Crafting a Custom Sales Platform for a Global Payroll Solutions Provider

An award winning payroll solutions provider engaged Bluewave to create a bespoke sales platform that would replace the company’s need for external spreadsheets and manual sales processes.

Find out more about this custom-built, Salesforce-powered digital transformation below.

About the Customer

Our customer is a global leader in consolidated global payroll solutions. The organisation allows its customers to run error free, fully automated payroll cycles in order to unlock time and improve business processes. The organisation’s platform provides a unified view of global payroll operations, processing payroll in over 150 countries, and offers real-time data analytics and advanced reporting capability, while ensuring legislative compliance and data security. This innovation has led to our client winning multiple awards, including acknowledgement at The GPA Awards, and The Payroll Awards on numerous occasions, cementing our client as a thought leader in the space.

The Challenge

Our client engaged Bluewave to design an efficient solution that would replace the need for external spreadsheets, previously used to calculate product pricing, with an entirely on-platform process. Our experts were tasked to replicate the full product pricing model with all possible configurations, customisations, inclusions and options and allow users to generate a range of documents to be sent to the customer with varying degrees of granularity. The challenge also included a feature that would automate the customer’s contract renewal process and provide a seamless expansion/contraction process, removing the need for manually creating renewal and amendment opportunities.

The Solution

Bluewave utilised Sales Cloud and Salesforce Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) functionality, and Conga’s Quote Generation solution as part of this custom digital transformation. Sales Cloud features a number of contact and opportunity management tools, as well as accurate sales forecasting with data-driven insights, and process automation that removes the need for time-consuming manual processes. With this solution, our client would be able to deliver tailored experiences to contacts and move forward faster with sales opportunities, bringing out the best in every rep.

Our experts designed a solution that would feature a combination of CPQ’s standard and custom objects to accurately store and manage all of the client’s service-related data. Configure, Price, Quote is Salesforce’s AI-powered sales configurator tool that helps to simplify complex sales processes. CPQ’s standard calculation methods, as well as price rules and custom fields, plus automation, would be used to calculate complex pricing models. Additionally, Conga’s Quote Generation functionality was used to produce complex, fully customised quote and rate card documents on an ad-hoc basis.

The Process

The digital transformation process included a Conga implementation, designed to generate quotes within Salesforce CPQ. The Conga composer would automatically generate quotes for three different documents – often referred to as a rate card. This complicated build would utilise Sales Cloud and CPQ to take in customer focused documents, price calculations, design documents and other factors into a complex pricing structure. This would also factor in which customers the products were sold to, where these customers were located, what tier the customer was ranked as, etc. These different aspects of our client’s offering were bundled up to customers and sold as one product, so there were numerous different combinations that all had to be factored into the build.

“This aspect of the project required a lot of heavy lifting, as there were so many moving parts that needed to be brought together to create a working model. Ultimately, we were able to successfully carry out the CPQ implementation, with Conga, to replace what was previously a complex manual system with the potential for many human errors, with a modern Salesforce-powered solution that would automatically generate the correct rate card to fit the customer’s requirements, every single time.” – Salesforce Developer at Bluewave

The Bluewave Way

The Bluewave Way is our agile implementation process, which has led to the delivery of over 250 successful Salesforce projects and engagements over the last decade, with this customer counted amongst them. Communication with our client flowed easily and was kept up regularly between our experts and their team. Throughout the project, the business made a significant number of change requests that were all taken on board and factored into the build efficiently by our experts. As a result, and despite the changes, the project was still completed on time. The whole process was handled expertly by our project managers who kept the lines of communication open at all times and were able to delegate tasks to our technical team.

“We worked hand in hand with our client to successfully carry out this project, but as the build was taking place, their team would start to suggest additional changes. While this could be considered quite a hurdle, my team was able to update designs and make the necessary changes, with our agreed timeline already factored in. Working in an agile manner, we were able to revisit, redesign, and add additional functionality to the implementation, ensuring it met the needs of our client.” – Senior Salesforce Consultant at Bluewave

The Results

Following the hard work of Bluewave’s consultants, developers, and technical experts, this digital transformation project was successfully completed, providing our customer with a fully functioning sales platform. This Salesforce-powered solution now allows the organisation’s internal users to view prices, costs, and margins – all generated instantly. This completely removes the need for hours of manual, off-platform calculations. Our client’s sales team can now generate and send complex quotes to customers with ease, all within minutes, rather than weeks. This has drastically sped up the organisation’s sales process. Additionally, admin users can now maintain their entire service-related data model directly from Salesforce, or by using a data loader tool.

The new org configuration has allowed The customer’s system admins to have a full, transparent view of their complex product and price data. This has allowed the business to investigate, review and update their service pricing and availability with their service partners. The quote and rate card documents that have been produced will remove several hours of work per document for the customer’s administration teams. An additional bonus is that the level of detail and presentation of the documents is not only an improvement of our client’s previous documents, but also now exceeds the general standard set by other businesses in the industry.