WKS 6a - Business Process Definition: Part 1

Workshop on 12 May 2025 to define the quoting and deal management business process.

Participants

Goal

The goal of these workshops is to map all the company's use cases as defined in the application, and to clarify the Sales processes to be implemented.

Workshop materials

Topic	Document	Comment
Quoting / Deal Proposal Process	CPQ process Valio Excel	Excel workbook containing Valio’s requirements for the end-to-end quoting process, to be implemented in the CPQ tool. Each tab corresponds to a step in the quoting process.

Main results

Business Process for Deal Proposal - Tabs / Tool Sections

• Process flow – sales people think of terms & conditions first (ie rebates), and only afterwards setting the product and prices. This way, at the end they will be able to calculate the correct margins. For margin estimation, sales rep inputs the estimated volumes.

• Valio’s Excel workbook contains details of the steps, one per tab, in the desired order.

• Each tab/step contains a mix of manual inputs from the sales rep and guidance/data coming from lookup tables.

• All steps discussed in today’s workshop are at ‘quote/deal header’ level, with key information described below

Deal

• New vs Existing Customer

• Deal Potential

  • High level EURO values > how much they are purchasing for each channel

  • This info maybe should be set at opportunity level – it’s important to get the overall deal size. This info should have an impact on pricing, eg amount of net prices. Salesrep should give the best estimate, as this will be monitored/tracked by sales leadership. They are already giving these estimates in excel – so it shouldn’t be a surprise. 

• Customer Group

• Validity Dates

  • Contract/ agreement start and end dates

  • Proposal validity

  • Ideally we would only have one active agreement with one customers, at any point in time. However, some bigger customers might want multiple agreements, due to the structure to their purchasing organisation. Eg one agreement per product category. Agreement amendments will be multiple quotes that then are applied to the same agreement.

• Price Udpate and Notice Periods

  • Price update frequency and scope (net prices) need to be in the agreement. Would be good to get alerts to the sales person when prices are due to be updated.

  • New quote for amendment: should have the current price the customer is paying, the freshest price recommendations, and then salesrep can amend price 

  • Agreement will have two buttons in CPQ – renew and amend

  • Amend > creates amendment quote (new products, update prices etc) 

Charges

• Service charges

  • some of these will be in PM-Locally Managed Data and brought as price recommendation.

• Delivery Charges

Rebates

• Rebates – all questions and data to input is in Excel (recommendations coming from PM-Locally Managed Data)

• Large number of tables required - technical feasibility question to Zilliant team (can we have tables at quote header level?)

Head Office Fees

• Head office fees by Product group

• HO fees – very rare but for very large deals – set by product groups (via excel upload) > also table format that we need to figure out how to implement/configure at quote header level. For large clients, they need money to support their purchasing organisation. A percentage of the sales that we ned to pay back to the head office. They don’t want this money to be shown to prices. Can be shown to customer at product group level.

Detailed meeting notes below.

Business Process and Deal Lifecycle

• Deal lifecycle involves quote-triggered agreements, customer validation, and initial product definition

• Quote acceptance leads to agreement generation with amendment or renewal options

• Renewal typically occurs at the end of first agreement validity period

• Business process lifecycle should start from CRM customer opportunity

• Agreement should have two buttons: Renew and Amend for managing deal lifecycle

• Renewal quote may involve renegotiating prices and products

• First step in business process: Determine if dealing with new or existing customer

• Define quote validity dates from September 1st to August 30th for customer agreements

Pricing and Quote Configuration

• Create specific tab for agreement information with start and end dates

• Design price update process that captures update frequency, notice periods, and first update date

• Build system to automatically generate new quotes for price updates with notifications to sales reps

• Implement price recommendation system showing current and previous prices during quote generation 

• Service charges will be free fields for salespeople to input values with guidance from local managed tables

• Local managed tables for pricing guidance are not yet built

• Sales team prefers setting terms and conditions before product selection to correctly calculate margins

• Rebates setup will include percentage-based discounts, marketing support rebates, and other rebate types

• Rebate recommendations will come from Price Manager's locally managed tables

• Margin calculation based on sales representative's estimated product volumes

Sales Projection and Estimation Process

• Create structured dropdown for payment terms with predefined options

• Collect sales potential across different distribution channels for pricing segmentation

• Sofia questioned sales reps' ability to provide accurate estimates for sales projections

• Plan to generate system reports comparing projected vs tracked sales for validation

• Sales leadership will review and challenge unrealistic sales projections from reps 

• Develop change management training to encourage accurate sales estimations

Customer Agreement Variations

• Discussion needed on whether 'deal' refers to opportunity, quote, or agreement level

• Preferred approach: One deal/agreement per customer with potential for amendments

• Exceptional cases allow multiple agreements for large customers with complex purchasing structures 

• Some customers require head office fee percentage on total sales

• Head office fee percentages can potentially be managed via Excel upload 

• Head office fees typically discussed during RFP stage with varied percentages per product group

Action list

• BCP to ask Zilliant CPQ team if possible to display rebates + head office fee tables in the quote; ie can we have tables at quote header level?
• Teemu developing Excel mock-up for system design, team to collaborate on formulas

Decisions

List of requirements

• Refer to Valio’s excel.

Session recording

Related pages