The ServiceNow® Sales and Order Management (SOM) Q1 ’25 Store/ Yokahama release introduces a number of exciting innovations to help organizations across industries sell, quote, and fulfill orders on a single, unified platform while accelerating revenue, improving productivity, and reducing costs. With the Q1 2025 Store release, 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.
Here are the top innovations in the release:
- Commerce Portal: Self-service order placement
- Configure, Price, and Quote enhancements
- Product recommendations
- Volume-based pricing
- Quote PDF generation
- Case management for invoice operations
Commerce Portal: Self-service order placement
Organizations need a B2B self-service portal to address common challenges such as long response times and manual processes. Without a self-service option, customers rely on customer service teams for routine tasks like placing orders and checking order status. Additionally, businesses struggle with providing timely responses to order inquiries outside of business hours, leading to customer frustration and missed revenue opportunities.
Not having self-service orderings deters order placement and slows down the overall order capture and order fulfilment processes, delaying revenue recognition. A self-service portal solves these problems by providing customers with 24/7 access, automating routine tasks, and reducing the burden on customer sales and support teams.
With the Q1 2025 store release, self-service order placement makes the product catalog and configurator UI accessible on the CSM portal, enabling B2B customers to configure products and services to meet their needs and directly add items to their cart. Once customers have reviewed their product selections and associated pricing, they can submit the order. This creates a new draft order for an order agent to view and approve. Customers can track the status of the order as well as view when the order has been completed.
Self-service order placement helps organizations grow and accelerate top-line revenue and increase conversion rates.
Increase order conversions by giving customers self-service order configuration, placement, and tracking
Configure, Price, and Quote enhancements
Multiple challenges are being addressed in the Q1 store release with enhancements to Sales and Order Management’s configure, price and quote capabilities. Organizations need to:
- Help sales reps increase revenue by efficiently identifying upsell or cross-sell opportunities when working on customer quotes.
- Address the complexity and potential errors in manually calculating prices and discounts based on quantities purchased.
- Automatically create quote documents during the quoting process to drive sales efficiency as well as clearly communicate details about the products and prices to customers before they place orders, while ensuring consistency in branding.
Product recommendations
When sales agents are configuring quotes, product recommendations can now be automatically displayed based on the items already added to the quote, and agents can add those items with the click of a button. This capability reduces the time and effort spent by sales agents searching for complementary products, allowing them to easily identify and recommend products that are frequently sold with the products already on customer quotes, driving greater revenue.
Volume-based pricing
With this release, organizations can automate volume price and discount calculations, helping sales teams generate quotes quickly and accurately and reducing manual errors. Pricing administrators can set up volume adjustments in the pricing matrix (e.g., standard price adjustment matrix) where the context variable is quantity. And sales reps or order agents can automatically view pricing discounts based on product quantity selections.
Quote PDF generation
SOM now generates quote PDFs outlining product and pricing details for customer review. The document offers clear, transparent communication by showing key details such as product configurations, pricing, discounts, and terms, making it easier for customers to understand and evaluate their offers.
Sales reps can generate quote documents using the ServiceNow PDF generator. The PDF document can be integrated with e-signature platforms like DocuSign to allow customers to sign and accept the quote electronically. Sales operations specialists can set up different quote templates with standardized formats with a company cover letter and can set up data mapping between quote and the template. They can also set up terms and conditions dynamically based on rules – context variables like account, country, and so on.
These enhancements to SOM’s CPQ capabilities help grow top-line revenue, improve sales efficiency, reduce sales cycle time, improve quote accuracy, and enhance both customer and internal user experiences.
Increase revenue with contextual product recommendations
Case management for invoice operations
Invoice disputes occur when a customer disagrees with the charges or terms on an invoice, often due to errors, incorrect billing amounts, or discrepancies in the goods or services provided. These disputes may involve issues such as overcharges, missing discounts, incorrect quantities, or disagreements over contract terms. These issues disrupt the normal flow of invoice processing and need to be addressed to streamline the overall order-to-cash process and maintain customer satisfaction.
Often times, billing/invoicing systems and customer service systems don’t handle exception processing well, resulting in inefficient manual processes and lack of overall visibility into invoice exception status. Organizations need a way to submit a case that easily references whole invoices, or specific line items in an invoice.
Case management for invoice exceptions provides the foundational data model to enable an organization’s customers to submit cases against one or more invoice lines to handle deviations from standard workflows due to exceptions such as pricing, date, quantity, or tax disputes.
This release delivers tables which will capture the various types of disputes listed above. Invoices can be tracked in tables and customer invoices can be imported into ServiceNow through SAP integrations or APIs. In future releases, a UI built on these tables will be delivered, enabling agents to create cases on invoices or invoice lines over unexpected items on the invoice. Cases can be created with invoice and invoice lines as case lines. The agent will then work through the case, and as needed create case tasks for other team members or assign case lines to other agents.
Case management for invoice operations helps organizations improve operational efficiency by delivering out of the box invoice exception tables. It helps improve cash flow by enabling automation of invoice disputes. And it aids in boosting customer satisfaction by helping ensure issues are resolved quickly.
Improve cash flow by expediting invoice exceptions and disputes with case management for invoice operations
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:
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New Feature/ Enhancement |
Description |
Business Outcomes |
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SOM Agent Experience: Hierarchical List |
Display parent and child product offerings on quote lines in a hierarchical list view |
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Lead Management: REST APIs for Leads |
Create leads or sync externally created leads via REST APIs |
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Opportunity Management: Pipeline Inspection on Kanban |
Display total deal amounts of all opportunities in each opportunity stage on the Kanban view for everyday pipeline inspection |
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Quote Management: Sales Agreement APIs |
Provide APIs that enable importing and syncing sales agreements from external systems into ServiceNow |
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Order Management: Subscription Revenue Metrics |
Calculate and display key revenue metrics on orders |
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Contracts & Entitlements: Contracts from Product Inventory |
Create contracts and contract lines when product inventory records are created as part of order fulfilment flows |
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Contracts & Entitlements: Location & Subscription Pricing |
Display location and subscription pricing information on contract lines and entitlements |
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Product Inventory MACD: Multi-Select Product Inventory |
Multi-select product inventory to modify, disconnect, suspend or resume in one order |
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Sold Product: Location & Subscription Pricing |
Display location and subscription pricing information on sold product |
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MACD Request Tracker |
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Summary
These new and enhanced capabilities help empower your organization to increase revenue and improve the customer experience. By leveraging Sales and Order Management, organizations can deliver the customer experience across the lead-to-cash cycle that today's customers demand while simultaneously accelerating revenue, reducing operational costs, and improving productivity. 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.
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.
