ServiceNow® Sales and Order Management (SOM) was introduced in the Q1 ’24 Store/Washington DC release, giving organizations across industries a solution to help them sell, fulfill, and provide service on a single, unified platform. With the Q2 ’24 Store release, we continue to add capabilities to help our customers address the complexity and high variability of product and service offerings, break down siloes across teams and systems, and deliver a more unified customer experience.
Here are the top innovations in the release:
- Contract renewals workflow
- Cost books
- Create quote from a sold product
- Contracts and contract lines for product offers
Contract renewals workflow
Renewals help contribute to maintaining steady, predictable revenue streams. It’s essential for organizations to have an easy renewal process to help prevent revenue loss. Often times, organizations lack a central repository for contracts – they’re scattered in various systems, emails, cloud storage, and file cabinets. This makes it easy to miss renewals simply because they’re difficult to locate. And tracking contracts in spreadsheets can increase the probability of failing to contact customers when it’s time to renew.
The renewal workflow feature solves these challenges by allowing agents to manage renewals in ServiceNow, supported by ServiceNow’s contracts APIs. Either complete contracts with all their contract lines and entitlements, or individual contract lines, can be renewed. Once selected, the renewal date defaults based on the end date of the previous contract. Agents can then fill in the new renewal end date. The new contract will reference the old record that has been renewed.
Using this capability, organizations can provide customers with a hassle-free renewal process to increase customer lifetime value, capture lost revenue by tracking renewals and fostering continuity with existing customers, and reduce customer churn with higher renewal rates.
Contract renewal workflow
Cost books
Organizations create cost books to track the costs and calculate margins on their product offerings. When agents create quotes for customers, they need to have visibility on the cost and unit margins of the product offerings to provide appropriate pricing discounts to customers and ensure healthy profit margins.
Cost books is a new feature that allows admins to create cost books that provide agents with cost and margin visibility on quote line items. Now, when a quote is created, for each product offering added to the quote, the sales agent can view the unit cost, margin and margin percentage on the quote line item.
Cost books helps organizations to maintain healthy profit margins by controlling excessive discounting, provide agents with negotiating leverage using a cost and data-driven approach, and help optimize pricing to preserve profit margins while maintaining sales conversion rates.
Cost books display unit cost, margin, and margin percentage on each quote line
Create quote from sold product
Customers often request changes to the products and service they purchase after order fulfillment. For business to business (B2B) companies, as their customers’ organizations grow, they often need to make changes to their infrastructure, services, or processes. In a business to consumer (B2C) context, consumers often change the products and services they own or subscribe to. For complex product offerings in industries like telecommunications, technology, or manufacturing, MACD processes involve multiple systems and processes. Organizations need to create quotes for any changes requested by the customer and get their approval before processing change orders.
The ‘Create quote from sold product’ workflow helps organizations in managing customer requests to modify their purchased products and services and is part of the MACD (Move, Add, Change, Disconnect) set of workflows. Now organizations can create a quote for the customer and discuss the pricing and other details before processing any changes to the order.
The ability to create a quote prior to processing commercial changes helps drive higher conversion with easy quote creation for cross-sells and upsells, improves order change process efficiency by first consolidating and confirming changes via quotes, and reduces customer churn by offering promotional or lower pricing options.
Make modifications and view updated pricing on the quote
Contracts and contract lines for product offers
Organizations offer a wide variety of products and services with different options, and tracking contractual obligations and measuring entitlement usage for specific contracted quantities is essential for maintaining customer satisfaction and preventing revenue leakage.
This new Q2 ’24 capability is aimed at organizations that sell products in the as-a-service model and need to manage the lifecycle after the services are sold. Customers purchase services for a specific period with a defined start and end date, for example a software license with a 3-year contract term, or an extended warranty plan for one year.
These products and services could include different entitlements. For example: a Standard version of software product might offer a set of capabilities, and a Professional version might entitle additional capabilities. ServiceNow products such as SOM Standard and SOM Professional are examples of these. In other instances, entitlements could be measurable quantities like 100 service calls, or 500 hours of agency design hours.
Create contracts with specific dates and track entitlements for product offerings
This feature drives revenue by defining product offer validity periods and entitlement quantities, boosts CSAT by effectively tracking entitlements and contractual obligations, and reduces churn by tracking contract expiration dates and influencing renewal rates.
Summary
These new and enhanced capabilities help empower your organization to launch products and services faster, accelerate revenue, and improve the customer experience. By leveraging Sales and Order Management, businesses can deliver a unified customer journey across the lead-to-cash cycle that today's customers demand while simultaneously increasing efficiency, reducing operational costs, and increasing revenue. Sales and Order Management comes in both a Standard and a Professional package. For more information, check out servicenow.com, review the May, 2024 store release notes, then schedule a meeting and demo with your account team, or contact us here.
For those of you in the telecommunications, technology provider, or manufacturing industries, please also check out the Industry blogs for more industry-specific information on Sales and Order Management and related solutions.
