Deliver value by unifying lead-to-cash
Driving revenue while maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction is among the top issues that keep sales, service, and operations leaders up at night.
This is because the customer journey inevitably intersects with an organisation’s lead-to-cash process, an inherently complicated set of workflows that need to be carefully orchestrated to ensure timely delivery and fulfillment of products or services.
The better streamlined an organisation's lead-to-cash process is—including quoting and order fulfillment—the higher the customer satisfaction and value, according to McKinsey.
Addressing lead-to-cash challenges
Why is lead-to-cash difficult, and why have many vendors faltered in this area? Several factors are involved.
Many configure-price-quote (CPQ) and order management systems aren’t flexible enough to handle the high variability of products, services, and the resulting workflows. This can drive up costs and delays time to market. Solving this lack of extensibility with a systems integrator can be expensive and time-consuming.
Too much fragmentation across front, middle, and back offices can lead to incoherence and disconnected experiences. For example, offer and fulfillment catalogs are often in different systems, pre-sales and post-sales are handled by different applications, and customer-facing agents struggle to get a single view of the customer.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are difficult to modify. The ServiceNow Customer Experience Trends report found that order processing and billing/accounting are two of the top three internal functions that delay customer issue resolution.
Customers demand more self-service across the buyer journey. They expect personalisation, convenience, and consistency. According to another McKinsey article, “71% of buyers are willing to spend more than $50,000 in a single transaction, and 27% would spend $500,000 or more.”
Improving lead-to-cash
Organisations can solve lead-to-cash challenges by addressing three critical business imperatives:
- Reducing costs associated with product and service complexity
- Eliminating departmental silos
- Delivering a cohesive customer journey
ServiceNow Sales and Order Management unites sales, fulfillment, and service on one platform with a single data model. The ServiceNow platform integrates with existing systems of record and provides one system of engagement to simplify and automate work—and provide oversight across lead-to-cash.
Managing complexity
To address the high variability and complexity of product and service offerings, the Sales and Order Management product catalog and order fulfillment workflows are highly configurable. This composability is lacking in many CPQ and order management solutions.
Because quoting and order fulfillment take place on a single platform, offer and fulfillment catalogs connect seamlessly. This means quotes flow directly to orders and fulfillment, which can shorten order cycle time, reduce errors, and accelerate cash collection.
The ServiceNow platform and workflows can be used to both extend applications and create custom applications.
For organisations dealing with order exceptions, invoice exceptions, and disputes that aren’t handled by legacy ERP systems, ServiceNow can serve as a system of engagement. The ServiceNow platform can help manage those exception processes, increasing clarity and control and helping to accelerate order and cash collection cycles.
Fusing the front, middle, and back office
With one platform underpinned by workflows, ServiceNow helps organisations progress work across front-, middle-, and back-office teams without manual handoffs. Moving from opportunity to quote, contract, order, fulfillment, work order, project, post-sale service, and renewal is seamless.
ServiceNow can deliver visibility to employees, managers, and executives across lead-to-cash processes. Customers gain omnichannel insights into their lead-to-cash data—quotes, contracts, orders, shipments, invoices, and service cases. By streamlining operations with ServiceNow, Acronym saw customer satisfaction and revenue generation increase significantly.
Delivering a unified customer journey
Whether customers are engaging in pre-sales or post-sales inquiries, they want a personalised, convenient, and consistent experience. Sales and Order Management helps organisations quickly respond to common post-sales order modification requests, empowering service teams to sell and sales teams to provide service when customers need it.
Customer Service Management provides an organisation’s customers with omnichannel self-service. Many inquiries can be completed via self-service, reducing contact volume. If customers need help anywhere across the lead-to-cash cycle, requests can be routed automatically to the correct team.
A coherent, connected, and composable approach to lead-to-cash can accelerate revenue while reducing costs. Find out more in our ebook: 3 ways to optimise the lead-to-cash cycle.