Why Workfront  + quote-to-cash = Professional Services success

A large professional services business sometimes seems like a relay race. A lead or inquiry comes in. The sales team hands it off to planners. Then they hand batons off to creative, and production, and finance, and...

No, it's not like a relay race. It's like dozens of relay races. Running at once. In straight lines, and intersecting circles, and random zigzags. Sometimes a baton gets dropped, or runners collide, or nobody can find the baton they need. Sometimes a crowd of runners head toward the same finish line when one could've done the job.

Maybe you've tried to get everybody running together, with mixed success. Or maybe you've just accepted the chaos as a cost of doing business in a complex organization. But what if it didn't have to be like this?

And you're off! With an Operational System of Record

If you know Adobe Workfront, you might be thinking "isn't that just for project management?" Indeed, it's the worldwide gold standard for work management platforms. But in the right hands, Workfront is so much more than just a way to track projects. It can be a full, end-to-end Operational System of Record (OSR) across your entire enterprise.

What does that mean? It means all project documents are in one easily accessible place rather than scattered email chains, messaging channels, shared folders, and sticky notes. It means visibility of capacity and progress across both planned and impromptu work. It means direct connections to the big picture of organizational strategy and the nitty-gritty of billing and capacity. 

What makes Workfront the ideal OSR is its almost infinite capacity for integration with other digital platforms. Whether your company is pivoting to Southeast Asian markets or Ryan the video editor is on vacation in Thailand, you can bring it all together in Workfront. You can see it all, and how it all fits together.  

Quote-to-cash: making the baton impossible to drop

A solid OSR is the foundation for the end-to-end suite of processes and activities known as the quote-to-cash (Q2C) lifecycle. Yes, we just threw another acronym at you. But we promise you'll be glad you learned this one, too. Because it's the glide path to turning leads into customers into repeat customers.

As a concept, Q2C is about integrating every step of a piece of business to minimize friction, to make those handoffs smooth and instantaneous. It's also about automating, templatizing, and systematizing activities along the way for a repeatable, sustainable process with a minimum of manual work and risk of human error.

From that first lead to setting a quote, from negotiation to contract, from briefing to production to invoicing, and beyond, Q2C turns it into one coherent flow rather than a rickety chain of atomized processes.

Big talk, we know. So let's break down some specifics of what a Workfront Q2C solution could mean for your organization.

From sales to delivery

Your sales team's fired up: they've landed a great customer. Your delivery team's fired up: soon they'll have a big meaty slab of new work. How can you keep that energy rolling through the sometimes bumpy handover period?

By mapping your key CRM info - the kind of stuff that lives in Salesforce or HubSpot - to the executional frameworks within Workfront. That can dramatically streamline project scoping, briefing, and management, directly tying your saleable items to the executional requirements and process assumptions needed to deliver.

And that, in turn, kicks delivery readiness into high gear by eliminating a lot of the administrative and alignment work in the handover from sales to delivery. Your delivery teams will understand your customers better; your sales teams will understand delivery. They'll all still be raring to go.

From delivery to finance

When a finance platform like NetSuite or Sage Intacct is integrated with Workfront, too, of course, it simplifies key accounting activities like invoicing, revenue management, and revenue recognition. You can automate away countless hours' worth of redundant data entry and swivel-chairing of information.

But it also gives you more accurate P&L management, by linking to billable and non-billable hours logged in Workfront. And you get a clearer line of sight into what has been approved for billing, what is still pending, and what isn't billable, reducing manual intervention in invoice processing and the risk of invoicing errors.

The introduction of a high-level planning layer to Workfront promises to supercharge the value of all this financial info. Better billing, better understanding of ROI, better planning - and all with less work.

From finance back to sales and delivery

So often, project managers and other key stakeholders have limited knowledge of how their projects are actually performing toward the bottom line. It's a strange blind spot in too many companies.

Invoicing and expense activity can be linked back into Workfront so people outside finance can see the transactional value of their work. Delivery teams can accurately represent value delivered, synced with progress against deliverables and key project milestones. No pestering anyone in finance to manually run a report. No need for direct access to the ERP system. It can be right there in Workfront thanks to integration. 

And to top it all off, all that info can flow back into the CRM to inform future sales efforts. Imagine the opportunities your sales team could see in a comprehensive, detailed picture of every client's entire relationship.

Sound unbelievable? To our mind, what's really unbelievable is how much friction, stress, and waste organizations put up with as normal. Q2C through Workfront is the real deal.

Let us show you how it's done

Of course, every organization is different. Some of those examples may sound familiar; others, maybe not. But whatever your particular ambitions and limitations, WNDYR has probably helped address them for other clients. Our Adobe-certified experts have simplified, streamlined, and humanized work for over 200,000 employees, in enterprises at every scale. We'd love to start a conversation about how we can do the same for you. The future of work at your company starts when you contact us.