Don’t get us wrong, we love SKUs. There is no more straightforward way to manage your products and subscriptions, whether you have them organized within a spreadsheet, CRM system, or ERP platform. When managed properly, configured products, price books and CPQ can be magic for your business.
However, we have seen from our clients that SKUs can get unwieldy when applied to more complex offerings, such as services. Given their complexity, the amount of variables can be staggering. Imagine a simple Implementation Service with the following attributes and selection options:
| Options | |
| Number of Instances | 5 |
| Number of Regions | 4 |
| Types of Resources | 2 |
| Number of Add-ons | 2 |
| SKUs | 80 |
As you can see, even for an overly simplified offering, you need to create and maintain 80 SKUs. What if your implementation has 20 attributes with 10 options each? And then consider how many services you have to support your products, 10, 20, 200? You may need the Drake equation to calculate how many SKUs you need! Even if your CPQ platform has advanced features like Product Option to reduce SKU volume, the burden of administration becomes unwieldy and unsustainable, incredibly fast.
With WorkRails’ Service Sales Platform, you simply create the framework of your Implementation Service package and the associated variables. Our automation technology then makes the logical connections based on selected criteria to support all of the variability without creating large SKU lists. Even better, WorkRails will communicate with your existing products and price book methodology, across all currencies, to help you develop service quotes that align to your quote lines.
Please contact us at info@workrails.com to learn more.
