We’d like to introduce you to SaaS businesses’ new best friend for creating customizations: Zeppa. Zeppa is our name for a new language that makes it easy for you to adapt Subskribe to satisfy your own particular business needs.
Let’s dig into how Zeppa works, how it gives agency to the people who are closest to the actual business, and why Salesforce Apex honestly can’t compete.
Why SaaS businesses need the ability to customize
You already know this, but just to level set: Because selling SaaS is so complicated, every business has specific quoting needs — anything from “in this region, ensure that these products are sold together” to “whenever we sell this product, we need to set the maximum discount to 20%.” The long-tail problem is that every business has fractal needs that they need to customize for.
With billing and accounting, you have specific standards that every business follows, and as long as your software conforms to that standard, you’re good. But when it comes to quoting for SaaS businesses, there is very little standardization. It’s largely the Wild West! There’s almost always something that’s just not supported out-of-the-box by your quoting software.
Enter Zeppa.
What is Zeppa?
Zeppa is a rules-based engine that defines and supports a wide range of actions so you can tailor your business’s quoting process.
In simple terms, as you create customizations, you think through related actions and conditions:
- What’s the customization?
- When does it happen?
- What’s the trigger?
- What are the conditions?
- What are the underlying actions that occur?
Zeppa isn’t exactly plain English, but it is an intuitive and natural language such that a non-engineer can easily create and review rules. Because the syntax is rules based, it’s easy to use it to express your business logic, adopt, consume, understand, and build upon.
How does Zeppa work?
With Zeppa, everything is a rule. Every rule has a condition. And every rule has actions and inverse actions.
When writing quote creation customizations, you choose actions to be invoked when specific conditions are met (or, in the case of inverse actions, when certain conditions are not met).
For example, let's say you want to create a quote customization that provides a 10 percent discount on new orders for accounts located in the U.S. where the charge type is recurring or one time — and you want to limit this discount to five uses.
You use Zeppa prompts to "spell" out the parameters of this order, using natural language to fill in specific details for:
- Rule: Defining what is the rule
- Name of the rule: Distinguishing this particular rule by name
- Condition: Clarifying under what conditions this rule will be in effect
- People: Identifying who the rule will impact
Once you set this rule, these terms will be automatically added to the order so you don’t have to manually add them — and so that Sales doesn’t forget about them.
How does Subskribe Zeppa differ from Salesforce Apex
Salesforce’s approach to customizations is to assume that there are no commonalities across businesses. Their “solution” to this problem is a construct called Apex which you can use to go hog wild to build anything! It’s a glorified Java that provides everything under the sun — which is the problem: as a business user, you will never be able to write Apex code yourself.
Salesforce CPQ was built largely as a manufacturing quoting engine so, for SaaS businesses, so much has to be done in Apex in order to get the SaaS elements down.
Zeppa is everything that Apex is not.
In contrast to Salesforce, Subskribe is purpose-built for SaaS companies. Zeppa is a much stronger and more precise tool for working with the SaaS space, with an explicit eye toward what can and can’t be done in the world of SaaS. Zeppa is your scalpel compared to the blunt hammer that is Apex.
The beauty of Zeppa is that anyone can read it and understand what’s happening. You don’t need to take courses and get certified or hire expensive consultants.
Zeppa is designed so you can do everything you want. The very basis of this language is simplicity and readability, features that govern how people work within Zeppa to create customizations.
The idea of Zeppa is to transfer the power from consultant developers to your business users. Instead of paying Apex developers through the nose to hold you hostage to do customizations, with Zeppa, you can just jump in to write the rules yourself. And it gives agency to business users — the actual people who are close to the business — so they can do what they want instead of relying on, paying for, and managing external developers.
What’s next for Zeppa and order customizations
Many of us are already accustomed to using workflows or rule-based systems. Zeppa builds on this norm to give you the power to create your own customizations to evolve your quoting capabilities. It’s obviously an in-demand feature for SaaS businesses, and yet no other CPQ vendors offer such an intuitive, business-forward tool.
Zeppa is already live in Subskribe, with many of our customers realizing the benefits of easily creating custom rules. In future iterations, we’ll continue to innovate this functionality, leveraging AI LLM to make it even easier to make customizations for your unique business.
Want to see how easy it is to create customizations with Zeppa? Book a meeting to give it a try.
