Today’s buyers expect a world-class buying experience. That’s why salespeople must be able to provide accurate and tailored quotes in real-time.
CPQ does just that. It helps your team leave lasting impressions on customers and enables upselling and cross-selling opportunities that maximize profit and revenue potential.
Pricing methods include percentage of total, rate-based, and contract pricing.
Focus on the Customer’s Needs
As your customers become more sophisticated, they will no longer purchase one-size-fits-all products. They want products customized to their specific needs and are willing to pay a premium for them. However, this shift toward personalization presents challenges for businesses. The good news is that CPQ solutions can help you to meet these changing customer expectations.
With a CPQ solution, you can streamline sales, providing customers with fast, accurate quotes. This allows you to increase customer satisfaction and retention, which leads to higher revenues. In addition, CPQ provides sales teams with a consistent and intuitive workflow, reducing new hire training time and increasing productivity.
Whether your business has thousands of different products or a complex pricing scheme, CPQ pricing can reduce your sales team’s time on administrative tasks. This allows them to focus more on building relationships with prospects and closing deals.
To ensure that all sales quotes sent to customers are accurate and compliant, you must have a set of rules and policies. For example, you may require manager approval for deals above a specific value or discounts more significant than 20%. The CPQ solution’s rule engine will allow you to add these requirements and automate the entire process, which helps to speed up the quoting process.
Optimize the Sales Process
There are a lot of preconceptions about when to invest in CPQ. Still, it’s not necessarily true that you need a certain number of salespeople or very complex pricing and configurations to see the value of this type of technology. The real question is how much time your team spends generating quotes and whether the process could be streamlined.
A CPQ solution can speed up the entire sales process, reducing turnaround times. It also allows your reps to focus more on the customer and build relationships, which is a surefire way to boost revenue streams.
As a result, your business can grow faster. In addition, a CPQ system reduces the time it takes to get an accurate quote out to a customer. This means that you can generate a quote for each customer in the exact format they require, which increases the likelihood of them giving an emphatic “yes” when it’s time to sign the contract.
CPQ can also simplify your products, making it easier for everyone on your team to understand them. This can open up a new market for your company because it makes your products more accessible to consumers who may otherwise be excluded from the fold due to a lack of product knowledge. Having a comprehensive training program is a must to ensure that your team uses CPQ to its full potential and provides a great customer experience.
Focus on the Financial Impact
In many cases, companies using CPQ need to realize the full financial benefits of the solution. Understanding how much each quote error costs your organization in lost sales and time is essential, and working to reduce those costs before calculating ROI.
To do this, you’ll need to identify the key stakeholders in the quoting process and determine how to implement a new system. It could affect their daily tasks. The most apparent stakeholder group is your sales team. Still, it’s also important to consider other groups, such as finance and accounting, who will ensure that critical data and metrics are captured correctly in the CPQ system.
When you implement a CPQ solution, your sales teams can access all the information they need to create a quote. This means they can spend time coordinating email chains, searching for current product pricing, or waiting on contract approvals. This gives them more time to focus on their core business, leading to a faster and more profitable sales cycle.
In addition, CPQ allows your sales teams to upsell or cross-sell products efficiently during the sale process. This will not only increase win rates but also help improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Finally, CPQ will provide your sales teams with optimal pricing recommendations, eliminating the need for additional workflows or price ‘second guessing’ and improving your profit margins.
Focus on Automation
CPQ can automate the entire quoting process, which can be highly time-consuming. It also removes human errors from the quoting process, such as pricing or configuration mistakes. This can dramatically cut the sales cycle and improve overall customer satisfaction.
The right CPQ solution is an excellent way to streamline sales and increase revenue. It can deliver accurate quotes, enabling up-selling and cross-selling opportunities and a more efficient workflow. It can also help to shorten the sales cycle and provide a competitive advantage.
One of the biggest misconceptions about CPQ is that it’s only needed for high-volume products and complex pricing and configurations. While these are essential factors, CPQ is a powerful tool for all organizations. It can be used for a wide range of products and help simplify and speed up the quoting process.
Conclusion
Even a simple product configuration can require much time and effort to prepare. CPQ can eliminate this problem by using an easy-to-use visual product configurator that allows the salesperson to configure products and change their specifications in minutes.
It can then automatically generate a quote fully configured for each customer’s requirements. In addition, if the salesperson is working on a services project, CPQ can take over from there by making all the bill rates, price books, project templates, and discount tables available in a single tool.
