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 orders, and provide service on a single, unified platform. SOM helps break down siloes across systems so organizations can launch products faster, accelerate revenue, and meet customer expectations for great service.
With the Q4 ’24 Store release, we continue to add capabilities to help our customers manage leads and opportunities, quickly generate quotes, accurately fulfill orders, and provide post-sales service. Here are the top innovations in the release:
- Location-based ordering
- Case Management for Order Operations
- Pricing plans
- Subscription revenue metrics
- Sync quote to opportunity
Location-based ordering
Most organizations operate in different geographies. Industries like telecommunications offer products and services that may vary based on geographic locations and customer requirements. For example, a telecom company needs to deploy network infrastructure efficiently to serve customers in different locations. These deployments are made effective by considering factors such as coverage area, population density, and existing infrastructure. This applies across other industries as well – insurance, technology, and so on. Sales agents need to be able to filter their product catalogs based on the customer’s service location to create accurate quotes and orders for their customers.
Location-based ordering is a new feature in the Q4 ‘24 store release of SOM enabling agents to create orders for customers based on their location. Agents can also create opportunities and quotes for one or more products or services across different customer locations.
Using this capability, organizations can improve agent efficiency by handling multiple locations within a single transaction, reduce order changes and cancellations by allowing only eligible products to be added, and reduce average time to create multi-site orders by allowing easy replication of configurations across regions.
Filter product catalog by location
Case Management for Order Operations
Once an order is placed, it’s common to have changes or exceptions to the order. Exceptions can occur due to inventory discrepancies, payment processing problems, shipping and delivery errors, supply chain issues, and so on. They can also result from customer input mistakes, such as entering incorrect information. And sometimes customers just need changes—faster shipping, quantity changes, adding or removing order line items. These issues disrupt the normal flow of order processing and need to be addressed efficiently to ensure smooth operations and maintain customer satisfaction. Many organizations handle these changes manually, or using case management that’s not designed to efficiently process and track order changes, producing order delays and driving up costs.
Case Management for Order Operations is a new capability that lets agents submit cases against one or more orders or order lines so they can handle deviations from standard workflows due to exceptions or changes. Rather than create one case per order line change, multiple orders and order line changes can be grouped together on a single case. From there, organizations can then create and assign tasks for specific lines, check eligibility for change orders, or trigger updates in external systems like SAP.
Case Management for Order Operations helps organizations increase operational efficiency, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction by resolving issues quickly and reducing delays.
Process multiple order line changes per case
Pricing plan
A pricing plan is a structured, multi-step process used to determine the final price of a product. It starts with establishing the list price and then applies adjustments based on factors like costs, market conditions, customer segments, and other variables to calculate the net price. This approach ensures that pricing decisions are consistent and aligned with business goals.
The new pricing plan feature in the Q4 ‘24 store release of SOM will help organizations configure a sequence of pricing steps to determine the product offering price in ServiceNow. Pricing administrators can create default plans and customize them with specific adjustments or calculations through an admin interface. This feature supports different pricing rules, such as contextual, offer-based, or volume-based adjustments, and enables differentiation for various products or business units. Additionally, it establishes a lifecycle for the pricing plan.
For example, a pricing plan for a security system component might begin by setting a base list price. If the component is part of a product bundle, a 20% discount could be applied. Then, a further geographic adjustment might add a 10% markdown for customers in California, resulting in a tailored final price.
This feature will help drive higher revenue through flexible pricing options that can be easily adjusted to meet market demands, reduce time to market for new pricing strategies with low-code, configurable plans, and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty by tailoring pricing to specific customer needs.
Pricing plan with sequence of steps for determining list price and adjustments
Subscription revenue metrics
In the service economy it’s critical for organizations to easily calculate and view key revenue metrics from their customer contracts. These metrics are crucial for understanding the revenue impact of sales deals and providing insights into the long-term financial health of the organization. Organizations also need to share some of these metrics with their customers in order to provide visibility to their monthly, annual and total commitment.
Sales agents often find it challenging to accurately calculate the total value of an opportunity and quote when adding products manually. Manual processes result in longer sales cycles, inaccurate revenue forecasts, and increased risk of delivering incorrect pricing information to customers.
With the Q4 ’24 store release of SOM, subscription revenue metrics give organizations the ability to calculate and view revenue metrics on both opportunities and quotes. This feature will help agents view key revenue metrics, including Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Total Contract Value (TCV), and Annual Contract Value (ACV). With this feature, when an agent creates an opportunity or a quote, they can specify the term for the deal in months, input deal start and end dates, and add relevant product offerings to auto-calculate the ARR, MRR, TCV, and ACV.
Subscription revenue metrics will help improve revenue forecasting, increase sales effectiveness by giving sales teams real-time revenue data, and improve customer satisfaction by providing customers with a clear understanding of their financial commitments over months and years.
Automatically calculate subscription revenue metrics based on deal term, start and end dates, and product offering.
Sync quote to opportunity
To ensure accurate revenue forecasting and effective decision-making, organizations need to ensure that opportunity records are updated with the latest pricing information from their corresponding quotes. For example, let’s say a software company is negotiating a large contract with a potential client. If the latest pricing for the software in the quote includes a discount that was recently approved, failing to update the opportunity record with this discount could result in inaccurate revenue forecasts and misleading reports.
With the Q4 ’24 store release of SOM, organizations can now sync the latest quote data to its corresponding opportunity. When a quote is created from an opportunity, the sales rep can enable the quote-to-opportunity sync. Once the sync is enabled, the opportunity is updated with the latest pricing data whenever quote lines are added or changed. The TCV/ACV and ARR/MRR numbers are updated on the opportunity in real-time. When the quote is marked as complete, the state of the opportunity automatically changes to closed-won.
This feature empowers sales teams to improve revenue forecasting, increase operational efficiency, and streamline sales tracking by reducing manual data entry and minimizing errors.
Once a quote is synced to an opportunity, opportunity pricing cannot be changed manually unless the sync is disabled.
Once a quote is synced to an opportunity, quote changes are reflected automatically in the opportunity.
Additional enhancements
Beyond the new capabilities outlined above, there are many other enhancements for Sales and Order Management in the Q4 ’24 store release that drive value. These new capabilities include:
|
New Feature/ Enhancement |
Description |
Business Outcomes |
|
Product Catalog Management: Cascade quantity |
Specify the desired treatment of quantity on the child line item through a system level parameter |
Provide accurate pricing and inventory management tailored to individual scenarios |
|
Product Catalog Management: Catalog hierarchy UI |
Enhance catalog hierarchy UI to display offer hierarchy |
Helps sales reps provide more informed recommendations |
|
Quote Management: Sales Agreements configurable and bundled products support |
Create sales agreements for configurable and bundled products and services |
Provide cost certainty and reduce quote cycle time and order errors |
|
Quote Management: Covered product support |
Display products covered by contracts or entitlements on the quote lines |
Reduce customer service times showing products covered by entitlements |
|
Order Management: Jeopardy Management business hours support |
Set planned task hours to reflect business hours when scheduling Jeopardy Management tasks |
Enable better resource planning and customer expectations management |
|
Contracts & Entitlements: Multiple lines on contract |
Manage all contract lines from an order in a single contract and add new lines to an existing contract |
Improve agent efficiency by quickly creating one order for multiple contract lines |
|
Contracts & Entitlements Workflows: Service contract-to-quote |
Create a quote for modification or renewal of contracts |
Drive higher conversion with easy quote creation for upsells and cross-sells |
|
Contracts & Entitlements Workflows: Multi-select contract lines |
Multi-select contract lines to disconnect, suspend or resume in one order |
Improve agent efficiency by supporting multiple actions on a single order |
|
Product Inventory MACD: Modify, disconnect, suspend and resume |
Process customer modification, disconnect, suspend and resume product inventory from customer account view |
Increase customer satisfaction by providing flexibility in managing their product inventory |
|
Customer Lifecycle Workflows: Create quote from product inventory |
Provide customers with quotes prior to processing technical changes |
Improve efficiency by confirming changes via quotes prior to processing the order changes |
Summary
These new and enhanced capabilities can help empower your organization to launch products and services faster, accelerate revenue, and improve the customer experience. By leveraging Sales and Order Management, you can deliver experiences across the lead-to-cash cycle that today's customers demand while simultaneously accelerating and increasing revenue, improving efficiency, and reducing operational costs. Sales and Order Management comes in both a Standard and a Professional package. For more information, check out servicenow.com, review the Nov, 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.
