A Solution Architect's perspective on Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ)

Meet Frits Haas, one of Africa’s leading solution architects with over 25 years of experience in the ICT, ISP and Telecommunications industries. Frits currently enjoys a PreSales and a Customer Success Engineer function at Jurumani Solutions, where he’s been a pivotal role player in the creation and success of potentially one of the most innovative telecom sales tools for Telcos.

We sat down with Frits, and dissected his journey in being part of the team that created Groove Systems.

Before we touch on the Groove journey, tell us about Groove Systems?

In layman's terms, Groove is a sales platform that generates comprehensive proposals, specially designed for large telcos who have enterprise clients with multiple sites, hardware and system requirements. It's a telecommunications proposal builder that utilises machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify multiple solutions for the client, including price, solution engineering, recommendations and more. As a Cherry on top, Groove also serves as a transparent sales analytics tool, for sales managers and channel managers, to track pipelines, performance and gross profits.

How is Groove different from other sales tools?

Multiple factors differentiate Groove from other sales tools, however, the most prominent differentiator is how it emphatically reduces the resources needed to sell solutions. For instance, selling a multi-site solution is a time-consuming process. It takes around 3 - 5 weeks needed for the network architect to design the proposed solution. Groove builds a ring-fenced network diagram in no more than 30 minutes, with a few line items of information and the proposed site’s address. From 5 weeks to less than half an hour - Groove can facilitate a sale. Even more, salespeople, unfortunately, don’t have the in-depth knowledge of network architects, and ultimately fail in supplementing the proposal. Groove’s machine learning and AI provides reasoning and suggestions unique to the client. It’s the entire sales process in one compiled document. Another aspect is the time-consuming process of checking and listing the bill of materials once the proposal has been approved. With Groove, once the proposal has been approved, the bill of materials is automated and sent to suppliers - cutting out human error completely.

How did Groove become what it is today?

Groove is under the Jurumani umbrella and was born for internal use for salespeople within the organisation. Jurumani was doing cutting edge stuff at the time, implementing IoT before it was known as IoT. They were, and still are, partners for Cisco Meraki for Africa. So, as Jurumani grew, and by rolling out Cisco as a managed service, we took on larger clients with complicated systems. Therefore, there was an internal need to build a quote for selling the service - a proposal. At first, it started with old, simple code and has been a project of improvement ever since, until 2019 where we took it to market. I was brought on board to bring it to market, by rolling out the strategy, supply management and maintaining the network - the type of work I've been doing for around 25 years.

Tell us about the process from bringing it to market, to where it is now.

Russell Achterberg, a Jurumani co-founder and brainchild of Groove has been incredible in the development of Groove, constantly challenging our team to grow it into the innovative product it is today. Once the product was ready to bring to market, we were at times a 'car with three wheels’ where we were selling a solution without proof, but at the same time leveraging the feedback we received from pitching and implementing fundamental changes that make it more attractive to the clients who use it now. Once we brought Groove to market, it was a difficult period because of COVID-19. So selling a proof of concept proved difficult, which meant we had to pivot to hosting demos - where I’d sit in virtual meetings showcasing the power of Groove.

Tell us about the AHA moment, the moment you knew you were onto something big.

It’s hard to pin down one specific moment. There was a time where the development team, including myself, felt real joy in what we were doing. The most important thing with work, and this covers all verticals, is the joy of being a part of building a solution. And that’s what Groove has turned out to be, a massive problem solver for salespeople in the telecommunication industry. Amongst us, once we realised the challenge we were facing, it became more meaningful for us and we put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it - willingly. The culture was developing around us as well, where we were all expected to do good work without being told to - we were pushing each other. Every roadblock we encountered and conquered was a testament to our collective teamwork.

What lessons have you learned?

Every single day was a lesson learned, which is also what made working on Groove great for the team and I - continuously learning. At times my perfectionist and control traits were tested because we were pressured to go to the market, to stay ahead of the market. However, learning patience was a big step for me and helped. At the end of the day, good work takes time. Another lesson I learned was from Russell. He once told me “You can have a vision, you can plan your launch, launch it, but there will always be a possibility where you'll have to change and adapt.” That took away a lot of fear but gave us a sense of readiness to adapt to what changes could come ahead. We learned about the power of sprints. With most development teams, time management is crucial. We learned quickly that thirty minutes of solving one problem at a time built the entire product.

When you weren’t working on this colossal Groove project, how did you unwind?

For relaxing, I enjoy spending time with my family horseback riding, usually weekly. I’m an avid adventure sports enthusiast, specifically horseback archery which is quite a challenge I enjoy - outside of the challenges of work. When I find time between all of that, I enjoy gaming strategy gaming like Warcraft and Starcraft. After years of hard work, Frits and his development team have successfully created a powerful proposal building tool that changes the entire landscape of the telecommunications industry from network building to sales and management. We're excited to see what Frits does next and see what the future of Groove has in store.

To find out more about the unlockable potential of Groove, visit Groove.Systems