The right CPQ software can keep sales teams happy and productive by eliminating tedious approval processes, complicated pricing/discounting rules, and missed revenue opportunities. Look for a solution that features value-added services like guided selling.
A robust rules engine prevents pricing, bundling, and calculation errors from reaching a quote. Additionally, a low-code solution empowers teams to tailor the system to their workflow without resorting to programmers.
Automated Pricing and Configuration
Today’s buyers are expecting instant gratification and a personalized buying experience. To meet these demands, sales reps must be able to quickly respond to prospects with accurate quotes tailored to their specific needs. This cannot be easy when working with complex products with many options, combinations, and exceptions. CPQ software can automate these processes, resulting in quicker and more accurate quote generation.
In addition, CPQ solutions can also automate pricing optimization, which can save time and eliminate the risk of miscalculation. This helps reduce the required manual work and enables sales teams to provide customers with more accurate pricing. Some advanced CPQ solutions also use AI to help determine the best price for a given product by analyzing a range of factors, including the customer’s purchasing history, current market conditions, and other historical data.
Another significant benefits of CPQ software is that it can automate the quote-to-order process. This helps speed up the sales cycle, enabling your team to close deals faster and provide a better overall customer experience. Additionally, CPQ can ensure that your business has consistent and compliant pricing across all channels, such as direct sales, resellers, and e-commerce. This can help to protect margins and reduce the risk of price erosion.
Automated Quote Review
Typically, multiple people in the organization must review sales quotes before they can be presented to customers. This includes legal, finance, and customer success team members. The problem is that it takes time to review each quote, and the more complex the product or services are, the more potential issues there are. CPQ software can automate this process, eliminating bottlenecks and allowing your team to provide quotes quickly.
Using a CPQ tool that incorporates rules for pricing, configuration, and cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, your team can make accurate recommendations to their customers. This not only increases your win rate but also improves customer retention rates. In addition, it reduces back-and-forth between your sales teams and customers.
Reduced Administrative Tasks
As businesses expand their product offerings to include products as a service, software that manages configurations and pricing intelligence is a must. With CPQ, organizations can reduce manual processes and focus on sales growth instead of dealing with product information and pricing rules.
In addition to streamlining the quoting process, best-in-class CPQ solutions provide organizational agility. With an easy-to-use interface, new team members can get up and running quickly – which helps reduce sales frustration and improve receptivity.
CPQ can also help with the configuration of complex, configurable products. It’s impossible for even a seasoned salesperson to remember the full range of options and relationships between them, so using software for this task can increase visibility and make the quoting process easier and faster.
With the ability to set rules that guide configurations, CPQ can help reduce the number of errors that occur during the quoting process. It can also limit the time needed to generate a quote so that sales representatives can spend more time building relationships and attracting business. Best-in-class CPQ solutions can also enable sales, renewals, and finance teams to all have a role in configuring products. This will ensure that no one is selling configurations that aren’t financially or legally possible, helping to avoid costly mistakes and customer returns.
Increased Sales Efficiency
When salespeople can spend more time focused on their customers, they can increase customer relationships and drive more revenue. CPQ software streamlines administrative tasks, product configuration, and pricing to free up more time. A typical sales rep spends 70% of their time on non-selling activities, such as preparing quotes and completing approval processes.
Unlike previous quoting methods, CPQ software uses set rule parameters and dynamic pricing to create accurate quotes quickly. This minimizes back-and-forth with customers and gives your sales team more opportunities to offer cross-sell and up-sell.
Different departments can also use it to manage the quoting process. For example, finance can use CPQ to ensure discount rates don’t exceed the company’s margin value, while legal can create and apply standard terms and conditions. This ensures the quoting process is consistent and adheres to industry best practices.
Another benefit of CPQ is that it reduces training time for new hires. This allows the organization to scale faster without sacrificing quality and efficiency. Moreover, it decreases the time to revenue for new salespeople by ensuring they can produce accurate quotes immediately. This can help them win more business and grow their career within the company. It also helps to reduce the risk of sending incorrect or uncompetitive quotes that can impact profitability and compliance.
