Interview Q's Flashcards
Can you provide a brief overview of your experience running a Deal Desk function in Salesforce.com?
-I was a hybrid deal desk role at 2 startups run by the same CEO
-Used Q2C tool from AppEx processing opportunities with their CPQ quote, contracts, subscriptions, orders, and invoices in SFDC
-At the 2nd company, I started with an extremely manual process each step of the way where it took btw 45-over an hour to process a single CW opportunity doing manual data checks, quote edits, creation of contracts, subscriptions, and invoices
How have you utilized Salesforce to streamline and improve the deal process in your previous role?
With the growing sales and CS teams, DD support increased and it was hard to track requests by Chatter. I prioritized to configure DD Intake using the Case object and enabled the frontline teams on how to submit a request, so that it would help DD better track start to finish and it was reportable for success metrics
Can you share an example of a time when you innovated on automation or processes to improve the efficiency of the deal desk?
-I was tasked by the CEO where I as the SME of Quote to Cash in DD was to be the product owner and project manager for CPQ Phase 1 because I knew all of the areas that had blockers in the process causing it to be slow/low velocity
-I worked with the SFDC dev team on automating the CW workflow in SFDC: CW–>Create Contract–>Create subscriptions–> Contract is activated–> Create Order–>Create future renewal opp with quote lines and existing prices–> Create invoice that also had invoices split into Y1, Y2, Y3 if annual freq on multi year
–Automations deployment decreased DD admin time from 45 to 10-15 min with correct core metrics data
How do you approach serving as a product manager for the sales team’s Quoting Experience in Salesforce?
-Interviews with team reps from each segment (Enterprise, MM, SMB,, and CSMs). Also interview other DD Managers to understand everyone’s workflows in Q2C
-Survey all of the frontlines to understand most requested to least requested to create a product backlog
-Value stream mapping to identify bottlenecks in the process
-Create product roadmap and backlog
-Work with delivery teams to execute Quote features that would be of highest internal customer value
Can you provide a quick example of a complex data analysis you’ve conducted to inform deal-related decisions?
ARR Delta for CU:
-Worked with BI to provide me data from Snowflake ARR data of existing accounts where data contained deltas between Netsuite and SFDC
-Manual disco in SFDC of top 10 to identify trends
-$600k Delta Fix: Worked with BI and IT to fix some of the root causes and confirmed that an upcoming renewal for $600k ARR was not off between the systems once we rectified that BI pulled the wrong SFDC contract data which initially showed a large delta NS<>SFDC
How do you coordinate information flow among different teams, such as Sales, Customer Success, and Finance, to facilitate the deal process?
Facilitate meetings with the Account Owners (AE and CSM), Finance resource who owns approving quote prices/discounts, and Legal that approves T&Cs, redlining negotiations to brainstorm and align together on a quote to present or approve/reject negotiated terms with the customer (for version control)
If using technical resources, can create Slack groups for specific customers with the same resource roles
How familiar are you with SaaS business models, and how do you see that knowledge benefiting you in the context of deal desk operations?
I started my career in SaaS back in 2012 with Salesforce, then Marketo, Jobscience, and Copado where it’s software in the cloud.
The knowledge is helpful in the DD Operations perspective because the role works directly in cloud technology such as Salesforce and other tools either by API or AppEx. When integrated, they all work together when configured in the way the org needs
Can you share a brief example of a challenging situation you faced in a deal desk role and how you approached solving it?
Low adoption of SFDC CPQ
I was responsible for identifying how to configure CPQ that would meet user needs and enable them for success
I interviewed the top performers in sales and CS and executed a survey with similar questions to identify what were top requested features needed
Executed deployment of year segments and discount fields and enabled the frontlines with live training and documentation
Increased CPQ adoption from 10% to 70% in the first month
