CPQ software automates tasks and processes like product configuration, pricing, and quotes. This software helps businesses reduce costs and increase sales and revenue.
To determine the right CPQ solution for your business, consider the needs of each department. Start by determining what challenges your team faces. Then, identify what solutions your business requires to overcome these challenges.
Streamlined Sales Process:
CPQ software helps to streamline the sales process, enabling reps to deliver quotes faster and more accurately. This is especially critical for companies offering configurable products with various options and pricing rules. CPQ systems automate and optimize the quoting process, increasing sales team efficiency and improving customer satisfaction.
Using guided selling, CPQ software eliminates the need for lengthy training for new reps and reduces the time to first sale. It also allows salespeople to use personalized quote templates that ensure a consistent, professional company message and accurate pricing information. Streamlined quoting and the ability to generate a custom, high-quality, professional-looking document increase salespeople’s confidence and overall performance.
A CPQ system can be used with revenue models, including one-off sales, subscription pricing, and recurring payments. It can help manage the entire sales cycle from initial quote to final invoice, including processing renewals and managing product add-ons. CPQ system can also provide automated quoting for subscriptions, managing discount levels, enforcing contract terms, and ensuring a smooth customer experience.
It can also improve cross-functional cooperation within an organization, with CPQ allowing sales, renewals, legal, product, and finance to seamlessly take part in defining different configurations. This prevents salespeople from offering options that aren’t financially or legally possible and limits the potential for rogue discounts that can derail profits.
Optimized Pricing:
CPQ software ensures that product configurations are valid and the pricing that is quoted to customers is accurate. This helps to protect profit margins by preventing rogue discounting and faulty configurations and providing guardrails that ensure that quotes are not changed after key stakeholders approve them.
For B2B salespeople, this means a quicker turnaround on quotes and more time spent selling. It also helps them to create stronger relationships with their customers.
The best CPQ solutions also provide a way to generate proposals quickly, which speeds up the approval process and allows multiple approvers to view and sign documents remotely. This also helps reduce friction for remote sales teams and buyers who often need help physically attending meetings with their sales representatives.
The best CPQ solutions are flexible and can be used by the entire sales organization to generate quotes and proposals for B2B and B2C clients. They can offer various customization options for product and quote layouts, allowing teams to share their quotes with customers via email or in person. They also offer a way to track the status of each sales quote and contract from submission through eSignature, making them easy for sales managers to manage.
Personalized Customer Experiences:
CPQ software helps businesses meet customers’ expectations by providing personalized buying experiences. This is especially important in business-to-business (B2B) sales and high-value, long-term relationships.
A CPQ solution makes it easy to create and deliver a quote uniquely tailored to each customer’s needs and budget. It also helps reduce the time that salespeople spend creating and delivering quotes. This frees up their time to pursue new opportunities.
Many CPQ solutions feature an extensive product library that enables teams to quickly generate accurate, error-free quotes. The technology can identify the best products or services based on each customer’s unique requirements and price sensitivity.
The best CPQ software efficiently manages complex product configurations and pricing structures. These tools can help salespeople quickly and accurately identify the right products and options for each customer, which improves win rates and increases revenue.
In addition, CPQ allows companies to enforce rules and pricing constraints during the quoting process, ensuring that quotes are always accurate and up-to-date. It also helps salespeople maximize margins by reducing one-time and ongoing discounts. Lastly, it provides visibility into the profitability of each product and service offering so that they can determine which ones to sell more of. This information can be shared with managers, helping to ensure that the company is following its pricing guidelines.
Increased Revenue:
CPQ software configures complex product offerings to match customer requirements precisely. This reduces the risk of errors that result from human mistakes. It also detects your cross-sell and upsell opportunities often overlooked by sales reps. In addition, CPQ software ensures that pricing structures are optimized. This ensures that you offer customers a fair price while maintaining profitability.
Ultimately, CPQ software delivers a world-class customer experience and increases revenue. The technology provides the nimble performance and seamless digital interactions that today’s buyers demand. By combining streamlined sales processes with dynamic pricing and quote generation capabilities, CPQ software helps create the kind of customer loyalty that can’t be replicated with a phone call or email.
Before you start implementing a CPQ solution, determine the needs of each business department. List the pain points that are preventing your team from achieving their goals. With precise business requirements in place and the necessary support from a vendor, CPQ software can deliver the results your company needs to thrive. It can reduce the sales cycle, increase average deal size, and deliver a more personalized customer experience.
