FinancialForce just made life a lot easier for you if you’re in the services industry. 

In mid-October, FinancialForce announced its newest addition to its Professional Services Cloud: Services CPQ (Configure, Price, and Quote). With Services CPQ, you’ll be able to create estimates more accurately and quickly since all of your data is on a single platform. 

Service companies often create initial estimates in a spreadsheet instead of a PSA tool or project management solution. These estimates usually don’t include pricing based on scrupulous resource planning, such as a person’s billing rates, specialized skill set, or availability for the project.

Once the opportunity is closed, estimates transferred from the front office to the back office — or from a spreadsheet to a PSA system — are vulnerable to all kinds of errors. At Diginomica, Brian Sommer explains why this can be disastrous for your business: “If sales people didn’t use firm standards in preparing estimates, the delivery team gets stuck with a deal that it struggles to understand or can’t be delivered at that price, timetable, or team composition as proposed. Handoffs are deadly.”  

Not anymore with Services CPQ. Because it lives on FinancialForce’s Professional Services Cloud, there’s no duplication of data or need for integration. All your data is in a single solution, streamlining the process between initial estimates for opportunities and project delivery. 

CEO of FinancialForce Scott Brown said, “Services CPQ enables our customers to deliver accurate estimates, complete with resource demand, that create a tight handoff between sales and service and facilitate delivering services projects at scale.”

How Services CPQ Works

According to Enterprise Times, Dan Brown, CTO and Strategy Officer at FinancialForce, said the creation of Services CPQ was easier than expected because FinancialForce PSA already performed many of the functions needed for an estimation tool like Services CPQ. Project templates easily translated into estimation templates, and FinancialForce PSA already quantified items like risk and contingency for a project.  

“The thing that we do best is being able to connect the Sales Cloud, the opportunity, and account management, with estimation, and then be able to connect that to the subsequent project and resource management and delivery end to end,” Brown said. “This is about digitising and having a fantastic experience, from an opportunity to Bill, all the way through to revenue recognition.”

How does Services CPQ work? With the new addition, you’ll be able to create estimates quickly from a library of templates you’re able to customize and curate. These estimation templates include resource requests and tasks pulled from FinancialForce PSA. According to FinancialForce, Services CPQ also includes “capabilities for ‘what if’ scenario modeling of resources, expenses, and margin requirements using existing rate cards.” Final estimates also connect directly to the opportunity in Salesforce CRM or CPQ, depending on your company’s preference and needs.  

Services CPQ is a game changer for service companies. You’ll be able to:

  • Deliver tighter estimates quickly
  • Close opportunities fast and jumpstart projects faster
  • Provide the most compelling estimates to customers
  • Serve employees with more accurate, efficient resourcing
  • Increase your company’s revenue 

We’re excited about the new possibilities Services CPQ provides for our past, current, and future clients in the services industry. We’re here to help whenever you’re ready to add Services CPQ to your FinancialForce PSA Cloud. Schedule a call today, and let’s discuss our team can help you deliver tight estimates to your customers and increase revenue and employee satisfaction.