Many businesses, including those that already use Salesforce, struggle to create an efficient process for contract renewals, including generating customer quotes and optimizing revenue opportunities. These businesses force their renewal specialists to spend exorbitant amounts of time updating and cleaning up overlapping and conflicting contracts and offers, and they don’t have controls in place to prevent renewal specialists from entering incorrect renewals information and conveying incorrect information to customers. Furthermore, these businesses lack important visibility into renewals-related sales opportunities, causing them to miss out on countless opportunities to offer more customized quotes and add value to a customer’s account.

Fortunately, the solution to all of these problems is as simple as integrating Salesforce Quote-to-Cash (also known as Steelbrick) into existing Salesforce infrastructure. Salesforce Quote-to-Cash is designed specifically for businesses that operate on a subscription-based model, allowing them to automate the processes by which contract renewal offers are extended to customers in a timely, strategic fashion. In this post, we’re going to explore the specific ways that Salesforce Quote-to-Cash automates and dramatically streamlines your business’s contract renewals processes:

1. Salesforce Quote-to-Cash automatically condenses contracts: When a renewal contract is generated in Salesforce for an existing account, this action requires generating another contract object for another opportunity. Consequently, when a customer has multiple products on an account, a renewals specialist must condense all of the contract objects down manually and nverify that the customer is still getting the lowest possible price and the best possible value. Salesforce Quote-to-Cash automatically takes care of making these adjustments, co-terming and appropriately pricing all of the products available under the contract.

2. Salesforce Quote-to-Cash allows contract adds-ons to be seamlessly integrated: When a renewal contract is generated, renewals specialists shouldn’t just be looking to maintain the status quo; the specialist should be armed with every possible opportunity to modify and bump up the terms and add new products to the contract. Salesforce Quote-to-Cash automatically generates these options, empowering the specialist to focus on quickly identifying opportunities to offer customers more targeted, high-value solutions.

3. Salesforce Quote-to-Cash eliminates the need for manual contract renewals: Under typical Salesforce renewal processes, renewals specialists are forced to spend precious customer interaction time generating and verifying renewal offers. This is a very poor use of the specialists’ time, and it forces the customer to wait (often impatiently) for an offer to be generated. Salesforce Quote-to-Cash keeps specialists focused on what they do best – that is, tailoring optimal solutions that meet the needs of the customer and ultimately drive sales and revenue.

4. Salesforce Quote-to-Cash enables you to customize pricing structures for individual customers: Not every customer falls onto the same pricing structure at many businesses. Governments and nonprofits are examples of customers that must or perhaps should have the option to automatically renew at lower rates. While many businesses generate these non-standard quotes manually, Salesforce Quote-to-Cash enables a business to use a contracted price object to indefinitely and automatically apply a given pricing structure to an account. This same feature also allows certain categories of customers to automatically have their renewal offers adjusted upward to accommodate, for example, annual price increases and revised list prices.

5. Salesforce Quote-to-Cash maximizes flexibility when adjusting value or pricing: Salesforce Quote-to-Cash is so powerful that you can set your renewal strategy by customer account. Perhaps for one customer, you’ll bump their renewal offer up 5%. If your list prices goes up substantially, perhaps you’ll want to set the renewal offer based on the higher list price. Renewals specialists also have the option with Salesforce Quote-to-Cash to do more cross-selling and upselling to customers in ways that are more tailored to their needs.

With Salesforce Quote-to-Cash, the contract renewals process becomes an afterthought, as your renewal specialists can focus all of their time and expertise on improving the customer experience – not manually updating and verifying back-end processes that can easily be automated. The advantages of Salesforce Quote-to-Cash are clear: You can automatically condense contracts, seamlessly integrate contract add-ons into an account, eliminate the need for manual renewals, provide customized pricing structures for different types of customers, and maximize flexibility for adding value to the customer’s account.