What is quote-to-cash (Q2C)?
Salesforce defines it as the process that “covers the end-to-end functions related to sales activity for your organization.”
“Quote-to-cash starts with the first interaction with the customer all the way to fulfilling, invoicing, recognizing revenue and collecting cash from that customer,” explains Digital Operations Director John Jones (@JonesieAtJMP). “That whole continuum of the journey to being a customer.”
You read about how we will fulfill JMP 17 to customers in October and beyond. But what leads up to fulfillment and invoicing?
Generally, the first tangible step in the Q2C process is quoting – configuring an offer for a prospect.
Among our many new business systems is Salesforce CPQ (which stands for Configure, Price, Quote). Salesforce CPQ will support consistent pricing and quoting being established with the new flat, tiered pricing and simplified offerings. It will integrate with DocuSign CLM (for creating, sending and managing contracts) and NetSuite (for recording the sales transaction, customer invoicing, recognizing revenue, cash collections and reporting financial results).
“Hopefully in Q4 we’ll start using new quoting and invoicing processes in Germany for new customers,” says John. “This is a limited scope so that we can test it out with a small volume of orders and get it into the hands of sales. Then sometime early in 2023 we would roll it out in the United States and then other countries for new customers.”
Our new business system architecture
Because our systems will be tightly integrated, Salesforce CPQ, DocuSign CLM and NetSuite must go live together. Quoting is also closely tied to fulfillment.
Fiona Kelly (@fiona_kelly) explains: “When a contract is signed and the order is generated, Salesforce CPQ creates a record that entitles the user or organization to access the software they ordered. Then My JMP notifies the customer to log in with My JMP ID to download the installers and license files.”
To meet legal and financial requirements, the order will be marked as fulfilled after the customer is notified. Then NetSuite will generate the invoice. Once the customer has paid, NetSuite will update the Salesforce Sales Order. This process accounts for grace term and full-term licensing.
High-level quote-to-cash process
Once all systems are ready to use – quoting with Salesforce CPQ, contracting with DocuSign CLM, fulfilling with My JMP and invoicing with NetSuite – we’ll have what it takes to sell and deliver software natively through JMP Statistical Discovery’s new business systems.
Our next story in the series will be about contracts.
