With the ServiceNow Q1 2024 store release, we are excited to introduce ServiceNow® Sales and Order Management (SOM). Organizations across industries need better solutions to solve the challenges they face across the lead-to-cash cycle. They are faced with:
- Complexity and high variability of product and service offerings
- Siloes across teams and systems
- High customer expectations for great customer experience
Sales and Order Management solves these challenges, enabling organizations to manage complex products and service offerings to launch products faster, connect front, middle, and back-office teams to speed up revenue, and deliver a unified customer experience to improve satisfaction.
Sales and Order Management (SOM) provides a set of applications to manage the sales and order lifecycle, including pre-sales opportunities, offer configuration and pricing, sales quote generation, order capture, order fulfillment, and post-sales engagement. SOM enables organizations to create one continuous value stream by managing the opportunity to renewal lifecycle on a single platform. SOM integrates with an organization’s existing applications and augments them with ServiceNow workflows, helping to increase organizational efficiency and reduce costs, speed order fulfillment, and both accelerate and boost revenue.
Sales and Order Management requires Customer Service Management (CSM) and leverages all of CSMs capabilities. For those of you familiar with ServiceNow’s Order Management applications, SOM incorporates and enhances previously released order capture and order fulfillment capabilities and connects them seamlessly to opportunity, quote, and post-sales engagement processes.
Deployment of these capabilities is composable—they can be implemented in combination to satisfy each organization’s particular use cases. And the design is flexible, allowing organizations to integrate with existing systems where desired and use ServiceNow where desired, maximizing value and outcomes.
This blog post will briefly review the top-level capabilities being released. Please stay tuned for more detailed information we’ll be publishing to help you learn what Sales and Order Management can do for your organization!
Top level applications and capabilities include:
- Product Catalog and Pricing Management
- Opportunity Management
- Quote Management
- Order Management enhancements
- Customer Lifecycle Workflows (Move, Add, Change, Disconnect, or MACD)
- Customer Contracts and Entitlements
Product Catalog and Pricing Management
The product catalog has been enhanced in this release to provide an easy and intuitive configuration and pricing experience for agents, allowing them to configure quotes or orders faster and more accurately. The catalog is available anywhere quotes or orders are accessible during sales or support engagements.
There are several needs we’re fulfilling with this release. For the catalog itself, users need an easy and quick search experience, especially when dealing with very large catalogs. Agents want a fast way to see different configuration options and pricing and make selections based on customer requests. And organizations must be able to restrict the types of configuration changes that can be made based on the option selections, quote or order stage, and who is making changes.
Regarding pricing, organizations need account or customer-specific pricing, support for non-product specific pricing strategies such as regional or customer tier, and they need to sometimes access prices from external systems or create custom pricing logic for complicated pricing scenarios.
We’ve addressed these challenges with Sales and Order Management!
Product catalog showing search and browse during quote creation
Product Catalog Management now includes:
- Ability to easily browse the catalog by category or search using keywords or special codes.
- A new product configurator UI that can be used during quote or order creation to simplify and streamline product and service configuration and pricing.
- Rules that can be defined based on the quote or order stage to restrict allowable configurations or changes – for instance ‘too late to cancel’ – to help get quotes and orders right the first time.
Price Management now includes:
- Account-based price lists that are automatically applied during quote or order creation.
- Pricing matrices to support non-product attribute pricing, i.e., attributes like region.
- Pricing extensions to override default pricing logic or use pricing from third-party systems.
These enhancements help improve agent efficiency and sales effectiveness, increase order velocity, reduce pricing disputes, increase sales conversion rates, ensure pricing consistency, and increase customer retention, driving higher revenue and customer satisfaction.
Opportunity Management
Opportunity Management is a new application within Sales and Order Management that helps organizations manage the opportunity lifecycle from start to finish. Until now, there was no easy way to capture and manage sales opportunities in ServiceNow, or to capture customer needs and translate those into relevant offers. This meant customers who want to use ServiceNow for opportunity management had to create custom solutions.
Opportunity Management allows sales agents to formally track and manage potential opportunities. At the appropriate point, they can seamlessly transition an opportunity to the next phases, like quote creation and generation, order creation, and order fulfillment. Opportunities can be imported from third-party systems or can be created in ServiceNow and pushed to third-party systems.
Kanban view for managing opportunities
Capabilities for Opportunity Management in this release include:
- Create opportunity – Capture foundational data for an opportunity in the ServiceNow opportunity management data model.
- Needs analysis – Surface the right offer recommendations based on captured customer needs.
- Kanban view – Provide a visual snapshot of opportunities for sales teams to view and manage, and allow drag and drop to progress an opportunity across the sales stages.
- Activity tracking – Initiate and track opportunity nurture activities.
- Create quote – Enable single-click quote creation from opportunities.
Opportunity Management enables organizations to manage their sales opportunities across the sales cycle, helping to increase sales agent efficiency and strengthen customer relationships, improve manager experience, and increase operational efficiency, which can result in higher revenue and margins.
Quote Management
Quote Management is a new application within Sales and Order Management that enables organizations to configure and price quotes, manage the quote lifecycle, and automatically create orders from quotes upon customer acceptance. Quotes can be imported from third-party systems in order to streamline quote-to-order processes and workflows.
ServiceNow customers have been looking for an easier, more efficient way to move from quote to sales order to order fulfillment. Prior to this release, moving from quote to order fulfillment required either manual processes or custom integrations, slowing down order fulfillment and increasing costs. Agents have needed an easier way to leverage previously captured customer, product, and pricing information collected during the quote phase to quickly create orders for the customer. And our customers want to reduce errors in transferring customer data between systems to help ensure accuracy of terms, products or services, and pricing.
To help solve this challenge ServiceNow has released Quote Management as part of the Sales and Order Management product, providing a seamless and automated linking when moving from the quote to order capture and fulfillment.
Creating a quote using product catalog and product configurator
Key capabilities included with Quote Management include:
- Create quote – Capture the foundational data for a quote.
- Configure and price a quote – Configure and price a quote using the product configurator and price management.
- Quote revisions – Revise quotes and track and present multiple quote versions.
- Create order – Create an order from customer-approved quote using workflow.
Now customers can move seamlessly from quote creation and approval to order creation. Quote Management helps organizations to increase administrator efficiency, sales agent efficiency, and operational efficiency, helping to drive revenue, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction.
Order Management enhancements
Several enhancements have been made within order capture and order fulfillment to help streamline the order management process. For many products and services, organizations want to capture minimal information up front and enrich the order later with technical details. Additionally, they want an easy way to navigate the catalog and configure orders. Finally, for complex orders with longer fulfillment times, agents need a visual way to view order fulfillment tasks and timelines that highlights tasks in jeopardy of not being fulfilled on time.
Order timeline view showing order fulfillment tasks in jeopardy
This release of Sales and Order Management helps solve these challenges. New capabilities include:
- Revamped order capture experience – Simplify the order capture experience for complex configurable products with easier catalog navigation and a new product configurator UI.
- Post-capture order enrichment – Allow minimal order details to be collected up front, and then trigger order enrichment tasks to be created and assigned after order capture.
- Order timeline view – Provide a Gantt chart visual representation of the order processing timeline and highlight any risks.
- Support B2C consumer orders – Place orders for consumers.
These Order Management enhancements help improve agent and operational efficiency, increase conversion rates, and reduce order delays and errors, driving higher revenue, lower costs, and higher customer satisfaction.
Note: For a fuller view into previously released Order Management capabilities, please see the Sales and Order Management data sheet.
Customer Lifecycle (MACD) Workflows
Sales and Order Management includes new capabilities to help with post-sale customer engagement. In addition to processing non-technical changes for customers – things like address changes that don’t have a financial impact – agents also need the ability to handle commercial change orders quickly and easily for customers. These are often referred to as ‘MACD’, which stands for Move, Add, Change, and Disconnect. For B2B organizations, as their customers’ organizations grow, they often need to make frequent changes to their infrastructure, services, or processes. In a B2C context, consumers often change the products and service they own or subscribe to.
Until now, ServiceNow lacked a commercial sales catalog and out of the box workflows to handle these types of commercial changes, and agents lacked a way to make changes directly from a view of a customer’s sold products.
This release of Sales and Order Management solves these challenges. Now agents can kick off commercial change orders directly from sold products, making it easy for customers to request changes. Change order approvals and processes are then routed and automated via workflows.
Suspending a sold product
Key capabilities included with Customer Lifecycle Workflows include:
- Modify sold product – Process customer modification requests and update commercial terms.
- Suspend and resume sold product – Temporarily suspend and resume customer sold products.
- Disconnect sold product – Process customer disconnect requests and adjust commercial terms.
Customer lifecycle workflows help organizations to increase operational efficiency by capturing, tracking, and automating customer change requests, and to reduce churn by moving customers who want to cancel to lower tiers or offering promotions.
Customer Contracts and Entitlements
The Q1 2024 store release enhances customer contract and entitlement capabilities that were originally released within ServiceNow® Customer Service Management.
ServiceNow has identified several challenges related to contracts and entitlements. There has been no easy way for contract admins to easily centralize contract data for different product or service types, making it hard to get a consolidated view of contracts and challenging to verify entitlements accurately. Agents need an easier way to verify entitlements within post-sale support workflows. Cumbersome, manual processes to verify a customer’s support entitlements leads to service inefficiencies, revenue leakage, and lower customer satisfaction.
There’s also been no easy way to automate the order-to-contract process. Finally, users have needed an easy way to add or modify entitlements when creating quotes or orders and automate the creation of customer specific contracts. Some examples of such entitlements include extended warranties, premium support, service level agreements, maintenance services, and so on. Organizations want to leverage entitlements to boost customer loyalty while generating additional revenue.
This release of Sales and Order Management helps solve these challenges. In addition to the changes highlighted below, entitlements themselves have been expanded to support more varieties of service contracts, and more types of entitlements such as support hours, hourly rates for extra support, SLAs, extended warranty, and more.
Contract list view
Key capabilities included with Customer Contracts and Entitlements include:
- Customer contracts data model and APIs – Create contracts or sync externally created contracts via REST APIs to provide a consolidated view of all contracts for a customer.
- Entitlement verification APIs – Automate verification of customer entitlements for service requests.
- Product offering-to-customer contract creation – Capture entitlement orders and create customer contracts automatically using workflows.
- Modify customer contracts and entitlements – Process customer entitlement modification requests and update commercial terms.
The enhancements to Customer Contracts and Entitlements help organizations to improve operational and administrator efficiency, reduce revenue leakage, resolve issues faster, and increase conversion rates, driving improved revenue and boosting customer satisfaction.
Summary
Whew! That was a lot, and this overview is just scratching the tip of what’s available in Sales and Order Management. Beneath each of these capabilities that will boost employee performance are great admin experiences for configuring Sales and Order Management data and processes.
These new and enhanced capabilities empower your organization to launch products and services faster, speed up 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 February, 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.
