Many businesses need help with pricing complexities and the time it takes to generate sales quotes. CPQ software eliminates human error and delivers accurate, reliable sales quotes that boost customer experience and revenue.
Deployed correctly, CPQ solutions can deliver significant KPI boosts across revenue, sales productivity, and deal velocity metrics. Plus, subjective improvements like happier sales reps and customers.
Configuration Management
Once your team is familiar with the new CPQ tool, it’s time to move on to the next phase: configuration. This involves importing your product and pricing information into the system. This allows for accurate and consistent data, making generating quotes and proposals a breeze. This stage also includes setting up rules and establishing discount structures that align with your organization’s business logic.
Services CPQ software, as outlined in what is CPQ software, aids in streamlining sales processes by automating quote generation and establishing an order management workflow aligned with your business objectives and financial targets. This software allows you to model various aspects, including resourcing, pricing, discounts, and expenses, facilitating the creation of precise estimates by company policies and client requirements.
Manufacturers that utilize CPQ software have seen an average of a 28% shorter quote-to-cash cycle and a 40% decrease in human error. In addition, these companies see a 49% increase in sales productivity and overall revenue. When deployed correctly, CPQ tools make sales reps more productive and enable them to deliver a better customer experience.
However, deploying a CPQ solution can be challenging. Many considerations need to be made, including the size of the business, IT infrastructure, training and integration, and data migration. In addition, it’s essential to consider how the tool will affect your existing sales process. It’s also crucial to map out the benefits you want to achieve, such as reducing quote turnaround times and greater accuracy.
Pricing Management
CPQ software offers your salespeople a range of pricing management features that optimize the profit margin of every quote while increasing customer satisfaction. Unlike the traditional, manual process of configuring products with pricing information manually in spreadsheets and piecing them together to create quotes, CPQ automates the entire quoting and pricing management process, resulting in a significant increase in speed, accuracy, and efficiency.
When implementing CPQ, the first step is identifying your current processes and requirements. Use a simple flowchart to outline what you want to gain from the software (e.g., faster-quoting turnaround times) and work backward to plan how you’ll get there. Make sure that everyone in the team participates in the planning process so that everyone understands the purpose and intended functionality of CPQ.
During the evaluation phase, you need to consider the software’s functionality and how well it will integrate with your other data sources. It would assist if you also weighed up the cost of deployment vs. the benefit of a CPQ solution that will give you the flexibility and scalability to fulfill your particular business requirements, such as branding for proposal templates, dynamic quoting, pricing regulations, and more. This will help you decide whether a configurable price quoting solution is right for you or whether something more advanced would be best.
Quote Management
CPQ software supports your pricing strategies and offers a sophisticated quote management feature that creates and enforces rules. This ensures a consistent pricing approach across teams and selling channels, helping to drive more revenue while reducing operational costs.
The solution can be configured to set one-time, recurring, or contracted pricing options. It can also offer dimensional or formula pricing based on region, customer rating, or quantity. This helps drive more revenue while ensuring that discounts are used appropriately and avoiding over-discounting.
The right CPQ software can help you generate a quote quickly and accurately, whether your product configurations are simple or complex. It can also enable you to automate your quoting process, speeding up the sales cycle and increasing sales efficiency. You can even use the solution to create personalized contracts that include introductory videos and fonts to improve brand consistency.
When choosing the best CPQ software for your business, consider the needs of your current and future customers. Seek solutions that you can incorporate into your current ERP and CRM systems. This helps eliminate data misalignment, re-entering of information into multiple systems, and manual errors. Additionally, it reduces time spent on administrative tasks and allows sales reps to work on other projects while still meeting their quota goals.
Reporting
Salespeople can rapidly generate precise customer quotations using CPQ software, a sophisticated tool. This can be a massive timesaver for organizations that have to deal with complex pricing structures, rules, and product variations. Pricing products manually and piecing quotes from a spreadsheet can be time-consuming and susceptible to human errors.
With a CPQ system, salespeople can spend more time closing deals and creating a great customer experience. This is an essential part of growing and maintaining a company’s business. In addition, it can increase profit and revenue by providing a consistent and reliable quote process.
Conclusion
Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) function is a cloud-based software solution that enables companies to compute prices, configure items, and generate personalized customer quotes. This is done much more efficiently and effectively than manually processing the information from spreadsheets or other systems. Salespeople can save over 60% of their time generating quotes with this software.
Implementing a CPQ system requires an internal project plan that includes goals, stakeholders, timelines, budgets, and other vital details. Doing this will ensure the new technology is successfully implemented and your staff recognizes its benefits. You will also need to train your team on using the CPQ system, so include that in your planning process.