Aggressive-growth companies have many critical decisions to make as they expand. They must adapt their processes and technology to respond to market conditions and must make strategic choices that will help them gain a competitive advantage. However, high-growth companies often have limited bandwidth to hire experts in every function of their business outside of their core focus. Successful companies understand that gaining capabilities quickly and effectively in the areas that support their core business can help them execute toward their goals.
Kymeta is a fast-growing technology company that develops mobile antennas that provide satellite and cellular connectivity, as well as services and digital tools to satisfy the growing need for global ubiquitous high-bandwidth connectivity.
The company was founded in 2012 and began bringing products to market in 2017. Kymeta purchased Salesforce as an initiative led by the sales team with the intention of developing an overarching sales road map. While the company implemented the platform internally, stakeholders eventually understood they could gain better user adoption and utilize more functionality by working with an experienced external advisor.
Optimizing the Salesforce environment
Kymeta’s relationship with RSM started with projects on a tactical basis—Kymeta contacted RSM when an issue or potential Salesforce project arose. However, the relationship has grown over time with RSM becoming a more comprehensive, trusted Salesforce advisor to the company.
Initially, Kymeta brought RSM in to improve the implementation of and bring best practices to Sales Cloud, but several additional Salesforce cloud products have since been leveraged to enhance analytics, improve efficiency and support growth across the business.
“I always describe our relationship with RSM as what you (as a business leader) always want—that true partner,” said Alisa Garcia, Kymeta senior director of sales operations. “RSM is not a vendor that I have to really manage hard to ensure they are delivering to spec. The RSM team is constantly going above and beyond.”
Product configuration and quote management
Kymeta sells very flexible satellite/cellular terminals with customizations for hundreds of different applications and connectivity plans. As a hardware manufacturer with optional services and connectivity offerings, Kymeta needed a way to track hardware demand forecasts for its factory and supply chain as well as to issue complex quotes. RSM recommended Salesforce CPQ for more powerful sales quoting processes and functionality. Kymeta agreed, leading to the development of a “wizard” format that allows for the capture of all required features in a quoted configuration based on a customer’s needs.
Further, Kymeta initially used the out-of-the-box quote functionality, but required additional terms for complex quotes based on products or configurations, inclusion of technical product information with quotes, and multiple templates for internal business units (military and civilian). To meet those needs, RSM leveraged CPQ to create a variety of quote templates, as well as a process for integration of necessary technical information and the automatic addition of documents based on selected products.
“RSM has been our savior,” said Garcia. “Since we implemented CPQ, we’ve probably changed our product catalog, options, rules, etc., a million times. But they understand the Kymeta environment, and they can speak so helpfully to what we should do and best practices, and work out solutions considering all of the other things we’ve deployed.”
Product life cycle and price book management
Kymeta also understood the need for enhanced product life cycle and price book management. As the company grew, information was kept in disparate systems without change control or history tracking. Frequent product and price changes required manual email approval processes. After meeting with the Kymeta team, RSM brought all the information and processing for products and pricing into Salesforce, creating a flexible platform that can accommodate continuous changes by multiple team members.
Contract generation
Due to its channel-model structure, Kymeta works globally with a multitude of resellers. Contract generation was a time-consuming process for Kymeta, with documents created manually and in numerous formats, without a defined format in place. Kymeta researched contract management software and requested RSM’s assistance with implementing Conga Contracts and Conga Sign. RSM configured the applications within Salesforce, with consistent templates for various types of contracts, defined processes to maintain and create additional templates, and the efficiency of e-signature functionality for improved transaction times.