Solution Centric Commercials and Customer Experience

Complexity
linkedin.com/pulse/solution-centric-commercials-customer-experience-shan-gopalakrishnan

Shan G.
Senior Director - SaaS Business Enablement, Commercial Transformation

9 articles
April 17, 2022

For most DCaaS and SaaS businesses, there are some complex commercial scenarios that
the traditional packaged application providers don’t support that well. The ‘aaS’ business
warrants tighter customer interactions than the conventional business models. Most of these
are unique due to multi-product solutions, consumption models, which makes it complex and
causes difficulty to provide a smoother customer experience, particularly when involving
value-added service providers like ISVs

General Challenge for Partners to support ‘aaS’ products:

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While some partners have modernized their BSS (Business Systems Services) investing in
the right technologies to adopt SaaS business models, many mid-size and small-scale
partners are yet to do this. The enterprise 'aaS' providers create niche consumption models,
which warrants the Partners BSS to support the same to mirror the business. These
consumption models are causing difficulty for the Partners in managing their customers, but
they are a hub to resell many such providers' products to the end customers. For a partner to
resell Amazon's or Google's, or Microsoft's DCaaS or SaaS products, they will deal with
many variances as their 'aaS' business goes by a consumption pricing model. Each
providers' aaS' offerings may vary to a large extent to make it a niche offering to their end
customers, which warrants the Partners to manage all these variances in their systems to
perform the business with their end customers.

While Partners spend cycles to integrate their business, Enterprises still need these partners
for customer outreach. Relying on the Inside Sales' ability to reach all the customer
segments may not provide the optimum scale.

Need for Solution Proposals:

Most DCaaS and SaaS Providers are trending to provide a whole solution to their end
customer, which comprises well-integrated products with many complimenting products of
their own and their partners' products (ISVs). The Hi-tech industry, especially DCaaS
providers, Network Virtualization Solution providers, and SaaS application solution providers,
need to evaluate their customers' current state before proposing a complete solution. Many
of their customers have an inventory of legacy purchases that are obsolete, warranting
upgrades and moving towards an 'aaS' offering for a better cost proposition.

Commercial Experience Challenge:

Most providers look to solve the traditional commerce experience wherein most of their
products are quoted line by line with a specific SKU and they are priced individually. Most
packaged applications providers in this space have a solution for this, but this does not
completely solve the needs. The majority of the DCaaS or SaaS Providers' customer needs
are solution-based and the underlying commercial experience to support this is complex.
Customers' desires are to trade in their legacy purchases, obtain credits for the forfeited
license or support services and use those credits to buy a whole new solution offer from the
provider. In these scenarios, the need to determine customers' current entitlements, and
potential products that they use from the competitors and provide a whole solution that
scales for the customers' future needs is becoming a more critical need. When a whole
solution offering is negotiated, the providers' partners' offerings or ISVs are also taken in
consideration. The traditional commerce application software’s quote and price feature won't
suit this.

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Today majority of these providers' partners re-brand the provider's catalog services along
with their value-adds on their catalog offerings and perform a relay business (mirroring
providers' business model) through their BSS (Business Support Systems). The question is,
is this approach effective? Many enterprise ‘aaS’ product providers will admit the fact that
this is not working well. Relaying the provider's business model and replicating the same via
Channel Partners BSS (Business Support Systems) are causing a delay for the Go-to-
Market. This approach also warrants the Partners to invest more in their systems to be
ready to market the provider's offerings. Most of the enterprise business partners who have
good outreach to the market have not invested in their systems to support ‘aaS’ (DCaaS or
SaaS) products reselling as it comes with some complexities.

Thoughts on Digitizing Solution Proposal based Commercial Experience:

DCaaS providers have been attempting to improve their customer experience through a
solution management console that helps define the target state whole solution for the
customer. Amazon’s CloudFormation graphical designer is a great segue way to the desired
customer experience. This is still evolving but it’s a good direction to build the ideal
customer experience. I am using AWS’s CloudFormation as the baseline and providing
additional thoughts on how this can enhance the overall commerce experience by
connecting it to the rest of the commercials process.

To begin with, a potential customer deal is designed with a solution proposal. The below
user experience illustrates a solution proposal layout. I am using a DCaaS example here, but
this can be designed for a SaaS provider solution proposal scenario as well. This designer
could be triggered through a standard commercial flow like during the opportunity lifecycle for
an estimation or to quote the solution proposal.

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A designer like the above could lay the proposed solution which in turn generates a JSON
payload comprised of the proposal template with commercial BOM and the technical
BOM. The technical BOM can be used for provisioning the actual workloads whereas the
commercial BOM can be fed to an estimator or quote with all the related price waterfall
elements that are applicable to the customer.

Configuration Rules Constrained Designer:

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This designer has configuration constraints for the valid inclusion /exclusions and the related
compatible add-ons. This almost provides the visual configurator experience and can be
projected via a 3D visualization as well in addition to 2D, especially for the DCaaS-centric
products.

SaaS Products:

For the SaaS providers, the visualization is more of a feature selection which in turn can
provide a feature experience VOD tied to each feature.

Customer Trade-ins:

Following this experience, if the customer has to trade in their legacy products, the designer
provides the necessary experience to allow selecting the products from an existing network
layout which in turn validates whether the trade-in is qualified or not.

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The above trade-in can generate the required credits for the customer.

ISVs – is a good Value-Added services approach:

Partners create white-label offers using their value-added services, warranting their way of
packaging the catalog and pricing forces the need to integrate into their BSS. The ISVs
(Integrated Software Vendor services) approach could provide the desired alternative to
position the niche VAR services. These can be added to the core product catalog within the
Providers catalog natively for the customers to view these offerings. Some of the examples
could be –

In a DCaaS business, the management of workloads is segmented to the SDLC

environments (Dev, Staging, or Production) via a console to track cost optimization.
Deploy recommended network architecture while adopting a DCaaS provider service.
Optimized secured Air-Gap asynchronous transportation of data/workloads
between an on-prem data center to a hosted service provider (Google Go, AWS,
Azure, Etc.)
For Enterprise SaaS, product provisioning or telemetry management via a console.

Below is a visual illustration of how partners can integrate their ISV products into the core
proposal designer. Although every ISV product onboarding to the provider portfolio must be
digitized to ensure partners can set up their catalog offers with a structural interface before
integrating them into the solution proposal designer.

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After completing the proposal, a workflow with a 2D/3D visual viewer will be provided to the
customer to review and approve the bid.

After approval, the design could translate this solution to the relevant BOMs that are now
ingested into the quote to generate a formal pricing and further processing via Order
acceptance flow. Refer to below for an illustration.

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What is the Opportunity?
Typical CRMs, ERPs, don't provide a seamless digital commercial experience for Digital
SaaS or DCaaS business models and support their buying motions. Unlike the traditional
perpetual business models, most 'aaS' business needs a triangulated commerce experience
(aaS Provider, Customer/Partner, ISVs).

Conclusion
Many companies spend millions of dollars on commercial transformations. Many SaaS
Providers and lead application providers exist in this space, yet those solutions don’t address
the target experience needed. It is daunting to see the same old business apps experience
despite several tech evolutions in the industry. This continued experience gap in the industry
as we continue to deal with the SaaS Providers – be it Oracle, SFDC, or SAP, the real
problems are not being addressed. We hope to see the modernity of the Apps technology
and SaaS innovations bring a massive difference to the commercial space someday soon.

Published by

Shan G.
Senior Director - SaaS Business Enablement, Commercial Transformation

Published • 1y

9 articles

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#cloud #saassales #saasbusiness #saas #saasplatform #partner-ecosystem
#channelpartners #enterpriseready #enterprise #enterprisesales #enterprisesolutions
#saasmarketing #subscriptioneconomy #recurringrevenue #pricingstrategy
#isvs #isvar #DCaaS #hosted
#datacenterservices #distributors #resellers #resellercommunity #reseller
#reselling #partnerprogram #partnersuccess #marketplaces
#enterprisesoftware #enterprise-it #commercecloud #ecommercestrategy
#ecommercetrends #ecommerceplatform #CPQ #solutionselling #tradein #upgrades
#strategy #estimation #proposals

Reactions

2 Comments Comments on Shan G.’s article

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Jaydip Bhattacharya 2nd degree connection 2nd Salesforce Platform
Architect at VMware

1y

Very good information Shan G.. This could potentially open a new business domain for ISVs.

10/10