Now that you’ve identified Salesforce Revenue Cloud as the chosen solution to lead your organization to the Quote to Cash (QTC) promised land, it’s time to implement!  So where do you start? Some businesses opt to engage a Salesforce partner from the outset to lead the implementation process, meet business objectives, and deliver a successful QTC project that optimizes the efficiency of revenue operations, activates new revenue streams, and improves customer experience. Other businesses decide to “go it alone” and rely on internal resources and knowledge to handle the aspects involved, including project inception and discovery, governance structure, implementation, testing/user acceptance, change management, and ongoing support. While this approach may save money in the short term, it’s likely to be much more costly in the long run. Here’s why:

Revenue Cloud Implementation – Why Going Solo Could Backfire

• Revenue operations are business critical: As the group of processes that drives revenue collection, functional revenue operations are the lifeblood of your business. You’re implementing Salesforce Revenue Cloud to optimize and automate this process. A mistake, oversight, or faulty integration during the implementation process could bring your revenue operations to a hard stop.
• Revenue operations are complex and span various departments: While sales, customer service, operations, finance, and executive leadership all “touch” revenue operations in some way, each department views revenue operations and associated challenges from their own perspective. Sales teams are worried about quoting speed, accuracy, and consistency. Sales leaders care about discount controls/approvals as well as pipeline reporting and forecasting. Operations wants to automate renewals management, while finance cares about regulatory compliance, audits, and reporting. Aligning these conflicting priorities and addressing them in your implementation strategy is easier said than done.
• System integrations and data integrity / sharing: Achieving QTC transformation success relies upon a complex web of interdependent integrations and bi-directional data sharing relationships. As Revenue Cloud pulls in data from various sources including front-office, back-office, and third-party systems, the integrations can become quite complex.
• Undocumented legacy processes: Without a doubt, one of the main reasons you’re implementing Revenue Cloud is to eliminate clunky, time-intensive, error-prone revenue operations processes through automation. But what happens if most of the processes you’re looking to replace are undocumented and live inside the head of various individuals within your organization like Angela from accounting or Dwight from sales? Without a Revenue Cloud partner, you’ll have to handle these crucial discovery interviews before implementation can begin.
• Change Readiness: The people side of QTC modernization is often the most overlooked. As mentioned above, revenue operations rely on several different functional organizations across your business. Sales, sales operations, finance, management are all stakeholders / contributors in the process. If these folks aren’t onboard with your QTC transformation project and trained properly, your implementation will not live up to internal expectations and will not deliver the return on investment you expect.
• Roadmap Completeness: Unless you have a dedicated team of Revenue Cloud implementation experts on-staff that have completed several successful projects, creating an execution-ready project roadmap that is going to produce the end results you want is a massive challenge.
• Resource Availability: Will the internal team in charge of your Revenue Cloud implementation be expected to dedicate time and hours to other projects during the implementation? If so, your completion timeline and overall project success could be in jeopardy. Things come up. Business priorities change over time. People leave companies for other opportunities. These are but a few of the unknown variables you will be contending with when you rely on a part-time, internal team to complete a complex Revenue Cloud implementation.

How A Salesforce Revenue Cloud Implementation Partner Can Help

Engaging a seasoned Salesforce partner with diverse Revenue Cloud expertise at the beginning of your implementation journey will help to mitigate the risks mentioned above and will also put you in the best possible position to realize true QTC transformation. Here’s how Argano provides value during a Revenue Cloud engagement:

• Ensure You’re Solving for the Root Business Problem – The inherent complexity of the QTC lifecycle and host of related challenges can obscure the root cause of your business’ pain. Through in-depth planning and discovery sessions, we help clients uncover and define every revenue-related challenge facing the business.
• Provide a Holistic View of Quote to Cash Transformation – Implementing the configure, price, quote (CPQ) module of Revenue Cloud only automates a portion of your business’ revenue lifecycle. Backed by hundreds of multi-cloud implementations spanning CPQ, billing automation, subscription management, recurring revenue enablement, and contract lifecycle management, Argano provides its clients with the comprehensive QTC expertise required for true transformation.
• Proven process & methodologies – There’s no substitute for knowing what works best in certain situations. We’re able to save our clients time and money with proven implementation methodologies tempered by years of experience and hundreds of QTC transformations.
• Aware of common project pitfalls and how to avoid them – On the flip side of the same coin, we’ve had the luxury to learn from past mistakes and know what to avoid, which eliminates unnecessary customizations, future rework, and inherited technical debt.
• Out of the Box (OOTB) vs. Customization – Of course, there are situations in which customization is the only recourse. However, we strive to implement Revenue Cloud OOTB as much as possible to reduce complexity and potential tech debt. If a customer has a use case that is not supported OOTB, we will explore all options before opting for customization.
• Training/Organizational Change Management – A training component is included in all of our Revenue Cloud implementation projects to ensure that all of your key stakeholders are fluent with the technology and will adopt it for all relevant processes.
• Implementation/integration acceleration – By leveraging best practices, accelerators, and proven methodologies, a Revenue Cloud partner like Argano will help you realize return on your Salesforce investment in short order. With your initial QTC transformation complete, you can focus on ramping up your revenue engine.

9 Things to look for in a Salesforce Revenue Cloud Implementation Partner

Once you’ve decided to go the partner route, how do you choose the right Partner for your implementation? Hopefully this checklist will help:

1. Partner has completed a diverse range of successful Revenue Cloud implementations with clients that are a similar size and industry
2. Partner can provide 2-3 reference clients willing to talk to you about their Revenue Cloud implementation experience. Engagements should be within the last year.
3. Partner has completed projects that solved similar business challenges to what you’re facing.
4. Partner was recommended by your Salesforce account executive.
5. Partner has diverse range of Salesforce and Revenue Cloud certifications across their technical organization (both on- and off-shore).
6. Partner has well-documented and proven Revenue Cloud implementation/client engagement methodologies.
7. Partner has diverse integrations experience with accounting, business management, ERP, tax compliance and payment processing platforms.
8. Partner has a high customer satisfaction (CSAT) score.
9. Partner has a deep and nuanced understanding of QTC lifecycle including CPQ, billing automation, subscription management, recurring revenue enablement, and contract lifecycle management.

Get it touch! Visit https://argano.com/solutions/revenue-operations-consulting/ to learn how Argano helps companies with Revenue Operations and Quote to Cash transformation.