SaaStr AI Day: How to Close Deals (and Collect Cash) Faster with Agentic RevOps

I wanted to mute everybody when they got in so we don't hear the, this meeting is now being recorded. Um, so we did that as well, which is all good. Okay, cool. Okay, I'm going to go on mute, but I'm here if you need anything, just say, hey, Amelia. Um, David will mostly drive your intro and any like interim questions. With that, have fun, good luck. Um, and with that, I'll, I'll start to let folks in.

Awesome. Thank you.

All right, looks like we're, uh, going live here. Welcome back to SaaStr AI Day. We're just going to give a moment for participants to filter in before we get started. Um, but, uh, as folks are joining, I just want to, uh, give a brief intro for James MacArthur, VP Product Advocacy at Ennu. Uh, really excited to have him back at SaaStr. James did a great session at SaaStr Annual, which you can find some highlights from on our website at saastr.com. I really enjoyed that one and excited to have James back, learn a little bit more about new, see some live demo here. And with that, James, I'm gonna turn it over to you. Now just keep in mind, folks, feel free to ask questions in the chat, also on the livestream for folks of you joining there. We'll do a Q&A after James's session, but if there's an urgent question coming in, he's encouraged us to interrupt him with any hot takes. So with that, turning it over to you, James.

Thank you very much, David, and thank you for having me on Between Two Light Beams. No, here at Zaster AI Day. I'm really excited for today and I'm excited to show you show everyone here how Nu is working to accelerate sales, accelerate collections, accelerate everything you do using Agentic capabilities. So I have this presentation here. Again, I'm James McArthur. I'm the VP of Product Advocacy here at Nu, product and customer. I'm here up in Waterloo, Canada today for an offsite, and I'm excited to come to you to talk about The way quote to cash has changed. So over the last few years, I've talked to a lot, a lot of companies that have been really frustrated with the system where their reps are spending days going back and forth on a single quote. They're having to deal with spreadsheets. It's a spreadsheet and a prayer is what one of our clients said to me. And then deal closes and finance hates it. And so they require their deal desk or the RevOps team to go back and rebuild every single deal by hand. And so what ends up happening is just days are lost, weeks are lost by people, and it's all because the math isn't mathing because they've put customization, they've put automation in between themselves and everything. And so you end up with weeks wasted chasing payments, chasing everything end to end. And so what I'm going to show you today is I've got a multi-part demonstration. So first, we are going to build a, a guided selling flow. And then we're actually going to use it to generate some quotes. So I'll come in here and hit New Guided Playbook. One of the things about New, we are a full CPQ and billing platform built in one platform to do everything end to end. Giving you a full profile, everything that you need to sell. We can, if you can sell it, you can bill it using Nu. And so I'm going to be showing you what our AI guided selling looks like. And to start out, the first thing we're going to do is configure who sees it. And so, a lot of people here have probably spent years building guided selling playbooks. So I'm going to go in and say, I want to create a new selling playbook for my customers or for my reps. And what this is going to do, it's going to ask me a couple of questions. What type of sales motion is playbook for? This is a new sales playbook just for creating quotes. And then it's gonna ask me all the questions I need because Nu is built with this incredible engine behind it. The engine is built on a deterministic, well, Nu is built with on Salesforce. So we've got an entire object architecture, data architecture sitting behind this. And you can actually look through and give it instructions end to end. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually tell it what to do here. Show me subscriptions up for renewal, check active subscriptions first and go through. And what this is going to do, it's actually going to create the MD file that our guided selling playbook is going to answer or the questions it's going to ask, what it should actually do, what are the products and the tiers. And it's gonna go through all of this and I can make any changes I want. I can be as explicit or not. As you see here, I'm adding a minimum, maximum quantity, saying which products can be sold for what, all of those things end to end. And it's gonna go ahead and it's gonna do the research to make sure this is actually sellable. And so you can see right now we're updating. Product line, room tiers, room standard, room premium, room enterprise. It's actually looked up those SKUs telling me exactly what tiers they can purchase, all of this in real time. So as an operator, I'm able to give it explicit instructions. I could have it look up if it was an exist— if they have existing subscriptions, if they have existing unpaid invoices, how the rep should deal with that. I can put all of those guardrails in place. So do I have any guardrails from a pricing perspective? I do. And so we're going to say lock the price book as standard, go through, generate the quote PDF, all of that. So we're saying here are the lot— here are the price book, the discount caps for tier, standard, premium, enterprise, whatever the approvals are. I can tie this directly into my approvals engine and it will make all of this functional in real time. Now, again, I've been doing this for about 2 minutes and yes, I had this all written out. But the reality is, if you were working through this on a question-by-question basis, you could actually go through and have it answer, ask you these questions in real time and give you that exact same playbook every minute. And you can be as explicit as you need to be for your reps to make sure that at the end of the day, you generate the right quote. So here we've got, what are the last questions? What should happen after the quote is created? Well, I actually have a few things before the quote where it's like, what are we naming the opportunity? What, what should the actual quote name be? And what should the start date and close date be? What are the billing and payment terms? Because at the end of the day, If you quote it, you can bill it with New. And that's the entire engine here, which is we want to make sure that everything you sell, you can bill out the other side. And if we have time here, I'm gonna, we're gonna take this all the way to invoice. And so right now we're validating this playbook against the capabilities. It can do its own testing. It can, I can actually have this thing fully validate everything. Why did we lock this print? Sometimes it does that, but we can see it making the changes in real time. We can validate, we can look at the source, we can see the differences, giving you full editability and auditability here. Now it's validated against its own capabilities to make sure Surface RIS auto signal, auto renew off, The agent can check auto-renewal status. It cannot directly access usage and consumption data, and that's fine for us. And the support ticketing systems, it actually can, as long as we have MCPs hooked up, and I'll show you that in a minute. So with new, I can go ahead, in a traditional world, I would test this out. As you see here, I can add additional MCP servers. I have Fellow.ai. If I have Gong, if I have any other service, I can all pull that in. But right now I have to make a quote for this customer. So Pravelli, I'm gonna go ahead and refresh my screen, make sure that playbook is marked as active. There we go. I'm gonna go ahead and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna create, I need to create 3 quotes, 3 preview quotes for my customer. So I'm gonna say, Let's create a quote for Provelli.

And James, while that's running, just give folks a little bit more context on what you were just doing, right? So what you were just doing is in essence, like, instead of a rep on your team having to learn all the nuances of like, okay, what's the pricing? What, what can I discount? You know, ask for permission on maybe certain feature sets. Extensions, timelines, things they can include. You're basically telling the agent all of those things so that the rep doesn't have to think about it, correct?

Correct. Exactly that. And so you can see that here right now, that playbook that we just created, which is this one, it's now asking me, okay, which, which tiers do you want? Here are 3 products. I can have up to 75 licenses of this one. It's giving the rep the guided instructions they need so that every single step of the way they don't have to know what they're selling ahead of time. This will do the math. So if I come in here and the rep goes, "Room standard, 150 units," the system's going to go, "No." It's going to make me make the change. It's going to make me make the decision as to what I'm doing and how I'm doing. And so I can come here and say, actually, let's do Vroom Enterprise, 150 units. Give me a 1, 2, and 3-year quote. With a 5% and 10% discount for each additional year. And now this can sit here and go, okay, we can— I can build you those 3 quotes, but I actually need to know when this closes. And we're fully context aware. So what it can do is it'll look at the account, make sure that it has all of the data around what, what's in, what the billing period is, what the payment terms for that account are. And it'll prompt me because I told it to, to create an opportunity and give me those full, those full quotes for each one. And so I want this to close the second Thursday of Q4 and quarterly billing and net 30. And because this system has so many capabilities in terms of what it's doing, because we have all of that context and we're built on the new engine, our system can automatically go back, do all the research for me, tell me what's in the bundle, Yes. It will go ahead and create the opportunity. Oh, getting— let's— we're figuring it out. Oh, opportunity stage needs to be corrected. There we go. It was able to actually figure out what it did wrong. Edit, get me into the right stage with the right close date. And it's gonna create 3 playbooks. Are 3 different quotes with my Vroom Enterprise subscription in it, all with the right discounting here. And so I can very quickly go make me the 2-year with Platinum and Platinum Support and PayGo. And it's gonna make this for me as I, as we're talking. And now you might be like, if you were here at SaaStr, you'll be like, well, I've seen this, I've seen this part, but we're gonna take it a step further today where we're gonna actually take this all the way to cash. And so I have my 2-year quote. I'm gonna say, go ahead and create. And we're gonna, it's gonna create this. For my rep. Everything we've been seeing up until now is preview. Your reps can go, they can play with their quotes. They can have a conversation with the AI around what's best for that customer. And you can set those guided selling rules to be as in-depth as you want it to be. You can have it go back and forth, challenge them on what they're selling, recommended rules, all of the things. And when I hit launch in Salesforce, What it's doing is it's actually generated— we've never left Salesforce to start out, but what it's going to do is it's actually going to generate the full quote for me. And it went ahead and let's go for the 2-year here. I can go in, mark this as primary if it's not already. And make edits to the lines all within Nu. And all of this is feeding through the exact same calculations engine that companies like OpenAI, Anthropic trust us with on a day-to-day basis. And so with this, as this loads, which it'll take a second because I am on a Wi-Fi here. Community Wi-Fi, we can see that I've fully calculated out all of the different pieces here. You can see I've got that 5% discount running across everything. This is a little bit higher because this, if you'll notice, my net, my sales price, my net sales price has increased over its base because I've got a percent of total relationship giving me full visibility on everything with this quote. So go to my general on that piece. Yeah, yeah.

Um, just, I'm gonna ask you a question that somebody asked me earlier when we were talking about how, um, we don't do this piece with our, our, our 10K agent at the moment because our contracts are a little bit more simpler. We have a smaller sales team. But, um, I'm gonna ask you a similar question they asked me, which was when I was showing kind of these finance portions, right? Like, one of the questions we got repeatedly this morning was, okay, since you have all this sensitive finance data in something like, okay, it's in Salesforce, but since you're letting the AI automate, you know, the pricing, the discounting, and now the contract and then the billing, like how much of that is human in the loop to start and then how much of it is human in the loop on like a day-to-day basis? Like I was kind of explaining to the folks, like when we first rolled this out just for ourselves internally, like every step of the way was human in the loop for us because it's finance, right? And you can't get it wrong. But then now it can do automations and it will just flag to us if it has a question before it runs its automation. So curious to know for you, because obviously even just New itself has more reps and a bigger team and maybe more processes than SaaS does. Like how much was your finance team involved when you set this up for yourselves?

If your finance team isn't involved, you're setting yourself up for failure at the end of the day. Because everything— and with New, we get the CFO involved as much as we possibly can in the initial discovery. And we have the finance team along because at the end of the day, disconnected quoting versus billing system is going to send you the wrong direction versus anything else. And so as you can see here, We're previewing invoices on day one.

Yep.

I'm able to sit here and at the time of quoting, show you everything that's going to be built. And so for us, we partner. So human in the loop always when it comes to new. Everything is designed with redundancies in place to make sure that if that AI goes the wrong way, like we have someone on the back end, we have approval rules on the back end.

Yep.

That are going to catch all of this. And then the secondary piece from a finance perspective is we involve finance in our builds regardless of if it's just a CPQ build or if we're doing full CPQ and billing for the fact that, for the simple fact that we are revenue architecture. And most of the times when you end up with invoice failures, it's because of an upfront process failure. And there's no world where you should ever have to change an invoice. That means that the quote was wrong. That means the order was wrong. And with New, we have those redundancies in place to make sure that at the end of the day, what you quote, you bill, and what you bill, you don't have to give back, which is everyone's nightmare. Yeah, for sure. So now I've got my quote, I have all of my data surrounding my quote, and we're gonna go ahead and very quickly close one this deal and see what that invoice looks like. So I can come here, hit closed. Salesforce is going to do its thing, generate the order, at which point I can jump into the reason I met New and we're working on different ways to engage with us, different, different new asks for new, but the Customer Lifecycle Manager is new. It is what gives you that full lifecycle end to end. You can see that I have my entire customer history here. Every, every order, every subscription, the entire history of Land and Expand is at your fingertips. We have all of our different change orders, so I can come in here I can update quantity, I can update term, I can renew. But the important thing for everyone here is I can actually see my invoices. And again, the Wi-Fi here, it's loading. But I can also, from a finance perspective, manage those invoices in one centralized place. So we can see I have a bunch of invoices here. I'll come in, I can see whether they're overdue, I can apply credit memos, write off, process payments, or send out a Stripe link. In the interest of time, I jumped here because we are at— we're at time. I could send this to anyone here and you too could pay— you could pay my demo environment $5,512 if you wanted to. But that's one of— this is a lot of the way that NU has changed everything to where we can give you incredible rep adoption, easy guided selling playbooks, and zero finance necessary on order management, saving you a ton of time, a ton of work, and making life incredibly easy for the entire quote-to-cash process. All right. Now that— now we're at the Q&A time. So what questions do we have?

Yeah, I don't know if you can reshare real quick, but on the, on the contracting side, can you show, can you take a few minutes just to show how much of that is automated in terms of like collections?

PDF.

So I can come here. So from a contracting standpoint, do year 2. I can generate a PDF. We have full PDF generation. We have e-sign integrations, so we can generate the order forms at time, make this easy for you and your team. And you'll also notice when this generates, we have a Buy Now button here, or I have Send Quote and Verification Code. So from a contracting standpoint, It's easy contracting. It's built to make your life simpler. And we're built with a build once, deploy everywhere mentality. So you can build this in using your Salesforce environment and send this anywhere. This could be on your website. And so Nu is designed with contracting in mind. And then from a payments perspective, it— I can go ahead and I can do pay now and that I'll give my super secure credit card Again, I am in Canada, so it thinks— I don't know what it thinks. All right, well, we'll try this.

And I don't know what postal codes are in Canada.

1231. Okay, great. That is apparently valid and I can pay now. And all of this right now is feeding that through Stripe. And so then when I go back to this invoice and refresh, it is going to be marked as paid. And so where did my payment allocation go? Well, demos are demos. Live demos are even better, but it is, it is designed to do that in real time and give you easy access from a, from that standpoint.

Yep. And for the rest specifically, right, like the workflow I think that this kind of replaces as well is like typically now when Salesforce, like for us, because we don't have this integration, is like you just get a PDF. Like we do have some automation in our agents for like contracting and signing and billing, but at the end of the day, like it sits in Salesforce as a PDF. Now we have a whole like agent-built dashboard, but I guess the true value here for the seller side is they should want to use this because then they're not sitting in PDFs all day. They're doing this directly in Salesforce, but then also they don't have to learn something else, right? Because they're already, they're already using Salesforce.

Exactly. And the whole idea is that we are built in the system your reps are used to every single day, giving them that full Like exactly your point, like your rep adoption is super simple because they never have to leave.

Yep.

And your invoice, your finance team actually never has to enter because I go talk to them. They don't want to go in Salesforce. I've never met a finance person that wanted to sign up for Salesforce.

Yeah, they don't.

And so we give each team the tools they need in the place they want to use it.

Yeah. Not only do they not want to, it's not worth using a license on them, right? To say, okay, I'm just going to give it to the finance side. Sort of related question, um, in the livestream was, can you walk through the approval process? Like, can you walk through what that's like? But then can you also walk through if they take too long to approve, does the agent do any sort of automation there to kind of get them to move faster? Because the whole point of this, right, is to move faster than humans normally would. So do you have anything built in there you can show us?

I do. So regenerate. The 1-year with a 35% discount and create a new opportunity for it, automatically flagging that we're going to need a discount. Same close date and go for it. And so this is gonna go ahead, do all of that for me and create a new quote. The reason why I created a quote is 'cause I closed one the previous opportunity. So that wasn't gonna work, but I can now come here. I've got this massive 35% discount launch in Salesforce. And New is built with approvals at the center. So Approvals Pro is designed— I still— this has been a problem for years, need to rename this one. But we have approvals built into New from the ground up. So everything is built around the idea that at every stage from the AI layer, you can flag to reps that they're going to need to do it. From the quote line side, you can flag to the reps exactly where the problems are. And how. And then from the hard approval side, we have Approvals Pro, which enables deep advanced approvals that you can send via email or Slack to anyone, giving you full auditability, everything. So yeah, there's a— it's a choose your own adventure, whichever way you want that adventure to go. And that's the way, if I can encapsulate anything with New, is that it's built to go deep. It's built to give you that auditability and the traditional kind of CPQ framework that you want all the way through to billing. But we, we're built for AI and everything is built with AI on top. So we've got a pricing AI, admin AI coming soon. You saw my quoting AI and we've got a renewal one as well, all MCP enabled.

And does this trigger any follow-up escalations if like the humans don't approve? Within like a set amount of time?

You can absolutely do that. That's something that is easily configurable for our team, yeah.

Cool. Any other, 'cause I know we're right at time here, any other things we might have missed or maybe common use cases you see for sales teams that are existing customers of yours? I know you mentioned some big ones earlier.

Yeah, the most common use case is just acceleration. Where it's reps, you don't know what reps are doing at any moment in time. You're confused about what the discounts that they're offering, you're confused about how they're engaging with customers. And with New, we can give you that auditability. And that's where I end up having most of my customer conversations, which is how do I do this? How do I do this faster? But one thing with any CPQ project, if I can give advice for those here, like don't enter into the project thinking you're going to take exactly what you're doing now and migrating it into the system. No system is capable of that, especially in the world of AI. So what we're doing is we're advocating now, and that's actually why I'm up here in Waterloo, is we're advocating for how do we make this simpler, how do we make this easy, and how do we make it so that that change that has to happen becomes easier for everyone. And that's what NuNew is entirely about.

Yeah. And then last question that came in is how long does it take to set all this up?

Big, big depends. Big, big, it depends. The answer though, on average, is about 90 days. But the, like, depending on the complexity of your dataset, depending on the complexity of your product catalog and how good your data is, like it could go to a year. Like that's— it's very easy for that to happen. It is a CPQ migration. If your data is broken, your CPQ is going to end up broken if we put it in. So we take a good in, good out policy and that's our focus.

Makes sense. And for any additional questions, do you mind reminding folks what your email is and best way to reach you?

Easiest email is james@nue.io. So just james@nue.io and email me anytime.

All right, well, thanks for doing this, James, and walking us through all this. Um, SaaStray AI Day will continue next. Um, at the top of the hour, we've got one more session for you guys. So thanks for joining. Thanks, James, for hosting from Canada. We appreciate it, and we will see you guys in the next one.

Thank you, Amelia. Thank you, David.

Bye.