While major corporations have their own IT departments, getting new ideas built and tested and into the hands of employees in the field is often a slow-moving process.
Citrix is a multinational software company that enables the secure and reliable delivery of apps and data through digital workspace technology.
The Citrix Deal Desk saw an opportunity to turn the current Citrix deal evaluation model into a self-service tool for field salespeople, greatly reducing the field’s dependence on internal resources for common pricing proposals and creating a single source of truth for commercial rules.
CHALLENGE
Prior to engaging with the deal desk, the Citrix IT department had already borne considerable expense to integrate a third-party CPQ application.
The existing CPQ was an “out-of-the-box” enterprise solution which required significant tweaking and customization, resulting in a confusing user experience and ongoing development and integration efforts to address missing functionality.
With the release of new pricing and deal structures to support Citrix’s cloud transformation, the need for a better tool to help clarify these new rules became apparent.
In the intensely competitive marketplace for enterprise cloud services, even a week's delay in approving a deal can make the difference between success and failure.
SOLUTION
Blood & Treasure quickly built a custom pricing and deal desk tool that would allow salespeople to easily calculate discount levels across product lines, and speed the deal approval process.
Combining a web interface for field salespeople with an admin panel for management to adjust pricing and margin levels, the functionality would include:
Ability to configure complex pricing deals.
Volume-based discounts.
Recurring pricing.
Pricing recommendations based on approval algorithms to indicate to reps what product pricing will be accepted or rejected.
Professional-looking customer proposals to include branding.
At-a-glance oversight management with detailed analytics by region, salesperson, product sold sales value, and profit margins.
Seamless, cloud-based integration with existing business processes.
The ability to tailor the functionality to exact requirements and the assurance that the tool could be built, tested and deployed in 3 months and within existing budget constraints were the reasons the project received the green light from the Citrix management team.
DEVELOPMENT & IMPLEMENTATION
The development process began with a deep dive into understanding the optimal experience the salesforce should have with the tool which involved creating a detailed set of wireframes to reveal every step in the product flow.
As the “boots on the ground,” the Citrix deal desk team understood the business best of all and
led the wireframing process, organizing complex pricing information into a simple and easy-to-assimilate format, essentially taking a huge Excel monster and turning it into an elegant solution
the worldwide salesforce would enjoy using.
Detailed wireframes were completed and approved in 2 weeks, allowing the development team to create the API and database schema as well as analyze all tasks in Jira within one month from commissioning.
Development time ran for 8 weeks with 1 new build being released each week. After an intensive period of beta testing, we began rolling out to the field salesforce right at the end of the 3 month development window.
UNFORESEEN ISSUES
Operating at this speed of development requires a very tight software development and testing process. Even so, on one occasion we found a bug that had slipped through our QA process and only got discovered after the build had been pushed to production. We had to scramble to roll back to the previous version while we fixed it.
As it turned out, it was a data-related problem where the staging database had been updated but the migration for those updates had not been recorded in the codebase so those migrations were not carried over to production.
The outcome was that we created database migrations for individual database records which ensured this issue never came up again.
RESULTS
Within 2 months of launch, most of Citrix’s sales force had become active users and almost all cloud transactions were being priced through the tool.
From the perspective of the intended audience - the field salesforce - the solution has been met with unparalleled enthusiasm since it simplifies the process of quickly pricing the best deals and generating professional quotes, which ultimately helps to close more business and earn more income.
The Citrix management team particularly values the simplified pricing process and insight into worldwide salesforce usage and performance. After undergoing an in-depth security and code review, Citrix approved Blood & Treasure to perform ongoing development and maintenance of the Deal Desk application.
“The Blood & Treasure team has been exceptional to work with.
They were able to create a complex, enterprise-grade app
within a fraction of the time it would have taken us to build
and deploy internally. 100% responsive, creative, and
professional.”
— Brian Ferber, Group Director, Supply Chain Operations & Demand Management.
TAKEAWAYS
A crucial ingredient to the success of the platform we built was working with someone who understood exactly what was needed and would be welcomed by the people on the front lines, in this case the Citrix salesforce. Without product vision and the leadership to champion a new initiative, it would be extremely difficult to persuade senior level management to engage and next to impossible to secure the enthusiasm of the salesforce.
For more information, please contact:
Noel Guinane
Managing Partner
Blood & Treasure, LLC