Background

Monograph is a firm performance management platform for architecture and engineering practices. Firms use Monograph to make quick and confident decisions about budgeting and resources to drive their practices forward.

As Manager of Revenue Operations at Monograph, Matt Woodfin oversees all of the company’s GTM operations. He was looking to implement a robust quoting system for the company, which until recently had relied primarily on customers purchasing directly using a credit card on the website. However, as the business started selling to larger enterprises, they realized quickly that they needed a formal quoting process and a system that could handle complex contracts. “We needed a platform that could scale with us to accommodate more complex deal structures and customer procurement processes,” said Woodfin.

Manual Quoting Couldn’t Scale and Didn’t Reflect Monograph’s Design-forward Customers

With no formal quoting process in place, much of the sales and closing process was time-consuming and manual. While most deals were closed with a customer entering in their credit card information, this process was becoming more cumbersome as the team started selling to larger customers. “As we started moving upstream and encountering more formal procurement processes, we started to become handcuffed as we had to actually get the customer on the phone to make sure that they entered their credit card information,” added Woodfin.

And as the team started to build quotes by hand for more complex deals, it was clear that the output was not reflecting the professionalism and design-forward thinking of Monograph’s customer base. “We are a design-driven firm,” explained Woodfin. “And just visually, our order forms were not up to par.”

Woodfin also described a process that had too many single points of failure. When it came to approvals, much of this logic had to be built in their Salesforce CRM instance, but it wasn’t adaptable. “It created bottlenecks where I was the only Salesforce resource, so if something needed to be changed, it would have to go through me,” he said.

The process of sending a quote out to a prospect also became troublesome, particularly at the close of the month or quarter. Woodfin or Monograph’s Chief of Staff, Evan Loh, would need to generate the order form in Salesforce, manually pull it out and package it in DocuSign, and then send it to the customer. “It was very labor intensive and became a sticking point as we got to the end of a month or quarter,” said Woodfin. “I’m on the East Coast, along with most of our sales team, but Evan is in Vancouver. Coordinating who was sending what and when introduced unnecessary risk and delays to getting orders out for signature.”

A Modern Platform With an Easy, Intuitive UI and the Potential to Scale Quickly

When it came to evaluating CPQ platforms, Woodfin had just come off of a recent implementation with another vendor at a prior company, so he had a clear idea of what he wanted and didn’t want. He knew he needed a platform that would make his life easier, particularly because he didn’t have a huge operations team to lean on — it was just him for the time being. Once he saw Subskribe’s modern interface and how easy it was to manage, he knew he had found just what he needed.

• A visually appealing, easy-to-use interface for sales reps to quickly adopt and feel comfortable building quotes on their own. “I don’t have to teach sales reps how to use it,” explained Woodfin. “Our reps can have full autonomy, while operating within predetermined approval thresholds.”
• Support for advanced deals to make it easier for reps to build contracts that customers want, like multi-year ramps with tiered-up or tiered-down discounts.
• Enterprise-grade capabilities to support the company’s move upmarket.
• Beautifully designed quotes that could be proudly presented to the company’s design-focused customer base.
• Strong integration with an e-sign platform to reduce manual work and facilitate a seamless signing process. “I simply click a button and the quote is packaged up and sent for signature,” said Woodfin. “It’s exactly what I was looking for.”
• A true partnership with a disruptive, fast-moving vendor that could support opportunities to scale, grow, and integrate the tool closely with the product.

“I’ve always had more success working with innovative startups,” Woodfin said. “Having access to the founders, professional services team, and the engineering team throughout the evaluation, implementation, and roll-out process is just something you don’t get with larger vendors in the space.”