Morningstar
How automation and transparency in pricing unleashed new revenue for Morningstar
How automation and transparency in pricing unleashed new revenue for Morningstar
What We Did
To free up its sales team for more valuable work, increase revenue through cross-selling and upselling, and provide a consistent client experience, Morningstar needed a faster, better process for producing prices and quotes. The company turned to West Monroe for help:
- Implementing an automated, digitized quoting platform—with an internal adoption plan to match
- Maximizing Salesforce CPQ as a quoting platform and customizing it to accelerate pricing approvals and flag upsell opportunities
- Increasing transparency on pricing logic at every step of the process
- Enabling sales teams to apply automatic increases in subscription pricing at the time of renewal
90%
of pricing requests through CPQ resolved in less than 1 day – up from 36% taking over a day before West Monroe was engaged
5
hours of work reduced on each of 90 sales opportunities priced through CPQ
15
hours of work saved each month for the finance team through automation
Project Timeline
2
WEEKS
Pilot requirements, design, and implementation approach
14
WEEKS
Pilot build, iterative implementation, and training
4
WEEKS
Roll out requirements, design, and implementation approach globally
4
WEEKS
Global build, iterative implementation, and training
The Challenge
Morningstar’s sales team handled pricing by hand or in Excel, creating inconsistencies, and providing little companywide visibility into how prices were calculated.
The sales team spent too much time building pricing proposals for clients and lost revenue opportunities because they could not easily access upsell information and discounts were unmonitored. And by the time a quote had been audited, it had already gone to the client, creating a confusing and frustrating customer experience.
Morningstar decided to fix these problems using Salesforce’s CPQ (configure, price, quote) platform as its quoting solution, and tasked West Monroe with helping extract more value out of the tool and driving lasting internal adoption.
An Undeniable Approach
To gain internal credibility that would lead to stronger adoption, West Monroe used a phased implementation approach to create quick wins that swiftly, repeatedly demonstrated the value of the platform. To begin, West Monroe focused on the requirements, design, and implementation for a pilot rollout. This pilot helped Morningstar realize value quickly by first loading the simplest, but most transaction-heavy products into Salesforce CPQ. Once the pilot was deployed, the focus shifted to the global scope, rollout, and training. This phase was iterative, prioritized ongoing training, and incorporated client feedback to ensure adoption.
To clarify Morningstar’s complex pricing structure, the team revamped rate cards on the platform to accommodate different pricing methods, volume discounting, and discounting thresholds.
The team customized additional Salesforce CPQ functionalities that sent notifications to the correct parties for discounting approval, flagged the need for fair market value assessments, and suggested add-on products that might be natural upsells for their customers.
Returns You Can Measure
Quicker approval routing and contract audits almost immediately improved the customer and employee experience, boosting revenue opportunities and productivity.
- Previously, 36% of pricing took over a day to reach reps’ hands. With a simpler, more transparent quoting process, over 90% of CPQ-eligible product pricing requests now take less than a day
- Reduced the time spent on new opportunities priced in CPQ by 5 hours, including pricing, contracting, and gatekeeping
- Morningstar’s sales team can see how complex offerings were bundled and priced, by product line, throughout the selling experience, arming them to capture revenue that could have slipped away in the old system. Now, the team can get more accurate pricing, show available add-ons, and capture additional sales opportunities that might have flown under the radar.
Even better, Morningstar can automatically apply an automatic pricing increases when a subscription renews – meaning the sales team is actively positioned to drive growth with subscribing clients.
New CPQ functionality allowed Morningstar to proactively load its 2020 pricing into the system before the end of 2019. A process that used to be extremely manual, time consuming, and retroactive now positions the entire organization to focus on net-new opportunities immediately in the new year– and on driving an exceptional customer experience.
