How Cprime’s licensing team reduced ticket backlog by 50% (and increased revenue by 61%!) with automation

“How Cprime’s licensing team reduced ticket backlog by 50% (and increased revenue 61%!) with automation” Find out on this episode of Appfire Presents: The BEST Work Management Show by Appfire. Monte Montoya joins Emily Peet-Lukes to discuss how Cprime automated scripting across multiple systems to unlock efficiency, boost productivity, and increase profitability. To learn more about this fascinating use case and how Cprime turned hours of work into minutes, click here.

About the guest

Monte Montoya is an accomplished product management and engineering professional with a customer-centric approach to product development. With extensive experience building successful partnerships and delivering innovative products, Monte has a proven track record of driving growth by eliminating pain points, streamlining processes, and leading high-performance teams. His expertise in product management has resulted in growing B2B and B2C companies from zero to multi-million dollar success stories. Monte’s passion for creating value-driven solutions and his excellent communication skills make him a valuable asset in driving innovation, building effective teams, and fostering successful partnerships.

About the show

The BEST Work Management Show by Appfire features smart leaders sharing their secrets for optimizing business processes and increasing productivity. Get the goods on how they handle everything from setting up workflows to automating processes. Every episode is 10 minutes or less, packed with insights you can use right away to supercharge your team’s productivity.

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For your convenience, here is the transcript of this episode:

How Cprime’s licensing team reduced ticket backlog by 50% (and increased revenue 61%!) with automation

Emily:  I’m here today with Monte Montoya. We’ll be talking about Cprime’s licensing team reducing ticket backlog by 50%. Stick around for 10 minutes of expert advice.

Hey, Monte. Thanks for joining us today.

Monte:  Thanks for having me, Emily. 

Emily:  It’s great to have you. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Monte:  Sure. I’m glad to be here. A little bit about me… I’m currently the VP of partnerships at Cprime. If you don’t know about Cprime, we’re one of the largest platinum solution partners in the Atlassian ecosystem. I’m excited to be here. We’ll be discussing a product today, and at that time, I was serving as the VP of product, and our customer and use case was our internal licensing team.

Emily:  That’s awesome. Tell us, what big problem did the licensing team have and why were they reaching out to you for help?

Monte:  If I take it back to 2019, it was all around our license quoting process. It was a highly manual effort. It consisted of five different tools, all of them were being used to create, quote, and close a deal. It was just very cumbersome. The licensing team, in order to keep up with growing demand, manage renewals, create new business, they were struggling. It was a lot of manual duplicate repetitive work. 

So, they reached out to my team at the time, who was using Power Scripts. We had a bunch of Power Scripts script automation engineers. They looked to us to leverage a solution for them, and it ended up working out really well.

Emily:  That’s great. What was the point where you realized that you needed to automate your processes, and what challenges were you facing at that time?

Monte:  To be specific, there were three areas; people, process, and the technology piece. 

On the people side, the big issue that the licensing team had at the time was they were very reactive. It was a very tactic-oriented state of work. We were asking them for requirements, and what they came back to us with was they were spending a lot of their time, almost 40% of their time, working on creating quotes on the front end of the process. That was kind of the first initial checkbox, we have to find a fix to that.

Secondly, we started to hone in on the process. What we found was that it was really manual and time consuming. To be specific, that quoting process could take anywhere from an hour per deal, and if it was more complex, up to four hours. You start talking about large deals, the hours start racking up pretty quickly. That started to hint towards how do we automate some of this stuff, how do we integrate it all together.

The final bit was technology. There were four to five different tools at the time being used. Logging in, logging out, context switching, and none of it talking to each other. What we found was there was this disconnected tooling and duplicate effort in multiple tools, and that was leading to a lot of the hours racking up. We needed to somehow take all five of those and either make them work together or simplify some of that stuff, as we simplified the process and the people effort around it.

Emily:  That makes sense. A lot of time, a lot tools, nothing talking to each other, it’s taking up a lot of energy. As the team was realizing their bottlenecks, was it difficult to get buy-in from the top to create a business case for this?

Monte:  No. I think one of the realities became it’s all about revenue and revenue growth. We saw that if we could increase that throughput, that’s the direct result of what we would get from a business case perspective. If we could improve it, then we knew what the value meant to us in the form of dollars and growth. 

There were three areas that we looked at. We had to free up time, and that meant we have to reduce tactical work, we have to stop manual time spent creating quotes and opportunities. Instead, just free up that time so that the team could basically spend more of their time on the strategic aspects of the business, like revenue growth, upselling, proactive renewals, things of that nature.

Then we started to look at leveraging automation and integration, using Power Scripts to automate as much of that process as we could. What we found was it stopped them from having to do it in Excel and spreadsheets and all of that fun stuff. It bought a lot of our team time back, so then they could just really focus on revenue procurement. That was where we started to hit home. 

The final bit that was aspirational at the time that we knew we needed to get to was reporting. Obviously, if we could get better data, it would drive better decision making. Things like visibility into DC customers, or margins for the 500 user license tier, those were all things that we could get, that took a long time to get, and we thought that was a quick solve with the Power Apps family, and Power Scrips specifically.

Emily:  Wow. I hear you. Tell us, what have you and the team implemented to achieve these amazing goals?

Monte:  Ingrid was a huge advocate, and Tim just got a ton of accolades from the solution that he implemented. It started with implementing an automated license management solution, and what that meant was helping the licensing team achieve common repetitive workflows across quote generation, quote renewal, upgrade, downgrade, upsell, cross-sell, all these activities related to license management. 

Then it was integrating it together and translating all of that data to process it across Atlassian system, Salesforce, and our internal platform Jira Service Desk, and that was really bringing all of that together. It needed an automated solution and Power Scripts really was that workflow toolbox that helped us set this in motion. What we found were there were probably specific things like now we can see all licensing data blended together with all of our services opportunities in Salesforce. 

We were able to start thinking about tracking proactively end dates and renewals in more of a strategic fashion, rather than being reactive, so the pendulum started to shift, focusing on more of that upside and growth. Then integration, being able to just talk to these different systems, being able to leverage Power Scripts to pull in fields and subfields, push data left and right across the systems, you do it once and it’s part of your workflow. 

We started to find that it was all about the workflow. That workflow now brought together customer, sales, procurement, and all the bells and whistles we saw were automating smart notifications and automated actions that prompt users. I think it’s still working really well, it’s still a big driver in contributing to our growth, but actively getting enhanced.

Emily:  That’s awesome. All of the things you needed, plus some bells and whistles. That sounds really great. 

Now that you’ve implemented this, what results are you seeing in this solution?

Monte:  Revenue. It was all about revenue and how we increase throughput and get moving much faster to gain ground. Otherwise, you would need an army of people to satisfy some of these requests. It was really an increase in revenue.

We looked at the numbers, and it was a 61% increase in revenue after that first year of installing that solution, and it continues to drive exponential growth for us. This problem came to us in 2019, now we’re several years in. It’s been a sole contributor to 50%+ growth year over year, if we average it all out and smooth it. 

The second is just reducing WIP. We all have too much of it. Everybody is on meetings, everybody has a ton of work to be doing. Really giving us the ability to streamline ticket backlogs, chop down all the tickets, automate the stuff that we could automate. What we saw when we looked at the numbers was a 55% increase in productivity by decreasing WIP. All of that wouldn’t have been possible without leveraging script automation and integration to help us just cut out the noise, push it all back, and just get a standardized workflow where we could run fast.

Finally, just efficiency. The workflow because of automation and integration just boosted the efficiency of that team. We went from taking an hour per quote, as I mentioned earlier, to now four to five minutes. That’s significant. It was upper 90^th percentiles of increases in throughput from just a process efficiency. Those same people, without having to scale their team exponentially, can now take on way more of those use cases and licensing requests, and do it at scale. 

Can’t tout the benefits enough. There’s just so much value that it has provided to our team. It’s one of the reasons I consistently say that we’re leading in the space.

Emily:  Yes. Wow. I have to say, those numbers are so impressive. This use case you’re sharing with us is just fascinating. Can you break down some of the key points for us from this great conversation?

Monte:  Sure. In summary, in order to unlock more efficiency, you have to reduce WIP, stop doing a bunch of manual busywork. In order to boost productivity, you have to use automation. You have to leverage automation to stop doing that repetitive work, and then it frees you up to focus on all that strategic work that you should be doing. 

Finally, just how does all this ensure that you’re getting business results? I think that’s really where it has to move the needle. You have to be able to tie it back to ROI and profitability. Every use case we see is leveraging some form of automation or integration to let them go faster. This was a great use case for us.

Emily:  Fantastic. Thanks again for joining us today, Monte. This has been Appfire Presents The Best Work Management Show by Appfire. We’ll see you again next time.

Last updated: 2023-06-05