How CPQ Software Can Streamline Your Sales Processes and Boost Revenue

 

CPQ is an effective tool for enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales team. However, implementing the solution requires significant upfront data collection and a thorough knowledge of using the system effectively.

You must prioritize comprehensive user training and a clear adoption strategy. This will help you leverage CPQ’s full potential.

Streamlined Sales Processes

CPQ software reduces sales process delays and enables your organization to achieve a higher win rate, leading to more revenue. It does this by streamlining the quoting and pricing processes and automating them so your sales team can create accurate quotes on demand. This will make them more competitive and deliver a delightful customer experience that will drive repeat business.

A CPQ tool can often offer customized products or services for specific customers. This can include development, training, service add-ons, and discounts for particular situations. Using rules-based logic, the configurator can automatically configure products and apply pricing rules with preprogrammed approvals to speed up the quoting process. CPQ can also help reduce manual errors and increase the consistency of your products and prices across all markets.

When implementing a CPQ platform, the first step is understanding your current quoting processes and how they could be improved. In the process, involving all stakeholders, from sales teams to finance departments, is vital. This will ensure everyone is on board with the change and can see how it will benefit them. Once this has been done, the next step is to select a vendor that offers a customizable CPQ solution to your company’s needs.

Increased Efficiency

By choosing the best CPQ software, salespeople can focus more on the customer’s needs and close more deals. With the ability to automatically apply discounts based on product rules, loyalty programs, promotions, local taxes, personal values, and more, your team can create quotes quickly and efficiently.

You can eliminate manual steps between systems when your CPQ tool integrates with your CRM and ERP systems. This enables you to automate your quote-to-cash processes, speeding up the cycle and increasing revenue.

A CPQ solution also helps your business manage scale. It prevents pricing errors when multiple people work on a quote in parallel and ensures consistent prices across all customers. This reduces margin erosion and rogue discounting that can affect your bottom line.

In addition, a CPQ solution with a robust rules engine can simplify complex configurable products. Even the most seasoned salespeople can’t commit the entire catalog of options and relationships to memory, but software can offer suggestions they wouldn’t have thought of themselves.

Once the CPQ process is complete, your salesperson can fashion a proposal sent to the customer for review and signature. This allows them to spend more time addressing the customer’s concerns and ensuring that the terms and conditions reflect your business.

Increased Revenue

CPQ software can boost your revenue by allowing you to configure products faster, create accurate sales quotes, and provide customers with a world-class experience to keep them returning. In addition to generating a high ROI, CPQ solutions offer a faster path to sales success than many other technologies, which means that your organization can enjoy the benefits of increased revenue in no time.

Manual quoting tasks consume a significant amount of your sales team’s bandwidth, limiting their ability to grow your business. Automating these processes, CPQ frees up your team’s time to spend on more valuable activities, including prospecting and closing deals with new customers.

Moreover, CPQ software can help you to ensure that your product configurations are optimized for your target market and that the pricing you apply is legally compliant. This allows you to avoid costly errors from misconfigured products or inaccurate discounting.

With instant gratification being among the top preferences of modern consumers, you can’t afford to let your sales cycle extend beyond the point at which you could have secured that potential customer. CPQ can help you shorten the sales cycle by allowing you to generate and send quotes quickly, making it more likely that your sales team will close the deal.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

CPQ software helps to improve the customer experience and increase your sales revenue. It does so by speeding up the quoting process, minimizing errors, and delivering a quality quote quickly. It also provides a mobile interface for sales reps to access information on the go and use it while meeting with clients.

Using a configurable product quoting tool like CPQ also streamlines the process of arriving at a pricing model for your order. It can automatically determine a price based on BOM characteristics, production costs, optional features, etc. This eliminates the need for a manual process that can be subject to human error.

Regarding sales, speed and instant gratification are top priorities. A delay in providing a quote can mean a prospect will decide to switch vendors.

Studies have shown that buyers prefer the vendor who responds to a request for a quote first. CPQ tools are designed to shorten the selling cycle, and studies show that they can reduce the number of quotes sent out by 28% and improve the average size of those quotes. In addition, a CPQ solution offers advanced price optimization and discount management features to help control margin erosion or rogue discounts. It also supports contract integration and eSignature, making completing the entire revenue lifecycle for orders easy.