Certinia Product Spotlight: What is Services CPQ?

Author: Matt McCallum

Released in October 2021, Certinia’s Services CPQ is a project estimation tool for professional services. This solution can help PSA customers accelerate their services estimation process so that sales teams, dedicated estimating teams, project leads, and delivery managers have a single workspace to initiate the estimation process. To avoid confusion between Services CPQ and Salesforce CPQ, we will be referring to Certinia’s Services CPQ as Services Estimator throughout this blog.

The Basics

Look at Services Estimation as an addition to Professional Services Automation (PSA), created and designed by Certinia to fill in some process gaps and make project estimation easier—by doing things like:

• Taking key project data and transforming it into estimates and quotes
• Allowing you to manage resource demand directly in the estimate
• Transforming estimates into projects once the deal is won
• Feeding final estimates directly to your Salesforce CRM and Salesforce CPQ
  • And connecting your PSA, CRM, and SF CPQ on the platform
• Allowing for week-by-week resource planning
• Giving you a better look at costs and margins
• Adding governance and not letting your teams skip steps accidentally

Where normally you might need an off-platform solution or unwieldy spreadsheets to create and configure project estimates, Services Estimator is a more cost-effective and user-friendly way to meet those needs.

This is because it automates a lot of tedious and complicated tasks and has some great quality-of-life add-ons.

Who Is It For?

Certinia’s Services Estimator is a great product for organizations that deliver services and have either invested in or are considering investing in, Certinia PSA and/or Salesforce CPQ to standardize and streamline their services’ estimating and quoting processes.

If you would like your entire sales and delivery cycle to have better flow, a way to give your sales and professional services teams more accurate and up-to-date information, more detailed estimates and cost information in general, and a lot more functionality—Services Estimator is worth looking into, as it offers:

• Help with capacity planning
• A major time, resource, and frustration saver for both sales and professional services teams
  • Those savings will impact the client experience they’re able to offer
• More complete data for continuous improvement
• A better alternative for organizations using various spreadsheets to track or calculate estimated details
• A way to reduce the occurrence of errors responsible for revenue leakage and margin erosion

Where’s The Value?

It gives service organizations that want to consolidate resourcing schedules and figure out the associated cost an easy way to do so and helps track project costs from opportunity through to billing and revenue recognition.

You get more for your investment than we can list here, but some highlights include:

• Taking final estimates and creating a starting point project
• Automating resource demand back to an opportunity
• Some great best practice-based templates with options for additional configuration
• Providing the ability to accurately forecast resource needs and understand capacity levels
• Measuring the impact of discounting on project margins
• Eliminating the need to go back and forth between different systems and rate cards
• Letting you lay out a schedule or plan and link resource costs accordingly

To summarize, the key benefits create value by shortening sales cycles, minimizing change requests and the overall effort needed by your sales and customer support teams, giving more accurate and detailed quotes, accelerating project start times, and reducing cost-of-sales.

Complete Service and Sales CPQ Solutions

If you’d like more information about Services Estimator, any Salesforce or Certinia product, or a service solution that makes sense for the future of your service organization—contact us.

We’re here to offer advice, information, and services to help get your business to where you’d like it to be—and can deliver end-to-end solutions, including complete service and sales solutions tailored to meet your organization’s needs.