For more than five years, Sonar has helped Salesforce-focused admins, operations teams, and security professionals make system changes with confidence. But Sonar’s ability to quote and price products wasn’t where it should be, largely due to shortcomings with its first CPQ solution, DealHub. Nue’s robust quoting and pricing capabilities provided a way forward — a win for customers and go-to-market teams alike.

We spoke with Brad Smith, Sonar’s co-founder, president, and chief customer officer, to learn more about how Sonar and Nue were able to implement Nue’s platform ahead of schedule. We also explore the benefits Brad anticipates that Sonar will see in the months and years to come.

Brad Smith: Sonar’s a software application that's purpose-built for the RevOps, IT, Security and Salesforce communities. Our biggest goal is to make sure operations folks and Salesforce-centric administrators and architects have the confidence they need to make changes in their systems. 

We all know collectively how fragile go-to-market technology can be. We want to make sure that you know the impact any change will have on apps and automations. We're now very focused on a deeper security layer aspect that goes into this. We want to make sure that you have a firm understanding of the security aspect of your go-to-market systems.

__________________

Brad Smith: When we were growing and scaling Sonar, we considered a couple of options for quote creation and finance transactions. This was back in the days of SteelBrick [now Salesforce CPQ], but that system’s administrative overhead was too much for us, so we went with DealHub. 

DealHub was more lightweight than SteelBrick, but two pain points emerged quickly. One, there was still a relatively high administrative burden. Our internal ops person had to step in half the time when quotes were being created. It was always for different reasons. Maybe discounting wasn’t working, or the custom terms of service weren't displayed properly on the PDF. And that wasn’t ideal, because the sales reps’ job was to sell our product, not to spend half the day trying to create a quote.

"With DealHub, our internal ops person had to step in half the time when quotes were being created.”

Also, we got some customer feedback that the quotes we gave them weren’t easy to understand. It didn’t look like the contracts they were familiar with, and as a result they were unclear whether what they just signed was contractually binding. 

We started looking for another solution, and we knew a bunch of folks on the Nue team, so we had confidence they could build a phenomenal product. 

__________________

Brad Smith: One of the forcing functions for Sonar is the way our go-to-market motion and pricing is evolving. As I mentioned, we’re focusing a bit more on the security side of things now. As we do so, we’ll be looking to add nuance to our original package-based approach to charging customers, with usage-based pricing options, for example. 

And in light of those plans, we wanted to buy a platform that would do a few things:

One, alleviate some of the pain points we’d experienced with DealHub. Two, be flexible enough that we could make pricing or configuration changes as we needed in the future. We didn’t want to find ourselves shopping for another provider in a year and a half. And then finally, we wanted something we only had to configure once. When we had errors with DealHub, we were often unclear whether they were on the Salesforce side or the DealHub side.

With Nue, configuration is a non-issue. The whole configuration process is within Salesforce, since Nue is a purpose-built application on the Salesforce platform. We can quickly pinpoint where we need to go to configure anything. Even if there’s a tricky deal that we need to tag in our head of internal ops for, he’s so much faster at problem solving. AEs and CSMs now get customer problems solved in no time, versus the hours it took under DealHub. 

“Account Executives and Customer Success Managers now get customer problems solved in no time, versus the hours it took under DealHub.”

__________________

Brad Smith: The feedback I’ve seen from the team is that the Nue UI is very, very intuitive. You don’t feel like you need a master's degree in computer science to go and figure out how to configure your quote. 

And that’s great, because our sellers are really good at selling, but we didn't hire them to be technical experts at configuring quotes. We need to meet them at their knowledge level and their skillset so they can get their job done quickly. In terms of efficiency and speed, creating quotes is now light years faster in Nue because it's intuitive. It's easy for sellers to learn. They don't need a master’s degree in Nue to know how to use the platform and service our customers well.

“You don’t need a master’s degree in Nue to know how to use the platform and service our customers well.”

__________________

Brad Smith: We were able to go live — and do it early — because of the diligence and the strategy that Nue and [implementation partner] Operatus brought to the table. The Nue and Operatus teams looked at our entire subscription catalog and said, “we're not going to let any of these subscriptions slip through the cracks, and we’re not going to harm your revenue or reporting. We're going to make sure that it's one-for-one, working properly as you would expect.” Without that, we might not have gone live early, or at all. 

Nue brought the right experts to the room. They knew how to make those changes for us and educated us through that process as well. And that really makes the difference, because no matter what you’re implementing, there’s always going to be edge cases that require special attention.

“Nue brought the right experts to the room. They knew how to make those changes for us and educated us through that process as well.”

With financial software like Nue, every edge case is a customer. We’ve had customers ask, “Can you prorate this contract to align with my Salesforce contract?,” and that means creating a 17-month contract. When you’re doing your lift-and-shift of data during migration, you have to preserve those edge cases. Nue and Operatus didn’t shy away from them. We spent an extra full session one time talking about that customer with the 17-month contract and making sure we got it carried over.

__________________

Brad Smith: I want to give Nue a high five for how you handle the balancing act of becoming very deep and specialized in your niche without becoming overwhelming. Nue checks all the boxes for us without being too intimidating.

“Nue checks all the boxes for us without being too intimidating.”

It’s so user friendly that our reps can create quotes without needing to ping anyone for help. We have virtually no more support tickets tied to quote creation. Instead, a sales rep using Nue can intuit, “oh, this is where I pull this line item down. This is where I create this discount, and this is how I submit it and share this with our customer.”

So that's a big kudos to you all for being able to create a platform that's intuitive, that's also deep in its technical aspects, checks all of our boxes, but also helps us run our business faster.

____

Interested in learning more about Nue or Sonar? Read more about Sonar’s capabilities or discover Nue’s advanced quoting and pricing tools.