When a customer requests a quote, they expect it to arrive quickly. Any delays can cost you the sale.
When CPQ tools are correctly configured, sales teams can be empowered to deliver accurate quotes more rapidly. The key is to ensure adoption by instituting user training and accountability initiatives.
Automated Pricing
Along with quality and customer service, price is a significant factor that sways prospects into a purchase. CPQ automates pricing to reduce the time it takes to prepare and deliver quotes, accelerating the sales process by days and weeks.
CPQ provides a comprehensive, centralized view of all quote and proposal information so it is available across the organization. This is especially valuable if multiple people are involved in the decision-making process or for remote workers.
Ensure that the system you select can handle your present product catalog and potential growth, and that it will continue to be useful in the future. Depending on your needs, consider how much customization you’ll want, balancing this against the need for a user-friendly interface that is easy to learn and use. Also, consider what your sales management and finance teams need from a CPQ solution. For example, do they need advanced features for coding complex product configurations or approval processes to help control margin erosion or rogue discounting? Do they need a way to track and manage quoting requests?
Automated Configuration
CPQ quote enables sales reps to configure complex product combinations, create a price for that configuration, and generate a quote document for customer delivery. Without a CPQ solution, this process can be labor intensive, often leading to errors in customer quotations.
To optimize team performance, CPQ solutions provide features such as nested bundles, a configurable UI, and pricing rules at the line level (one-time, subscription, usage-based) to offer a personalized purchasing experience for your customers. These systems also eliminate rogue discounting and ensure that discounts align with your company’s pricing policies.
In addition to enhancing sales rep performance, a CPQ solution streamlines the sales process by eliminating manual and error-prone processes like handoffs between teams and departments. This also improves the quality of quotes and ensures that customers get accurate pricing information. The result is a faster and more efficient sales process that delivers better experiences for everyone involved.
Automated Quote Creation
If you’ve ever had to manage an extensive product catalog, you know that pricing can be complicated. It requires a team of people with multiple roles to coordinate. Sales reps hand off customer data to revops, who pass it to finance to figure out pricing and contract terms. Legal then reviews the proposal for compliance and approvals. With all these moving parts, it’s easy to introduce inefficiency and even mistakes.
CPQ solutions streamline your processes by automatically generating quotes based on predefined criteria, such as order volume or product discount rules. This eliminates the need to manually enter information, ensuring that all aspects of the quote are accurate.
A CPQ solution also ensures that all the right collateral is included in a quote document and speeds up buying experiences with eSignature integration. It’s a powerful tool that helps sales teams deliver quotes quickly and accurately, giving them more time to build relationships with customers and landing deals.
Automated Invoicing
When a quote is created, the system can automatically generate an invoice. This saves time for both your team and the customer. It also helps clarify what is included in the pricing and what is not. This makes for a more streamlined process and better customer experience.
A CPQ solution also ensures that quotes are valid, crucial for maintaining a consistent product offering and avoiding margin erosion or rogue discounting. This is accomplished by providing a set of rules that govern how options, configurations, and prices are calculated for each product. Creating approval workflows to notify critical stakeholders when quotes are sent is also possible.
The most effective CPQ solutions are easy to use and can track and report on sales activity in real time. Ideally, these tools will be cloud-based, saving IT departments the burden of time-consuming installations and upgrades. They will also enable your salespeople to use a centralized system to access information from anywhere, including while traveling or from their home office.
Automated Reporting
With a CPQ solution, sales teams use a product catalog to configure products and services. The system automatically calculates their prices in real time when they select configuration options. Pricing calculations are based on predefined rules that determine viable product assemblies, and they consider factors such as raw material costs, discounting policies, supplier discounts, delivery charges, etc. This ensures that every quote is accurate and competitive without needing to check with the engineering department.
The configuration-price-quote system also generates CAD models and a Bill of Materials for each configured product, speeding up the engineering process. It also helps improve sales-to-engineering collaboration. A no-code policy engine allows non-technical users to easily adjust the rules and constraints, reducing the dependency on IT resources.
A fast quote process is critical in a sales cycle where the quote isn’t delivered daily, which means another customer may switch to your competitors. With a CPQ solution, each quote is accurate and complete and can be generated quickly and delivered electronically to the customer. This enables you to be a responsive partner and win more business.
