ArganoaMind Implements Salesforce CPQ at Remind Days before Unprecedented Growth from COVID-19 School Closures
Transforming Businesses Around the World Through CPQ & Billing Since 2005
Background
Industry: Education Technology
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Founded: 2011 – 30 million monthly users. Used in over 80% of U.S. public schools.
Salesforce CPQ
COVID-19 Story
Perfect Timing for Distance Learning
The day Remind launched their new Salesforce CPQ system was the same day that schools began shutting down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly, their already-critical service for connecting educators, students, and parents became the primary tool for distance learning—and Remind was inundated with inquiries from schools and districts.
Remind’s mobile-first platform is often the only way teachers can keep in touch with students and their families, especially those without laptops or internet access.
COVID-19 made it crucial for Remind to help schools and districts get set up as quickly as possible.
With Salesforce’s robust CPQ platform, which enables seamless support for all types of transactions, quotes, renewals, pro-rating, and amendments, Remind replaced awkward workarounds and manual processes that were slowing down purchases—and the communication vital to supporting distance learning.
Challenges
Business
- Rapidly growing startup outgrows Zuora Quotes. Requires a quoting solution that scales with the business and supports paid features, such as subscriptions.
- Time-consuming and error-prone manual sales process and workarounds extended the time to develop quotes, and led to errors.
- Requires a single source of revenue recognition data for Finance billing and reporting.
- Management lacked visibility to KPIs needed for optimal decision making.
- Support integration to Docusign, Marketo, Outreach.
- Integrate with website to support self-serve as well as the sales-driven process.
Technical
- Two separate systematic Sales flows resulted in the creation of different quote object records, which did not provide for a streamlined way to track Quotes or report on key metrics.
- Existing Zuora Quotes system did not prorate pricing, requiring sales to manually calculate prices.
- Every Remind subscription product required its own individual SKU in the product catalog.
- Used static text fields that had to be checked, easy to miss.
ArganoaMind was the only vendor that took the time to truly understand our core business cases and needs. They follow a regimented approach to scoping out the work and establishing a schedule from kick-off to go-live. Will definitely work with ArganoaMind again for Salesforce CPQ work.
Results
Sales teams sell more efficiently to customers.
Reduced the time to close opportunities.
New customers are on-boarded more efficiently.
Improved SKU management.
Supports more non-standard contract terms to suit customer needs.
Provides more robust reporting and analytics capabilities to track revenue and other key management metrics.
Enhanced Employee Efficiency
Improved Management
Streamlined sales processes by replacing Zuroa Quotes with Salesforce CPQ.
Enhanced Reporting
Streamlined reporting in Salesforce for ARR, churn, forecasting, etc.
Seamless Sales Process
A lot of processes that were followed involved manual intervention. That has been almost totally eliminated, with the exception of certain types of website self-service quotes.
Reduced Time to Quote
The right products, pricing, controls for discounting and generation of forms are all streamlined in Salesforce CPQ.
Standardized Pricing and Discounting
Reduced SKU Proliferation
ArganoaMind cleaned up and simplified Remind’s product catalog. Originally every combination (30+) of Remind subscription products required its own individual SKU in the Product Catalog. By leveraging a Bundle Product with Product Options, ArganoaMind reduced subscription products to 5 SKUs in the Product Catalog.
Increased Profitability
Improved Sales
Increased sales productivity, quality and throughput of sales outputs and reduced manual processes. Remind is now able to serve more customers with a better buying and renewal process.
Reduced Time to Quote
The right products, pricing, controls for discounting and generation of forms are all streamlined in Salesforce CPQ. This leads to shorter sales cycles and faster revenue recognition.
Slashed Quote Preparation Time
By moving quoting to Salesforce, Remind eliminated the time it takes for sales to manually input Opportunities and Quotes, and reduced errors.
Improved Quote Accuracy
Reduced discounting and approval errors, previously managed through email.
Accurate and Timely Product Discounting
The ability to discount and get pricing is significantly improved. CPQ processes are now driving discounts, instead of manual calculations to an eighth decimal place.
Automated Product Renewals
Each renewable product is on the subscription, as opposed to a variation of each SKU for all of their product combinations.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
Improvements in productivity allow Remind to serve more customers while increasing retention.
Salesforce CPQ
Salesforce CPQ
Quotes
Product Bundles
Contracts & Subscriptions
Quote Templates
DocuSign for Quotes
Salesforce (Standard) Approvals (not CPQ+/ CPQ Advanced Approvals)
Extensions
Parent/Child Accounts for school districts and schools, extended with student information that drives pricing
“Multi-Location CPQ” extensions so they sell 1+ bundles of services to the school district, but track which schools get which bundle and price the bundle based on total students in those schools
Automated migration of active customer subscriptions into Salesforce
Fully-Automated Website-Lead-to-Quote
Fully-Automated Subscription Renewals Process
Integration
Customer self-service from public website
Countries
Channels
Sales Agents
