Challenges and Risks
- Quoting using CPQ is at a minimum a $15K project. Integration (if necessary) is between $12K and $15K. FSL can be anywhere from $15K to $25K, so a full on solve all your problems, change the way you do business project for a Job Shop manufacturer can EASILY be over $50K. We should walk into these projects with an understanding of the complexity and try and find the MOST painful point with the Prospect, and try to solve for that (first).
- Are we high enough, talking to the right people ? Most of these clients in our space are family owned, which means, that there is 1 or 2 people at the top who make all of the decisions. We need to make sure they are with us right from the beginning.
- A VP at Salesforce has an ingenious way to handle this. Make the first meeting after the Prospect is qualified to you a “CXO/VP Introduction”. Hold out for this meeting and don’t proceed until we get it. At the meeting, we do a broad overview of Salesforce as market leader, an explanation of CRM (sometimes the customer doesn’t know). This meeting also sometimes tells the prospect what we don’t do. For instance, we don’t do ERP! We don’t do production control, we don’t do warehousing!
- Does the client have rigid business processes? Salesforce and system in general LOVE rigidity. Back to spreadsheets, if the solution to a problem with production is “add a row”, we can’t always manage that kind of change. We should understand the processes in that first meeting before we commit to spending more time.