Thales Group is a French multinational company that designs, develops and manufactures electrical systems as well as devices and equipment for the aerospace, defence, transportation and security sectors.
“We’ve reduced the cycle time to complete a quotation by 78%. This allows us to spend more time with our clients and to work on specific and complex offers. As the Oracle CPQ Cloud solution is user friendly, a few clicks are sufficient to issue a full proposal. In addition, we are looking to provide our customers with self-service options using Oracle CPQ. Since all data, logic and outputs are stored in the same repository, renewal quotes, such as ordering certificates, can become part of an “automatic” subscription renewal. Our Thales users are enthusiastic about using a web interface that automates the processing of their proposals.”
Mathilde Wingler
Digital management, Thales Services Numériques
Why CPQ?
Thales Services Numeriques was able to improve and accelerate its processes for generating commercial proposals for standardised packaged services by implementing Oracle CPQ Cloud.
Expected benefits?
- Significant reduction in time required to create a quote
- Improvement of sales staff expertise and effectiveness in generating an accurate quote and reducing average sales cycle time
- Increase of the average value of each quote with logical upsell and strategic discounting control
- Improvement of the Win-ratio of quotes (less lost deals)
- Reduction of the complexity and time required to roll out new offers
- Expansion of sales and quoting processes to include Thales partners and resellers
- Enablement of a unified quoting process starting with one division and branching out to other groups
Challenges?
- The first challenge of Thales Services was to improve the process of generating their offers in order to be faster, more precise with the goal to harmonise and standardise documents and to capitalise on the experience acquired.
- The second challenge was people, by giving sense in team’s daily job, in order to improve their daily lives and allow them to focus on activities with high added value.
- Before the implementation of CPQ, the Sales team had to manually manage the quote generation with Excel and PowerPoint.
- There was no central repository nor document standardisation.
- On specific quotes like certificates, the Sales team had to manually check the termination date to propose a renewal.
- The information was entered manually into the CRM to keep track of each proposal. This was a time-consuming and prone to errors process.
Results?
- 78% Reduction in time required to create a quote.
- On certain proposals, the sales agents were spending more than 100 hours per year. Thanks to CPQ, Thales went from 175 hours per year to less than 40 hours.