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 while accelerating revenue and reducing costs. With the August 2024 Store and Xanadu family releases, we continue to add capabilities to help our customers more effectively manage their lead-to-renewal processes, break down siloes across teams and systems, and deliver a more unified customer experience.
Sign up for the Live on ServiceNow webinar on Sept. 24, 2024, at 9:00 a.m. PDT, Discover What's New: ServiceNow Xanadu Release Highlights for Sales and Order Management.
Here are the top innovations in the release:
- Lead Management
- Contract Management for Sales and Order Management
- Quote Management: Sales Agreements
- Opportunity Management integration with Field Service Management
- Product Catalog Management enhancements
Lead Management
To win customers, it’s crucial for businesses to effectively track and manage leads, cultivate strong customer relationships, comprehend customer needs and offer tailored products, and synchronize efforts with internal sales teams. Many organizations manage leads manually or may be using systems with more bells and whistles than they need.
With the August 2024 store release, ServiceNow delivers Lead Management, enabling organizations to manage lead-to-renewal processes on a single platform. Lead Management helps organizations manage the lead lifecycle from start to finish, allowing sales agents to create, track and manage leads. Leads can be imported from third-party systems or can be created in ServiceNow. Lead Management includes needs analysis, a Kanban view to drag and drop leads between stages, and lead activity tracking. At the appropriate point, leads can be converted into opportunities, accounts and contacts, or consumers.
This new capability helps to improve sales agent efficiency and strengthen customer relationships, improve manager productivity with improved lead visibility, and increase accuracy and operational efficiency with auto-creation of opportunities from leads.
Convert lead to opportunity and account or consumer
Contract Management for Sales and Order Management
It’s not uncommon for organizations to struggle with inefficient and manual quote to contract workflows that impact transactions and slow down business. Manual, opaque processes increase the risk of disputes and misunderstandings. Organizations need to quickly and accurately navigate through contract creation, review, and approval processes.
Contract Management for Sales and Order Management is a new application that enables customers to create legal sales contracts from customer-approved quotes in ServiceNow. It is an integration between Sales and Order Management and ServiceNow’s Contract Management Pro application, which contains the legal, negotiation, and terms and conditions workflows for the sales contract.
The exchange of information from the quote to the sales contract is seamless and performed out of the box. Once a quote is approved, sales agents can initiate the sales contract with the click of a button. They can choose the format for the contract document, then generate the document with quote header and line details, terms, conditions, and signatories. From there, the contracts and contract process can be accessed from the Contract Requests tab on the quote.
Contract Management for Sales and Order Management improves operational efficiency, reduces disputes, and improves customer satisfaction by tailoring contracts based on customer needs.
Contract request initiated from a quote
Quote Management: Sales Agreements
Businesses create sales agreements that outline the proposed terms and conditions of a potential sale based on the information provided in an approved quote. Sales agreements establish clear, agreed-upon terms along with price stability and predictability to mitigate risks. Often times, sales agreements are created manually, and agreement terms are not available in a standardized data format to easily support post-quote workflows and order processing. When creating orders based on sales agreements, organizations need to automatically filter the product catalog based on the agreement to ensure proper selection of products and services, prices, and quantities.
Sales Agreements, now available with the August 2024 store release, supports automatic creation of sales agreements from quotes, bringing in sales agreements from external systems, and creating orders using sales agreements to filter the product catalog with products referenced in the sales agreement. This release supports sales agreement creation for simple or fixed bundle offers with no configuration. Once a sales agent completes a quote, they can create a sales agreement with the click of a button. Sales agreement header and line items information is pulled over from the quote, including start and end dates, price list, products, prices, quantities, and so on. During order creation, once sales context is established, only eligible offers that belong to the sales agreement will be filtered and displayed.
Sales agreements help organizations grow top-line revenue by quickly converting quotes to sales agreements, improve efficiency and support compliance by reducing manual data entry, and enhance customer satisfaction by fulfilling customer orders quickly and accurately.
Create sales agreement from quote
Opportunity Management integration with Field Service Management
Organizations with field service personnel have technicians who are frequently at customer sites servicing products or fixing issues. Often, they identify opportunities for new services, products, or assets while on site and need to capture and seamlessly pass them to sales teams for follow up. When technicians interact with customers, they are often perceived as trustworthy, and their recommendations carry significant weight. Failing to capture opportunities in the moment diminishes the likelihood of converting leads into sales, as customers may not follow through on recommendations from technicians without a streamlined process in place.
Opportunity Management integration with Field Service Management (FSM) is a new capability in the Xanadu Family Release that gives field technicians the capability to seamlessly create opportunities while on location during a field service visit using the FSM mobile agent app. Technicians can easily view, search, and filter their created opportunities, and can also see opportunities already created for the same customer, helping to prevent duplication of effort.
This feature helps drive revenue by enabling technicians to upsell or cross-sell additional products and services, increase customer satisfaction by letting technicians immediately address customer needs, and improve technician efficiency by capturing opportunities while engaged in their normal routine.
View and create opportunities from the FSM mobile agent app
Product Catalog Management enhancements to drive order velocity
Organizations are under constant pressure to fulfill orders more quickly and accurately. Complex product offerings in bundles with parent-child hierarchies make this challenging. Organizations need to be able to associate a specification to any level (parent or child) of a bundled product offering to be able to easily and automatically fulfill orders for bundled product offerings. They also need to effectively manage eligibility. For example, an electronics manufacturer may restrict the sale of certain products to specific countries due to regulatory compliance or regional voltage differences. They need eligibility rules based on various criteria such as customer location, customer segment, or sales channel, along with the ability to filter the product catalog dynamically during opportunity, quote and order processes.
Product Catalog Management has been enhanced to solve these challenges.
Now organizations can associate product specifications to any level of a product offer hierarchy, better enabling them to manage complex product offering structures such as bundles with parent-child hierarchies of offerings. Starting this release, organizations can associate a specification to a parent offering and allow this parent offering to have child offers with specifications bundled into it. In the example of a Triple Play offer with Internet, Video and Voice child offers, both the Triple Play offer as well as all the child product offerings under it can have specifications associated with them. This feature will enable businesses to fulfill orders in ServiceNow for all types of product offers and bundles that have specifications mapped at any level in the bundle, helping to increase order fulfillment velocity and drive revenue growth.
Organizations can now set eligibility rules that allow for dynamic catalog, category and product offer filtering based on certain customer criteria. With this feature, product admins will be able to set rules based on customer location, based on customer attributes like account category, based on transactional attributes like sales channels, and much more. Once the customer context is established, only eligible offers are displayed on the product catalog and offers that are not eligible are filtered out for the sales agent.
Dynamically filter the product catalog, categories, and offers based on business rules
Additional enhancements
Beyond the new capabilities outlined above, there are many other enhancements for Sales and Order Management in this release that drive value for customers. These new capabilities include:
|
New Feature/ Enhancement |
Description |
Business Outcomes |
|
Product Configurator: Configurator state model enhancements |
Use open state model to control features in the configurator, set values for quantities and characteristic options, and define defaults based on customer context |
Increase flexibility for admins |
|
Product Configurator: Configurator UI enhancements |
Display alert or error messages in the product configurator while making selections |
Improve agent efficiency by placing orders quickly and accurately |
|
Pricing Management: Cost book copy and modify |
Copy and modify cost books and cost book lines based on a reference cost book |
Improve operational efficiency with quick cost book creation and reduction in manual effort |
|
Pricing Management: Price list copy and modify |
Copy and modify price lists and price list lines based on a reference price list |
Improve operational efficiency with quick price list creation and reduction in manual effort |
|
Pricing Management: Default cost book selection |
Implement rule matrix to determine the default cost book on quote |
Improve decision-making efficiency by standardizing cost allocation |
|
Opportunity lifecycle: Microsoft Teams chat |
Collaborate with teams with a Microsoft Teams integration |
Improve collaboration between sales teams and other experts |
|
Opportunity to quote: Line-item level quote creation |
Create quote for selected lines on opportunity |
Improve customer satisfaction by tailoring quotes to customer needs |
|
Quote lifecycle: Quote tasks |
Initiate, assign and track quote tasks |
Improve deal closure rates and speed through timely follow-ups |
|
Quote to order: Line-item level order creation |
Create order for selected lines on quotes |
Reduce the risk of overstocking or understocking items, as orders are based on actual customer needs. |
|
Change inventory specification version: Batch update (TMT only) |
Perform batch update of Product Inventory records when there are changes to product spec versions |
Reduce time and effort required to migrate product records to new specification versions |
|
Order Management: Covered product support |
Display products covered by entitlements on order & contract lines |
Reduce customer service times with quick visibility of entitlements |
|
Commercial MACD: Multi-select sold products |
Multi-select sold products to suspend, resume, or disconnect in one order |
Improve agent efficiency by supporting actions on multiple records through a single order |
Summary
These new and enhanced capabilities help empower your organization to accelerate revenue and improve the customer experience. By leveraging Sales and Order Management, organizations can deliver the 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 August, 2024 store release notes, then schedule a meeting and demo with your account team, or contact us here.
Sign up for the Live on ServiceNow webinar on Sept. 24, 2024, at 9:00 a.m. PDT, Discover What's New: ServiceNow Xanadu Release Highlights for Sales and Order Management.
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.
