Rescuing an in-flight CPQ project
leads to a successful partnership
PROJECT CRISIS MANAGEMENT | REVENUE CLOUD (CPQ) + SALES CLOUD
The Challenge
The client’s project was delayed, over budget and the executive team had low confidence in the 3rd party consulting firm that had been leading the project for 9 months. As their go-live date was approaching in 3 months, the client engaged EpiGrowth.
EpiGrowth’s team quickly jumped in to take a seat at the table with both the client’s leadership and internal project team, and became a liaison with the 3rd party firm. Initially, our role was to evaluate the health of the project by considering the requirements versus the client’s business model and planned integration solution, as well as the overall strategy.
There were many areas of project complexity:
- Oracle integration and ensuring the accuracy of customer, sales, quotes, and invoice data going in
- Custom UI for Sales Reps to create quotes using Salesforce CPQ
- Defining the Salesforce process to track usage consumption for media assets
- Calculating royalties for content creators and managing their pay-outs in other systems
- Removing technical debt on the new system previously built during the initial project phase.
CLIENT OVERVIEW
A Los Angeles-based digital video entertainment company was in-flight on their Salesforce CPQ implementation. This highly complex project included an integration to their financial tool, Oracle, as well as their internal database and core business functions critical to their success.
Our Solution
Working with the internal team, we scoped out a plan to move forward detailing our recommendations for 3, 6, and 12 months with estimates on approximate costs.
Our deliverables included an implementation architecture review, producing a comprehensive Process & Design Review Report detailing recommendations for improvements that adhered to best practices.
This highlighted:
- Gaps in the solution design, for example, multi-currency considerations and a strategy for managing exchange rates
- Poorly written custom CPQ code that was not scalable with the business growth that needed to be remedied
- Configuration and/or code updates, and bug fixes needed
EpiGrowth provided the conduit working between the business teams (who were fairly new to Salesforce) and the 3rd party firm to get the project successfully over the line. We partnered with project leads to create test scenarios for user acceptance and an enablement plan that included training material for role-specific personas. Additional documentation was created to highlight the complex Entity Relationship Diagram and integration process flows that could be used as a reference for future maintenance.
Our Results
With EpiGrowth’s recommendation, the client agreed that it was in their best interest to push back the Q3 go-live date to the end of Q4 so that the business could start the new sales process and accounting practices with a fresh slate. The contract for the other 3rd party consulting team was not renewed.
EpiGrowth continued to partner with the client for the next 6 years, expanding our services to further advanced integrations for Hubspot Marketing Automation, Shopify for Storefront as well as Salesforce web to case forms for customer support.
In 2022, our client was acquired by a 100-year-old private media company whose portfolio of brands garners 53M unique visitors each year.
20
Million in CPQ-processed revenue in year one.
6
Years of EpiGrowth partnership
500