.

No, I'm not.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

All right, we're both sorry. We're sorry.

Lance.

You have no idea how hard my job is. Cash flow and profitability targets and living with the ever present ghoulish specter of an audit breathing down my neck. If we don't stay in business, how could we help our customers?

A ghoulish specter? God, finance. I had no idea. I was too preoccupied with my own ghosts to notice, knowing that if I don't meet my quota, I could get the axe. And don't get me started on club. Did you make club? You go into club? God, I hate club. All I want to do is help my customers be successful.

Oh, sales. I never knew.

Look, sales and finance have never understood each other. Perhaps we never will.

But like it or not, we're in a relationship.

There's got to be a way to get along.

But how, Lance?

How?

Well, that certainly is progress, but we got a long ways to go. It's my pleasure to introduce one of the most impressive sales leaders I've worked with at Salesforce. She runs one of our largest sales teams in the company. Denise Dresser, senior vice President of sales.

Thank you, Pascal. I am really excited to be here today to share the story of Hitachi Ventara with all of you. Because regardless of what industry or segment or geography you are from, we're all facing the same challenge that Hitachi was facing, and that is the unprecedented pace of change in market dynamics and customer needs. And almost feels like it happens overnight. And the landscape in an industry has changed. And I hear about it on Squawk on the street from Jim Cramer. And so the companies that are able to be successful in what is this new norm have the ability to keep pace with this dynamic. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. It's almost like Hitachi doesn't need an introduction. I'm sure many of you have heard of Hitachi. They have over hundred different businesses. They're really well known for being a pioneer and a leader in mainframe and mainframe computing and data storage solutions. In fact, this was one of their most successful businesses until a few years ago when they began to face the headwinds of the commoditization in the data storage industry. And as if that wasn't hard enough, their customer needs were changing. The customer no longer wanted to do business with a vendor just because they were the lowest price. They really wanted a partner that could deliver an end to end solution to help them innovate. Thankfully, Hitachi has a culture that's deeply ingrained in listening to their customers. So they could see this change happening, but it didn't make it any easier for them. They knew they needed to make a really big change and they needed to move quickly. So what they did is they formed a new company, Hitachi Ventara. They acquired products, they expanded their solution set. They moved from being a business based on physical hardware and solutions to one that included managed solutions, managed services based on reoccurring customer relationships. As you can imagine, that's a really big transformation that drives a lot of changes. And I'm honored to say that Hitachi Ventara partnered with Salesforce to help them manage through that transformation. Okay, here's the spoiler alert. If you only remember one thing from my presentation today, it is this. Salesforce CPQ is about making the complex simple. We know that if we can help you drive scale, that drives productivity for your teams. But most importantly it creates a better customer experience for your own customers. And that was really important for Hitachi who has a team of highly skilled salespeople and service agents that are now it's their role now to be able to align these expanding customer needs with an even more complex solution and to continue on our commitment to make the complex simple. Today we are announcing conga quote generation for Salesforce CPQ which makes it very easy for salespeople with just one click from the quote to create a professional customer facing pixel perfect quote with all the right T's and C's making it really easy. So Hitachi's solutions now include Hitachi Ventara solutions now include mainframe and data storage, but also the managed service solutions. And our customers want to have one unified solution like Salesforce CPQ that's robust enough to be able to manage the different business models. An example of Salesforce CPQ and how robust it is is that we support things like usage based pricing so customers only pay for what they use and evergreen subscriptions, so pay as you go. Think about your Netflix agreement. You pay monthly. When you can use one solution, you have all of that data from the entire customer life cycle all in one place, which makes it really easy to get further insight and value out of the data. And today I personally am really excited to announce Einstein Pricing which is going to allow you to Apply machine learning to that data, for example. It's going to allow you to look at the historical. Historical deal, history of deal win and losses, and apply that insight to deals that are in flight to optimize pricing. But nobody here really wants to see slides. I want to bring the solution to life for you and provide a real demonstration. And in order to do that, I have a special guest in the audience who I'd like to have help me do that. I'd like to announce Asim Zaheer, CMO of Hitachi Ventara, who is here with us today to help me run through this demonstration. Asim.

Thank you.

I have to, like. Welcome to Dreamforce.

Thank you. It's an honor to be here. I did not come alone. I actually have an army of Hitachi and Hitachi Vantarens here in the first few rows.

Is that what we call them?

And shout out thank you. And it just so happens our user conference is running at the very same time as we speak in San Diego. And we're live streaming this presentation down to San Diego to all of those technical innovators.

No pressure.

Yeah, no pressure.

Awesome. Okay, well, that's just a. That's a perfect sign of the partnership that you are up here during your user conference, and you made time to do that. So I want to thank you again. And Asim, as you know, we've been working together for over three years, and our partnership was really. I mean, there was a North Star of this big, transformative vision. But what I think is really special about it is that it was founded in the same values that we share, and that is in doing well so that we can do good and give back to the community. A lot of people heard about the Salesforce 111 model yesterday. If you were at the keynote, Hitachi also has a similar approach and program. Can you share what your program is and how it drives the same culture?

Which is why I think our companies work well together. We. I believe we have shared values at Hitachi. We call it social innovation. And essentially what we talk a lot about at our company is what we call the double bottom line. We not only want to deliver outcomes for business, but also for society. And so we're always cognizant of that mission in everything that we do and the type of solutions that we. We bring to market. I'll add that we, Ventara, as Denise alluded to earlier, have been going through our own transformation over the last number of years. And that project internally is actually called Mirai. And Mirai in Japanese means the future. And this is a multi year journey that we initiated to transition from a purely a product oriented company to a solution services and partner ecosystem oriented business as we go forward. And we're in the throes of that transformation as we speak. Salesforce has been a terrific partner for us in enabling this path in our journey. Not only to help our customers, you know, be digital innovators, but we also are trying to be digitally innovative internally. Our goal is to have that 360 degree view of the customer in one centralized system. And currently we're actually using CPQ for our renewals business. We actually have over 10,000 customers worldwide. So that's a pretty significant area for us and we're excited to learn about what's next.

Good. All right, well, I'm excited to show it. So since you're the customer, I'm going to make this an effortless experience. So I'm going to run the demonstration with the help of Dan, make it very easy. And what I'm going to focus on is illustrating, just as a sales leader myself, I really want to illustrate the areas that I think are important to understand and how they help make salespeople smarter and how it's going to help them close the right deals faster. Let's get going. Okay, so I hope everybody is familiar with this. Certainly I hope salespeople are familiar with this. This is the Opportunity homepage. We don't have opportunities. We had a problem. But the nice thing is that salespeople, they just start right here in the opportunity homepage. And here is where the quotes are. They just go right to a quote. So it starts with adding the products and services to a quote. So here's what you're seeing right now. This is something called guided selling. This is a configuration wizard that walks a salesperson through a series of questions based on whatever guidelines you want to put in that helps them make the product selection really easy. So let me show you what I mean. So right here, if I wanted to pick the segment of the customer, let's say it's enterprise and they are in the manufacturing industry. They've told us they're interested in IoT solutions and maybe there's 2,000 devices they think they're going to connect. Again, this is whatever you decide. What's happening in the background is Salesforce CPQ is running configuration guidelines and it is actually going to make the recommendation of the products that best meet the customer need. Right. Which is incredible. So right here now we have a quote. And it's no simple quote it's not like it's a one line item quote. Dan probably wants to kill me because I picked the criteria because there's 100 line items on this quote, but it's really robust. And the other thing I want to point out to you is you see charge type and you can see there's a couple of different ones reoccurring one time usage as I spoke about before. So really, really robust. This looks like a quote, but it's actually more than that. And this is probably my favorite thing. This is actually a deal making canvas. This is for sales reps to be able to model different scenarios right here. So let me show you how that works. So let's just say for this product set, customers told US they have $15 million budgeted. Okay, the sales rep would put in $15 million. What's happening is that that $15 million was just spread across all those hundreds of line items on the quote and it is allocating revenue based on your pricing guidelines. And what it's telling us is I have a yellow and I've got a red. What it's telling me is that in order to make this deal work, I have to go outside of the standard pricing and I need to actually get approvals. So I could automatically route this deal quote right here and actually sent it to the right person to get this approved. Okay. That just looks really easy because we're using Salesforce cpq. I know from firsthand experience, this is a disaster. Okay. This gets done in Excel. People take their peers templates, they copy over things, they write the wrong formula and then you have the dreaded email approach which is the approval chain for this. Right. So I love this. This.

Yeah, I think this is really interesting, particularly for companies like ours who have very large broad portfolios. In fact, you're seeing a subset of it here. And so it's great to be able to zero in on the appropriate solution, which can be relatively complex at times when you're talking about multimillion dollar offerings, particularly in our space. And what's also interesting is that as far as we're concerned, particularly in our company, it's about business velocity. And so this is really helping with the notion of speed. Speed to deal execution benefits everybody.

Yep, making it really easy. This is a game changer. So this is not only a quote, it's a deal making canvas. But a couple of minutes ago I told you I was really excited to announce Einstein Pricing, which applies machine learning to your historical data. So Einstein is now in this quote and I can Go to any line item in this quote and get input from Einstein on recommended pricing. So let me show you what I mean. So I just clicked on the Lumada solution. What you're looking at, it looks there's sort of three shades of purple at the very top. What it's telling us is the highest price that we've ever closed a deal or the highest price we've ever sold this product for is $2901. At the very bottom is the price the sales rep is quoting this product for now at 2,500. And in the middle, what Einstein is telling us is we can actually raise the price in this quote to 2,700 and change and not risk the deal, not change the propensity of the deal to close at all. I mean, to me, this blows my mind. If I had had this as a sales rep, maybe I wouldn't be here today.

Well, pricing and I think sales and finance back there can attest to this is a long and arduous process, sometimes many times. What I find really interesting about this and useful for companies like us is that these are data driven insights that are being created through Einstein, which really helps speed the process, but also it allows you to be a data driven decision making company, similar to actually what we try to do with our customers. And so it'll be interesting for us to apply our own philosophy to our own business.

Yeah, I mean, the velocity and just insight of this is incredible. And we have talked a lot about that. Right. And getting insight from data. And that is exactly why we created something called Einstein templates. These are just out of the box dashboards that are preconfigured based on data insights that help you make decisions about your business. Oh, oh, we jumped. Right, Sorry. That's all right. No, that's okay. So here it is. This is the Einstein analytics template. And what it's going to provide you, it says quoting effectiveness, but think about it as like discount analysis and it's going to help you look at discounts by account. So, right, you might want to know what the discounts are in a certain account, by region, by product. So I'm looking right now at product and I'm looking at it based on the largest products for revenue descending. But if it tells me you can see that the Average discount was 24% for the products, that doesn't really necessarily tell me everything I need to know. So maybe I want to look at it by product. So if I Look at the IoT managed solutions, it's telling me the average discount, it's 31%, which is higher than all the. So the first thing I want to know is, right, why. Why is that happening? Very quickly, I can see this is kind of going to freak people out if they're a sales rep, but it's going to tell you what, reps are actually discounting that product more than the average.

Right.

I mean, that's scary, but amazing.

Yeah. Well, I think what's helpful actually for me as a marketer is for us.

This is fake data, by the way. This is. This is not his real data. He's not going to call on us.

These are not even real people, I don't think. I think for us to understand is where are we discounting? Where we don't need to. And for me as a marketer, what's interesting is then we can then position better the value of the offering to the customer and to a group of customers potentially. So this is really interesting.

Yep. One thing I know you're really excited about is you were interested in the conga quote generation, right?

Yeah. Well, one of the things that, I mean, we send out a lot of quotes, our salespeople send out a lot of quotes. What we are missing is brand consistency.

Yeah.

And so I would love to be able to get some brand consistency into the quotes that we send out now. Talked about conga quote generation.

Yeah.

Yes. So here it is. So here we are right here in the quote. So all you have to do is click generate proposal. It almost looks like automagic. Right. But it is literally that it easy and that is. Look at that.

Right.

I mean, that is per. It's branded for you. It looks completely professional, has all the right products and what's really important and you know how this can be a gotcha. The required terms and conditions associated with any product are included in there. So really easy. I know. And it's great. Okay. So I know we got to wrap things up and bring this home. So we showed you a bit about the sales use case here. What is your thought about the impact it can have to businesses generally? And then for Hitachi.

Yeah. I mean, I would just in closing say it's been instrumental to this point in working with Salesforce and all the other offerings that you have. Yeah. Like I said, we're partway through our own digital transformation journey Mirai within Hitachi Ventara. And we've been able to benefit a great deal in terms of having visibility and greater insights into our customers. We're really striving for that really. 360 degree solid view of our customers and the entire customer value chain. And right now, as I said, we're using CPQ for renewals. But there's a lot of potential here for us to achieve that nirvana state that we're shooting for with some of the features that we saw here today.

Well, we're excited to partner with you on that. I want to thank you again for making this trip up here in the middle of your conference to come to Dreamforce. And I also want to thank you and the whole Apache team for the amazing partnership.

Thank you.

Thank you. It is now my pleasure to introduce my colleague, Greg Giselle to come up and talk about another trailblazer, Kronos.

Thank you, Denise. And thank you, Asim. I run our product marketing team here for Salesforce, CPQ and Billing. So it's my job to listen to you, our customers. And today, I am so proud to share the story of an amazing trailblazer in Kronos. Now, we all remember our first jobs. Mine was actually bagging groceries at a market basket in Raleigh, Massachusetts. I would start my day, I would punch the time clock, I'd bag my groceries, and then I'd punch the time clock again at the end of my shift. Little did I know that that was my first interaction with Kronos. Kronos was founded as a company with one simple idea, and that was to make employee time tracking really, really easy. And Kronos has grown and evolved since they were founded in the 70s in order to become a leader in human capital and human resource management software. Kronos has over 35,000 customers that are using their software to recruit, to hire, to pay, and to retain their customers, or, excuse me, their employees, many of you are probably Kronos customers here in the audience. And so starting with those time tracking boxes that I was all too familiar with and going into software, Kronos has sold their products with a perpetual model. And that means that their customers paid once and then they own that product indefinitely. Think about buying software on a CD back in the day. But with the invention of cloud computing, Chronos saw an opportunity. They saw the opportunity to actually deliver their products as a service. And that's something that us at Salesforce are very familiar with. And so Kronos has gone on this journey and this transformation. And in fact, when they launched their first cloud computing product, it was a huge success. Everyone loved the new pricing model, but the problem was it was too good. Their finance team instantly went into crisis mode because they could not handle the scale. And all the manual processes that are involved with actually tracking subscriptions. Their ERP system simply was not built for this. So Chronos knew that they had to have a better way in order to deliver this amazing customer experience they knew was possible. And so they turned to Salesforce and luckily we had an answer. So today at Dreamforce, I am very happy to introduce the brand new Salesforce Billing. Salesforce Billing completes the last mile of the sales cycle and is now generally available. Billing is a natural extension of Salesforce CPQ and it helps businesses build deeper recurring customer relationships. And I think the most exciting part about billing is it takes salespeople who ultimately own that customer relationship and finance people who own the contract and it allows them to come together to really maximize revenue. Think about our friends Lance and Bianca. Billing completes the entire lead to retention lifecycle that Pascal mentioned earlier. And with billing. And since billing is built right on top of the Salesforce platform, it's flexible. It's flexible enough to meet every business need. We can extend CPQ and billing with thousands of pre built app exchange app, thousands of pre built apps that are available on our app exchange apps like Avalara which does complex tax calculations so you can send an accurate invoice and never get yelled at by the IRS every single time. But it doesn't stop there. Salesforce is one single platform and we have a lot of partners that enable us to extend data into the back office middleware solutions. And our newest member of the Ohana Mulesoft enables that. It enables that connection into the back office to fuel those back office processes like revenue recognition and accounts receivable. Now let's bring all of this to life. I want to give you a demonstration of the vision of how account managers at Kronos are going to use Salesforce CPQ and Billing to automate that last mile of the sales cycle. So it all starts right inside of Salesforce. Here we're looking at the account record for Presidio technology. Presidio is one of Kronos best customers and this is their full customer view. So we can see here the sales opportunities. It always starts with the sales deal. Right below that we can see all the quotes that are generated during that sales cycle. When quotes are won, they're converted into contracts. Below that we have orders. The orders are automatically generated when products are provisioned and sold. And then if Presidio bought a subscription based product we could see that here. That is a whole bunch of data all in one place. Before Salesforce cpq, Account managers at Kronos had to swivel chair back and forth between the CRM, the erp, Excel, spreadsheets, back office data and even post it notes to really understand what their customers have purchased. But thanks to cpq, it's all in one place. Now let's take a look here in the middle, I can see that Presidio purchased our Workforce Ready product and they are in the lowest usage tier. Workforce Ready is a brand new cloud based offering. And the interesting thing about Workforce Ready is it's usage based. That means that Presidio only pays for what they've consumed and in this case that is measured by the number of employees who are interacting with the platform. So for an account manager, it's really no longer sufficient to just know that Presidio is purchased. Workforce ready account managers need to understand the usage. So here we could click on Consumption and see the brand new usage based pricing that Denise talked about earlier. With new usage based pricing, Cronus is going to be able to pull data in from their back office system and see it represented right here on this graph. So let's look at this chart. Kayla, you want to zoom in a little bit Here we see the usage and it's growing over time. And that red bar on the right hand side is getting dangerously close to the blue line we have at the top. The blue line is the contracted limit of 40 users on the platform at any one time. Now I can see this data right here on the chart. But Salesforce can also proactively notify account managers when a potential problem is going to happen. Now this visibility is amazing for Chronos because it enables Chronos to become a trusted advisor. Chronos can reach out to Presidio technology and start to have a conversation about upgrading them to the next usage tier and avoiding the dreaded overcharge. We've all gotten overcharged by blowing through the data on our cell phone plans, watching too many YouTube videos, sitting on the couch at night, it's just the worst. But now Chronos can be that trusted advisor. They can have a conversation and they can upgrade Presidio to the next usage tier. It's a win, win for everyone. And actually making that upgrade is really, really easy. All we need to do is click on the Amend button. Now the account manager can go in, adjusts the usage rate, and CPQ handles all the complex calculations in the back like terminating the old usage card. And we can see we've automatically added in that subscription for workforce ready tier 2. This is possible because in Salesforce CPQ, the contract is a living and breathing record. We all remember contracts in the past. It was a PDF that was stored on somebody's laptop, or even worse, a signed piece of paper that's in a file folder that's in Bianca's office down in the basement. But with Salesforce CPQ and Billing, now the contract is living and breathing, and it's automatically updated with all of those changes that we've gone in and made. It's very, very powerful. So let's pause for a second. I just went through a lot. We saw the full customer view for Presidio technology. We identified a problem and we upgraded them all without ever leaving Salesforce. But Presidio actually has to pay for these products, right? They have to pay for workforce ready. Luckily, the team at Kronos is using the brand new Salesforce billing. Billing enables Kronos to send out accurate invoices every month. And there's never any manual reconciliation based upon changes that were made. Since the contract is accurate, the invoice is accurate. It's so easy. And the accuracy isn't just inside of Salesforce. We talked a minute ago about how Salesforce enables all of these partners to fuel back office data. Here we can see an example of that. I can see how MuleSoft is keeping our Oracle ERP system completely up to date. Now with billing, Chronos can actually collect payments as well without ever leaving Salesforce. It looks like that invoice has gone out. And look at that. The payment came in and is automatically recorded inside of Salesforce. That's amazing. With Salesforce CPQ and billing, we are able to complete the last mile of that sales cycle. And Kronos is now able to create meaningful recurring customer relationships and customers for life. Now, we're really lucky to have John McGregor, who's the CIO of Kronos here at Dreamforce, to share the Chronos story with us firsthand. John, welcome. John, thank you for being here.

Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Is this exciting stuff or what?

Oh, awesome.

I'm psyched for this. This is good.

Yeah. So, John, share us a little bit about your vision and how you're going on this journey.

Yeah, sir, the journey really started and you described it very well, Greg. A few years ago, we started to transform Kronos into a true SaaS company. And for any of you that have been through that, you understand that that drives change through every part of the company, and that change is just tremendous. And so we looked at our systems at the time and we knew that they wouldn't handle it. And you described that too, during this presentation already. But we knew it wouldn't handle it, and we knew what we wanted was a single platform that would handle the whole process. And we chose Salesforce because it can do that. It can handle our whole customer journey. And for us, we call that lead to nurture. So lead to nurture is from the time we make contact with the customer through quoting, ordering, contracting, billing, amending, through services support, and then renewing. Right. That whole process on the same platform is really, really important. So outwardly, it gives all of our Kronos employees a common, really broad view of the customer all the way through. And then inwardly, under the covers, everything's stored once, so everything's in common objects. And that's just much, much easier to manage. And Salesforce gives us that.

That's amazing. So you've been going through this transformation. Can you share any early results that you've seen? You're one of our earliest billing customers. Yeah.

We were really concerned about the volume of transactions generated by the SaaS business, and we knew that that was a big thing for us, but we've solved that problem. In fact, we reduced our transaction processing time by 50%. And even more importantly, I think we've reduced the number of manual touches through the process by 75%. And we have a system that will scale now with the business.

That's amazing. 50% reduction, 75% reduction in manual processes. Can you share with the audience some tips and tricks or some advice on how you got there?

Sure. I'm going to look at Mike. He's in the front row. He's been through this process with me. But, you know, relationships are important, and we know that relationships with our business stakeholders are super important. And that's not new news. But, you know, this is hard. CPQ with billing, it's legitimately hard. And it's going to stress those relationships. You have to keep those strong. But not just with the stakeholders, it's also with your vendors. So with Salesforce, we've seen these products mature over the last 18 months, and we've been going through that process with Salesforce lockstep. So the partnership's been awesome. We couldn't have got here without your help. It's just been fantastic. And I think our partnership's stronger now than it's ever been. And I think, you know, we have a lot to do. Usage, billing, just being released. That's. We've been waiting for that. Right. So it's that. That type of partnership and Working together closely, that's been really good. So that's one thing. And then the other thing I would just stress is, as we've heard today, and I think we heard that, you know, the goal of CPQ with billing is to make it simple. Well, that is the goal. But making complex simple is really hard. And CPQ with billing is really hard. It's not sales cloud, it's not service cloud. Like those are easy. CPQ billing is hard because you have to be exact. The numbers have to be right. They can't be close. You don't get paid by being close. Right. You get paid when the number is exact. Customers look for a reason not to pay. So it's, it's got to be exact, it's got to be exactly right. So when you think of CPQ with billing, think of it's like ERP implementation hard. And you should remember that when you approach a project like this.

Great.

John, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for all your advice over and your sponsorship with cpq. Thank you so much for being here.

Thanks.

Let's check back in with Lance and Bianca and see what's going to happen.

And now the conclusion of Days of Sales and Finance starring these guys and featuring Pascal Yamin as Dr. Pascal Yamin Let it out in the offices of corporate therapist Dr. Pascal Yamile.

Yes, we are in my office.

We are.

Good.

You can't heal what you can't feel.

That's so true.

This has been a rough ride for you too, hasn't it?

Yes, doctor. We've been at odds for too long.

Yes. What's wrong with us?

Well, clinically you suffer from sales and finance disconnect disorder, which means you literally see the exact same deal from nearly opposite points of view.

Is there any hope?

Can this relationship be saved?

Yes. You see, I have a complete solution for you. You do?

You do?

I do. I'm gonna write you a prescription for Salesforce, CPQ and Billing. Oh, here's a fact sheet.

There's a fact sheet.

Oh, let me get that for you.

Sorry.

How convenient. Oh, let's read it.

Salesforce, CPQ and Billing helps companies accelerate business transformation by allowing them to manage the entire customer life cycle from core.

To retention on one platform.

That's right.

Healing properties include empowering sales teams to configure complex deals really fast.

Yes.

And it provides automated billing for products with subscription and usage based pricing models.

Word.

Salesforce, CPQ and Billing unifies sales and finance data in one system to inform decision making.

Unifies?

Yeah.

Unifies. Oh, Finance. I'm so sorry.

I'm sorry, too. Sales. You're important to the whole process.

Thank you. And you know what? You are. You're integral. You really are.

Nobody's ever called me integral before. I feel so close to your department right now.

Professionally.

Professionally, of course.

How else would one feel close to someone?

Say, shouldn't your two departments be getting ready to rock Metallica tonight? Doctor after his orders.

Oh, yeah. Double date.

Come on. Deal. All right. Thank you all for joining the keynote. If you have not gone to configure your own character, please do so in the sales lounge. And you can get your beautiful Astro with whatever color shirt you want. Thank you for joining.