CASE STUDIES
STREAMLINING QUOTE TO CASH FOR IMPROVED REVENUE RECOGNITION
SPENDESK
Creating operational, programmatic and people alignment in the Quote to Cash process to improve billing errors, data accuracy and revenue recognition.
Spendesk helping businesses make smarter spending decisions and contributing to real growth
Spendesk is a French fintech unicorn created in 2016 that is providing an all-in-one corporate spend management platform to manage their operational spending to small & medium businesses. With now over 3,500 customers and more than 500 employees in the company has been growing fast.
They replace the complicated and bureaucratic process of managing company money with one complete spend management solution. Spendesk increases team productivity and collaboration, provides businesses with visibility and control, and frees up valuable time so that the finance team (and everyone in the company) can focus on strategic topics to grow your business.
We speak to Vincent Terol, Director of Revenue Operations & Enablement at Spendesk, who is front and center in managing Spendesk internal go-to-market operations. See below his take on tackling the challenges, designing a solution and the results, with our help.
THE CHALLENGE
Some of the processes that were developed and put in place did not scale as fast as the organisation was growing, so they “broke” along the way which required structural review and revamp on a regular basis. This was notably the case for their Quote to Cash process which is the process from the moment a sales executive can quote to how finance can recognise the revenue.
The challenges were across;
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People : No single ownership of the processes and several gaps that were not covered by the teams concerned by the different steps of Q2C​
Process : Lack of clear process & governance which was causing mistakes & a lot of overwork to correct them
Data : Data discrepancies across the different systems of record & reporting
Technology : Lack of integration & automation between tools which created friction & errors in our system
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"The challenges we had were causing for us to do a lot of manual intervention which is time consuming and unproductive. Down the line in the process this had really affected our revenue recognition to be inaccurate."
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THE TASK
ASSESS, REDESIGN AND ALIGN QUOTE TO CASH
The Quote to Cash challenges was affecting the sales, customer success, operational and finance teams. Although there was awareness of the issues, it wasn’t entirely clear the extent of the challenges and where they were coming from and who was involved where. The business was using Salesforce.com, Chargebee and were about to migrate to NetSuite which had clear breaks in the process.
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Think RevOps set out to design and implement scalable solutions and practices that would enable Spendesk to have a more streamlined cash-to-quote process.
THE SOLUTION
MASTER SOP, ROLES ALIGNMENT AND SALESFORCE & CHARGEBEE INTEGRATION FIX
The first phase, we set out to assess the business’ quote to cash process first to understand exactly what the challenges were, the extent of them, who was involved, where the tech stack was failing. This was then followed by helping Spendesk prioritize the challenges based on high and strategic value add. We did this exercise using our use case catalog. This also helped us map the right stakeholders to key activities and ensure we got buy-in from all relevant teams for the project. Once that was established, we helped build a roadmap for the project.
The second phase, we set out to design what the end-to-end quote to cash process should look like. Part of that, governance was a very important factor, so we created a Master SOP and definition documentation and realigned the org to create clear roles and responsibility and ownership in the process. Deal and billing management processes were established, and finally a revision of Salesforce and Chargebee integration.
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THE RESULT
BETTER ALIGNMENT, BILLING ERROR REDUCTION & DATA ACCURACY
The assessments’ goal is to provide Spendesk with the full visibility and transparency on their Quote to Cash operations that would enable them to create a clear roadmap for resolution. The solutions we developed and implemented would allow Spendesks’ teams to be better aligned, data to be more accurate, and reduce billing errors which led to a more streamlined revenue recognition process.
The assessment allowed Spendesk to have a clear view of their quote to cash process and understand where in the process there was friction and breaks. Following this it was easy to prioritise efforts in the right places and mobilise the right stakeholders for the project.
“Think RevOps presented to us a very robust & comprehensive assessment of the current state of our quote to cash. As well she shared & aligned the key stakeholders around a vision of what the end state could & should look like. Finally, they were also able to align us on most important topics to start with and get commitment from the different stakeholders involved.”
In phase 2 we executed on the plan which meant delivering solutions for areas such as billing governance, Integrations, enablement, data governance, and streamlining the billing model.
Several projects were launched that led to several deliverables including (non exhaustive)
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A definition & implementation of a new quoting system in SFDC
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A complete realignment of the organization on the roles & responsibilities - which led to fewer friction between teams
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A definition & implementation of clear & robust billing & deal management processes which led to a drastic reduction of billing error (divided by 4 in 6 months only!)
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A revised & optimized integration between chargebee & SFDC which led to better data accuracy
"One of the biggest issues we had was especially the lack of ownership in the quote-to-cash process which meant there was . Think RevOps helped us realign the business in terms of the roles and responsibility in this process which has led to having fewer friction between the go-to-market and operational teams. "
“The billing and deal management process implementation led to a drastic reduction of billing errors 4 x times less in only 6 months!”
The business now has better knowledge on the key activities in the quote-to-cash process and how data flows. The fixes with Salesforce and Chargebee integration have led to much more accurate data.
Overall this drives an improvement on the unification and alignment of the revenue recognition process. With the solution Think RevOps has implemented it provides a stronger foundation for the operational teams to build from.
WORKING WITH US
GET EXPERTISE & PARTNERSHIP
Spendesk chose the Revenue Operations as a Service (ROaaS), as it matched their initial need to have a support on-board for several months that could help deliver the solutions for the period duration. We asked Vincent, how it was to work with Think RevOps.
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"Think RevOps is very easy to work with and they “landed” very well in the organization as they were able to demonstrate great soft skills in term of communication & active listening as well as expertise in her field
Speaking of expertise, Think RevOps masters RevOps very well and was easily able to help us define the right processes, systems & tools improvement to put in place. They notably have a strong experience with Chargebee which is the tool we used at Spendesk for our billing and we could benefit from it to accelerate the implementation of the solution.
Think RevOps is also strong at project management and was able to drive the program forward in an effective manner by putting the right rhythm of work while supporting whenever needed the driver of streams.
Also, they are not afraid to be “hands on” and actively contribute to the delivery of some of the stream of the project.
Finally, they're very good in adapting their communication from C level to Individual Contributor to convey key messages!"
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