Salesforce'com and Big Machines

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Salesforce.com and Big Machines
Presented by Bobby Buchanan Systems Analyst and
Salesforce.com Administrator for
Ixia rbuchanan_at_ixiacom.com
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Ixia is a leading provider of performance test
systems for IP-based infrastructure and services.
Ixia is a public company (NASDAQ XXIA) operating
in over 30 countries worldwide. We have over
800 employees with offices in several countries.
Our headquarters is in Calabasas, CA. We
manufacture hardware and software solutions that
generate, capture, characterize, and emulate
network and application traffic, establishing
definitive performance and conformance metrics of
network devices or systems under test. Our
website is http//www.ixiacom.com
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We have been using Salesforce.com as our CRM
since August of 2004. Currently we have about
200 internal users and around 30 partners who use
the Salesforce Partner Portal. In addition to
integrating with Big Machines for quoting, we
also use Marketo for our marketing and email
blast needs, Centive for our sales commission
usage, and CastIron as our middleware integration
solution. (note Centive was acquired by Xactly
Corporation at the beginning of this
year) www.marketo.com www.centive.com www.castiron
.com
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Big Machines provides SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)
solutions to allow customers to configure and
quote products to their own customer base, either
as a stand-alone solution or as an integration
with Salesforce.com Big Machines has grown into
a global on-demand software company with offices
in Chicago, San Mateo, Frankfurt and London.
The company has successfully implemented over
160 customer deployments of its Big Machines
solutions and continues to grow its staff and its
customer base, in addition to growing its revenue
over 50 per year. Big Machines achieved a record
year in 2008 and has seen a combined revenue
growth of 265 over the past three years.
www.bigmachines.com
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Find out more about BigMachines on the
AppExchange. Search on Big Machines
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WHAT DID WE USE BEFORE BIG MACHINES FOR QUOTING?
I created an Excel spreadsheet with several VBA
macros that allowed our sales team to import
opportunities and products, and then give them
the ability to put in discounts. Once the quote
was configured, the user could click a button and
have the changes synchronized back to the
opportunity in SF.
WHAT WAS WRONG WITH THIS APPROACH?
It was not web-enabled. It was a client solution
that the sales users had to download to their
PC/laptops. Although the sheet was locked, the
user could unprotect the sheet and add their own
comments, rows, columns, etc., which caused a lot
of problems when they tried to click the update
button. In addition, there was no workflow to
alert sales management of how much discount the
sales user was quoting the customer
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WHAT ANSWERS AND SOLUTIONS DID BIG MACHINES OFFER?

• Configurator
• Workflow
• Customizable Content

Big Machines offers a customized configurator
which allows your sales team to build a quote by
answering some simple questions about the
customers needs. It helps reduce the amount of
product knowledge a salesperson must have in
order to correctly ensure the customer is going
to receive ALL the products that are necessary to
meet the configuration they want. Without a
configurator, its very easy for a salesperson to
forget or accidentally leave off one or two
products that are included with the purchase of a
different, more complex, product. For our
immediate purposes, we had Big Machines design a
configuration for us that handled about 4 of our
most popular software products. Usually, the
sales user can put together the entire
configuration of products by answering less than
5 questions. It helps increase order accuracy
and cut down on mistakes where the customer does
not receive all of the products to which they are
entitled.
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WHAT ANSWERS AND SOLUTIONS DID BIG MACHINES OFFER?

• Configurator
• Workflow
• Customizable Content

The most important goal we achieved with our Big
Machines integration was getting a workflow
implemented. Now, when the sales user creates a
quote, it must be approved by whatever personnel
is required BEFORE the user can send the quote
out to the customer. Depending on how much
discount the sales user is attempting to give the
customer, approval may be required by up to 4
people, including the CFO of our company. If
the sales user stays within the range of their
allocated discount margin, no approval is needed
and they can proceed to create the printed
version which is then emailed to the
customer. Big Machines automatically attaches a
copy of the quote to the opportunity in
Salesforce. With the Excel-based tool, the sales
user had to remember to manually attach the
quote. Since Big Machines is SaaS, it appears to
be a part of Salesforce.com, so the sales user
never has to leave the browser in order to create
the quote.
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WHAT ANSWERS AND SOLUTIONS DID BIG MACHINES OFFER?

• Configurator
• Workflow
• Customizable Content

In addition to the features that come out of the
box with Big Machines quoting, they offer a wide
variety of customizable content thats suited to
your companys own specific needs and
requirements. Big Machines created some
integration scripts that import all of our
pricebook and part information from
Salesforce.com into their own products database.
I run these scripts whenever we add/update
products in our Salesforce instance. We also had
them customize our quote such that the users
could add discounts at both a line level and
overall. In addition, the user can give a
discount as a percentage or as a dollar amount.
We also had them create specific incentive
discounts which are applied to the overall
quote. At the bottom of each quote, we can
either display or hide a maintenance charge which
will be required by the customer at the end of
their 12-month warranty if they wish to continue
on a maintenance-and-support plan. You can
include documents (i.e. white papers about
certain products, terms conditions, etc.) to be
added to the quote.
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Once integrated with your Salesforce.com
instance, you will see a new related list on the
Opportunity detail page above the products.
Products are automatically added to the
opportunity by Big Machines once the quote is
configured and saved. A custom object (Quote)
is created by Big Machines
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The Quote custom object fields identify the
characteristics of the quote the quote number,
an internal ID, the current status, the overall
discount amount, the grand total, and a link to
the opportunity to which its related. This
object is created during the implementation and
is exclusively used by BM application.
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Now, lets see a quote created from start to
finish