Letting the Deal define the Bundle
In 2020, one would think that ERP or BSS systems would provide the flexibility required to help win deals. This should be especially true for the marketing and sales functions who need to tailor pricing and contract terms needed to win deals, right?
The unfortunate reality is that deals can be lost or impacted based on the rigidity of entrenched product catalogs and BSS systems and their inability to handle exceptions, unique bundles and/or unique pricing.
Frustrations continue as marketing and sales teams cannot optimize rigid legacy billing platforms to support new product development, or unrestricted terms for complex deals.
Not only are there limitations of WHAT aspects of the deal can be negotiated, and HOW tailored bundles can be offered, but also the TIME it takes to put together a new offering is simply too slow in an internet economy.
In effect, the sales function is forced into letting the bundle define the deal…instead of the more logical and natural other way around.
Legacy Constraints Continue
BSS challenges are compounded in high tech industries such as telecommunications who continue to run their business on billing systems developed in the 80’s. Although there may be new front end or portal access developed, these legacy systems are compromised with a patchwork quilt of add-ons and work arounds resulting in spaghetti architecture. This of course impacts the ability to introduce new features/functionality based on fear of upsetting a delicate system balance and/or a fear of transformation projects.
This environment forces sales and marketing functions into taking a traditional “waterfall” approach to new product/service development. This accepted cycle can take months, requiring businesses to slowly construct, analyze, and test products and services before their deployment.
Take an agile approach to product/service development
So, must the sales and marketing functions continue to accept these constraints? Based on Kansys conducting over 80 BSS conversions, with eleven different billing systems, we say absolutely not!
The Kansys Edge enterprise billing software takes a diametrically opposed approach to creating new products, services and bundles that starts in our our offering catalog. The catalog is generated from scratch as opposed to being forced into particular file, record or format requirements. Those offerings can be the basis for “building blocks” that allow a carrier/enterprise customer to create new offerings literally in minutes (not days, weeks or months) but minutes.
The catalog also provides the ability to support more efficient campaign management as well. Things like loyalty programs, customer notifications/interactions, adding discounts onto another discount, etc. can all be done in a small fraction of the time when compared to traditional/entrenched BSS systems.
Furthermore, this architecture can quickly incorporate contractual terms/requirements and assign them to a customer account even when they have sophisticated parent-child account hierarchies across different countries and currencies.
Extending deal flexibility across your sales channels
Corporate organizations and franchisors with robust channel management strategies face another challenge: complex financial settlements that many times are connected to currency exchange, commitment discounts, and other contractually agreed-upon terms.
Yet again, legacy billing systems are limited by the technical foundation and makeup of their software, translating into expensive and time consuming customization of their BSS or ERP systems to address complicated models such as these.
The Kansys Edge allows a company to create deals from scratch while concurrently allowing sales channels to continue using existing/preferred business processes. This flexibility is derived via system “pipelines” which provide low cost integration to other applications without having to change data sources or data destination formats.
When dealing with our metadata architecture software, the billing possibilities for your business are endless. The bottom line, corporations with complex B2B relationships need to unleash their marketing and sales functions so they start letting the deal define the bundle.
If this sounds too good to be true, reach out and let us show you how The Kansys Edge is the most flexible and powerful billing system in the market.
