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Get to Know Multisite Quotes and Orders

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Identify the purpose and benefits of Industries CPQ multisite quotes and orders.
  • List the roles and responsibilities of those who work with multisite quotes and orders in your organization.
  • Differentiate between Industries CPQ and Industries Enterprise Sales Management (ESM) multisite quotes and orders.
Note

Prerequisites

Before you start, consider completing the following content.

One Customer: Multiple Sites

If you wander into the office of Sophia Perez on any given workday, you’ll likely find her typing up Slack messages to sales reps or on a customer call with a fidget spinner in hand. 

Illustrated headshot of Sophia Perez.

Sophia is a sales manager at Infiwave, a communications service provider (CSP). She guides her sales reps in selling Infiwave products, such as devices, subscriptions, and data plans to both business and residential customers. With Infiwave’s recent adoption of Industries CPQ, her team can create quotes and orders with lightning speed, and their sales numbers are steadily increasing as a result. 

As the Infiwave customer base grows to include larger companies, her team encounters more customers requesting quotes to procure products and services for several office locations or service accounts. In the past, these types of quotes and orders were always tricky to configure because of their complexity. For example, the sales reps had to create one quote at a time for each site. They had to communicate frequently with the order management team to fulfill the products across the different addresses. All this meant lots of work for sales reps.

With the Industries CPQ solution, Sophia’s team can create a large number of quotes and orders for several sites and keep them all organized under the same account. Sophia believes now is the time to take the sales team’s success to the next level, so she’s studying up on multisite quotes and orders to bring her team up to speed.   

Multisite Quotes and Orders Overview

Before going further, let’s take a pop quiz. What would you do if your customer asked for a quote for business phone lines, media streaming, and internet services for 15 different offices across the USA? 

  1. Smile sweetly, and think about your sales bonus. Then block out your diary to give you time to create and collate all those different quotes.
  2. Tell them you’ll call back, and then spend the afternoon looking for a new job.
  3. Confirm you have details of the offices and the types of services they require, and then send a proposal over later in the day.

If you have Industries CPQ, the answer is always C.

The scenario is common—large businesses often require products and services for many different sites in one quote. Quotes like this are called multisite quotes. 

Flip the cards to see examples of multisite quotes in different industries.

How does Industries CPQ make multisite quoting easy? It groups individual locations, service accounts, premises, subscribers, or any type of site the organization requires and applies the same product configuration to each group member. You can apply these changes to an entire group in one action or to specific, individual group members only.

Multisite quoting is especially helpful when several sites have the same product or service requirements because it simplifies the management of the resulting multisite quote and order. Once the customer signs off on the quote, you can create orders directly from the quote. Then, submit the orders individually or as a group.

Benefits of Multisite Quotes and Orders

Industries CPQ multisite quotes and orders expedite product selection and configuration for multisite orders. Sophia can use the multisite functionality to group the different sites in the account and then apply the same product configuration and pricing to all members of the group at once. After that, she can fine-tune the configurations for any members that need something slightly different. 

These special large quote and order actions improve processing speed and efficiency, including:

  • Bulk configuration across a group
  • Apply-to-all-members functionality to set a product or configuration for every quote member
  • Validation and pricing on demand, which reduces processing by validating and pricing only when needed
  • Line item configuration, pricing, and order creation from a parent quote across all child quotes or for individual child quotes or orders

The solution simplifies the inherent complexity in the multisite order process. All of the product quantities and their pricing roll up into the parent quote, and you can group products and services in different ways in the quote for easier review. For example, Sophia can choose to view all the requested items organized by location, or she can see the totals for each product ordered across all sites.

Contrasting CPQ and ESM Multisite

Industries CPQ and Industries ESM handle multisite quotes and orders somewhat differently, as the following table shows. 

Question

Industries CPQ 

Industries ESM

What are the target industries?

Communications, media, and energy and utilities 

Communications 

How does the solution handle large transaction quoting?

By using parent and child quotes and a contract hierarchy, with one child quote for each location or service point

By using one quote and one contract for multiple location- and subscriber-based services, supporting up to 60,000 line items in a single quote 

How does the solution handle group-level quoting?

Grouping by service points, premises, service accounts, and custom objects

Grouping by subscribers or location

How are quote entities set up?

Configuring service accounts, locations, and sites as part of account setup

Capturing new locations and subscribers without service accounts by using the Quote Member object and uploading subscribers and locations with a CSV file

Industries CPQ Multisite Quote and Order Capture

The solution works in a wide variety of industries and offers a broader range of site and quote member types than Industries ESM. These include service points, premises, service accounts, and custom objects. You set up quote and member types on customer accounts during implementation. You can also configure record types to organize separate quotes and orders for each site under a single parent quote or order for the account.

Industries ESM Multisite Quote and Order Capture

ESM extends Industries CPQ with models and processes designed specifically to support CSPs in the B2B market. ESM includes the following multisite capabilities.

  • Large-transaction quoting for processing thousands of line items across multiple product lines
  • Guided workflows for browsing and configuring multisite offers and quotes
  • Out-of-the-box processes for importing service accounts and subscribers from a CSV file to a business account as part of quoting
  • Multisite groups for managing multiple members in a single quote and creating multiple child orders on conversion of the parent quote to an order

Administrators and Salespeople

Typically, administrators and salespeople are the key roles that participate in multisite quote and order creation. 

The administrator often performs these setup tasks.

  • Create customer accounts.
  • Configure the required premises, locations, service accounts, and service point information on accounts.
  • Make sure information is accurate and up-to-date before salespeople create quotes and orders.

To learn more about administrator responsibilities for quotes and orders, refer to the Define Multisite Objects link in the Resources section. 

Salespeople work closely with customers to create quotes and orders and are usually responsible for these tasks. 

  • Create opportunities on accounts and multisite quotes based on the opportunities.
  • Group quote members based on quote and account requirements.
  • Apply and configure products and services for each quote group or individual member.
  • Validate and price quotes.
  • Generate, negotiate, and manage proposals and contracts.
  • Create and submit orders.

In your organization, different people may share these responsibilities, or one person may perform all the tasks. Can you think of who might take on these roles in your workplace?

What’s Next?

As her fidget spinner slowly rotates to a stop in her hand, Sophia envisions a new future where she and her team can knock out multisite quotes and orders fast and efficiently with Industries CPQ. 

Next, you learn all about the multisite quotation process and how to create your very first quote and order for different customer locations. 

Resources

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