CPQ streamlines the sales process, reduces errors, and impresses customers with a professional-looking quote. It is an excellent fit for businesses that sell complex products with complicated pricing models. If your organization needs more efficient revenue processes, including slow quoting, siloed product data, and difficult configuration management, then a CPQ solution can help.
Automation
The software’s built-in rules automate pricing and quantity discounts, which gives your sales team more time to focus on building relationships with potential customers. One of the benefits of CPQ software is that it helps you stay ahead of the competition by ensuring that quotes are accurate and delivered promptly. Each day a quote isn’t delivered to a prospect can cost you a sale. CPQ software is based on configure-price-quote systems, which are product configurators that help manufacturing and services companies sell products by accurately configuring them for each customer, creating price quotes, and delivering them to the client. With a CPQ program, you can quickly produce a customized quote based on a prospect’s specifications, have the quote automatically sent to the client, and keep all of the information connected to your internal systems, allowing your sales professionals to easily update a client’s configuration or add new options with the click of a button.
Many people think of CPQ in the context of business-to-business sales. Still, even businesses like known coffee shops use essential CPQ software to allow customers to customize their drinks. Their app allows users to select a type and size of beverage, uses an algorithm to determine the price (usually just adding up the prices of each add-on to the base price of the drink), and provides a full quote. Having this kind of system in your B2B sales can help you deliver on the promises you make to prospects, and it can also help you increase revenue operations by shortening the sales cycle, reducing rogue discounting, and delivering consistent cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
Personalized Quotes
Personalized quotes that can be sent to the customer in near real-time are a huge advantage over competitive offerings. Whether you’re selling configurable products or services, this feature helps create error-free and customized pricing quotes that are digitally available for sales teams. With a customizable product library, reps can build configurations considering various factors. These include bundled items, incompatibility rules, discounts, and more. It’s easy to set up complex options and configurations that can be automated for a highly personalized quote.
When it comes to pricing, CPQ is the way to go. A configurable product management system will help you establish preprogrammed rules that determine the price of a product based on BOM characteristics, production costs, optional features, and more. This eliminates customer conflicts and makes it easy for the sales team to quickly and accurately provide pricing options and discounts. In a service-based business, CPQ software is precious for helping your resources track time spent on quoting projects and creating invoices at project close or specific milestones within the project. It streamlines complicated and often messy quoting processes for professional services organizations, turning them into lean and productive systems that can be scaled. Then, your company can focus on growing its core business, and your team will have more time to close new sales and retain existing clients.
Integrations
In the era of instant gratification, buyers expect fast and accurate quotes. Businesses that can’t meet this expectation risk losing potential revenue and profit. A CPQ system reduces turnaround times by automating and expediting the quoting process. Moreover, it can help increase the productivity of salespeople.
Configure Price Quote software enables you to create personalized quotes for each customer. It also offers a powerful integration platform for connecting other systems and data sources. This helps you streamline the entire sales process and provide customers with a seamless experience. The right CPQ solution should offer a visual configurator that gives customers a clear view of your product’s components and parts. This will help them understand how the different components of a product interact with each other and how changing one aspect affects another. It will also enable you to upsell or cross-sell products and services easily.
Analytics
In addition to helping sales reps create accurate quotes, CPQ software also allows you to monitor your business and identify areas of improvement. By analyzing quote data, you can learn how much of your products are sold in various configurations, which ones are being abandoned during the ordering process, and more. This insight will help you fine-tune your processes to improve sales and customer retention.
A major problem most companies need help with is determining how to price their product offerings. The wrong pricing can lead to lost revenue, as can overly generous discounts that cost the company more than they are worth. With the right CPQ solution, you can use configurable pricing rules and discount structures to ensure you sell your products at an appropriate and profitable price point. Using the CPQ software, you can update your product and service pricing database in real time as custom configurations are created, ensuring your sales team has the most current information. This can help you avoid costly mistakes like over-discounting or promising a customer a specific product configuration that is no longer available. It can also help you avoid slow, cumbersome back-and-forth between sales and marketing teams as they attempt to keep track of the latest changes. With a streamlined, automated, and optimized configured price quote system, you can deliver the best possible customer experience while increasing sales and improving profitability.
