When sales teams spend less time on administrative tasks, they have more time to focus on connecting with customers. CPQ solutions automate and streamline configure-price-quote processes, which can help to improve sales efficiency and productivity.
Many organizations need help to balance serving customers with managing pricing for products with numerous configurations. Using a CPQ solution with automated pricing mechanisms helps to prevent costly mistakes such as sending out pricing that has yet to be approved or promising product configurations that are no longer available.
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Streamlined Sales Process
If you are a manufacturer with complex products and an inefficient sales process, CPQ configurators can help. These solutions offer several tools that improve both quoting and product data management.
One of the essential tools that a CPQ system provides is a powerful configurator that allows salespeople and customers to identify perfectly optimized configurations from massive product catalogs.
Likewise, CPQ systems automate pricing, freeing up the time needed to input a quote manually. Using a pre-generated product rules library, a CPQ solution can automatically determine pricing structures based on BOM characteristics, production costs, optional features, etc. This information is then layered on top of a granular discount approval workflow that considers preferred customer pricing, variable price books, and more.
This eliminates the manual need to send a quote to finance to approve a budget or negotiate with a customer on price. As a result, the overall sales and quoting process can be faster and more accurate. This helps make salespeople more knowledgeable and confident while ensuring the right people get the correct prices for suitable projects.
Reduced Errors
CPQ solutions streamline the quoting and configuration management processes, eliminating many errors when a rep or customer manually enters the sales process. When errors are corrected, it speeds up the sales process and makes it easier for everyone involved.
A CPQ system uses rules to efficiently give customers choices that make sense for your business while allowing them to modify and add options as desired. This eliminates the possibility of a customer doing something that can’t be easily fixed, or that might break your system. The software can also remove unprofitable configurations and undesirable options for your business, saving you time and money in the long run.
Automating these processes frees up your team’s time to focus on selling instead of administrative tasks.
The CPQ process is a data source that can help your company optimize its product portfolio and pricing strategies over time. It can tell you which configurations are most popular, what features and add-ons are most expensive, and how they compare to other products in your catalog. You can use this information to create better quotes and a more personalized customer experience.
Increased Productivity
CPQ is more than just sales quoting software. It is a complete solution that covers the entire sales process—from product configuration and pricing to guided selling, quotes and proposals, contract management, playbooks, and more. Essentially, CPQ replaces the need for sales teams to use stand-alone solutions for each task.
CPQ efficiently gives customers choices while ensuring that those choices are viable for the company. For example, the product rules programmed into a configurator eliminate the possibility of assembling a non-viable order by preventing the selection of parts that aren’t compatible with each other. The system also ensures the pricing is proper by reducing the number of possible permutations to a manageable level.
Once a quote has been fashioned, the system sends it to the customer through their chosen channel. The sales team can then negotiate with the customer the remaining variables, such as pricing and delivery dates.
Salespeople don’t just use CPQ—it’s also a valuable tool for marketing, legal, customer success, and finance teams as they work to create accurate and streamlined quotes for their customers. This ensures that all stakeholders are kept in the loop on what is being offered to the customer and helps reduce errors, such as over-discounting. These errors can be costly for a business and lead to customer dissatisfaction.
Enhanced Customer Experience
As a result, sales teams can provide customers with dynamically calculated, accurate, and up-to-date pricing, and they can do it promptly. This helps improve the customer experience and boosts sales effectiveness, ultimately driving business growth and profitability.
Before CPQ tools came on the scene, generating quotes was an involved process requiring back-and-forth customer discussions. This is where many errors could occur, whether offering an incorrect product combination or overestimating the cost of a specific configuration. CPQ eliminates these errors and allows for generating a compelling quote, helping sales teams close the deal more quickly.
With a visual CPQ configurator, it becomes much easier for sales reps to identify perfectly optimized configurations from potentially massive product catalogs. CPQ product rules (little bits of logic built into the software) help reduce the number of possible permutations to a manageable level. An excellent visual CPQ solution will also include constraints that ensure a customer cannot place an order that is impossible to produce or exceeds budgeted costs.
Businesses will only be able to survive with a good customer experience, and a CPQ tool can provide an improved customer experience that will make your customers feel valued and help you win more deals. The CPQ tools will also increase the productivity of your sales team and provide more accurate quotes, leaving them more time to focus on developing their relationship with your customer.
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