Tim Shoemaker, a Senior Principal Product Manager at Epicor, and his team knew that they couldn’t have a unique integration solution for each product.
Epicor has 5 product lines—manufacturing, distribution, automotive, retail, and construction—, in addition to a CPQ product, an ecommerce solution, and a shipping manifest product. Given their wide portfolio of solutions, offering integration products for each would be confusing, hard to manage, expensive, and simply unscalable.
Shoemaker and his team decided instead to invest in a single solution for the entire business—Workato’s Embedded Platform. After investing in it, they decided to take the whitelabel approach and named the solution “Automation Studio”.
Shoemaker shared his team’s journey in taking Automation Studio to market successfully during a recent Fireside Chat at one of our Automate World Tour events. You can read on to learn what they did.
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Catch everything Shoemaker said by watching the full recording of the event.
Landing on a fair, yet profitable, price point
Like determining the price of any product, Shoemaker’s team had to navigate the delicate balance of wanting to earn a solid return from Automation Studio while keeping customers happy with their investment.
After some thoughtful conversations, they landed at pricing Automation Studio by the number of connections used. In addition to being a straightforward, value-driven pricing model, they knew it would keep reps motivated to sell it.
Going live with just a few essential deliverables in place
Epicor’s priority was to launch Automation Studio quickly so that their clients could take advantage of the platform as soon as possible.
To expedite its launch, they didn’t build out and share automation templates, and they only embedded Automation Studio into 2 of their products. And while their focus was on a fast time-to-market, they knew that it didn’t have to come at a cost; Workato’s track record of success, coupled with their clients’ ability to leverage their products independently, made them confident that their small-scale, go-live approach would be a success right from the jump.
To help their clients feel completely comfortable in adopting it, Shoemaker outlined some of the messaging they used:
Raising awareness at their user conference
Since 2005, the team at Epicor has hosted “labs” as part of their annual user conference, which aims to help users learn specific product features and capabilities via hands-on experience.
Given how big of an audience they have at these conferences, they knew that they needed to get Automation Studio out the door in advance and feature it in this year’s lab (which, by the way, was a big reason why Shoemaker’s team pushed Automation Studio to go live as soon as possible).
Through the lab, clients learned how to build an automation that extracted overdue invoices from a fictitious company in one of Epicor’s products and then emailed specific information from those invoices—using a pre-formatted email template—to themselves.
The lab proved to be such a success that they held it on 5 separate occasions, with each event having roughly 50-60 people in attendance. Moreover, they were able to confirm that the vast majority of attendees completed the lab successfully, as they could see the emails that were sent via the Jobs tab in Automation Studio.
Early success and a promising future
Epicor’s decision to go live quickly looks like the right one in hindsight. Within the span of roughly 6 months, thirty one of their sales reps have sold Automation Studio, as have 6 channel partners.
As Epicor continues to take Automation Studio live across its products, and as they continue to invest in efforts that increase awareness and adoption of it, both Epicor and its clients should benefit for a long time to come.
