With sales tools like CRM and business intelligence already part of your arsenal, adding a configure, price, quote (CPQ) tool may seem daunting. Fortunately, salesforce’s CPQ simplifies product configuration and pricing complexity to boost sales efficiency.
CPQ automates quoting and creates accurate quotes with little room for error. It also speeds up quoting, which helps shorten sales cycles and improve customer experience.
Sales Process Automation
A CPQ solution can streamline the process of configuring products, pricing them, and generating customer quotes. It can improve efficiency and reduce mistakes. Additionally, it can help companies save money by eliminating over-discounting, which can lead to lost revenue.
Adding another piece of software to your sales team’s tech stack may seem daunting, but with Salesforce CPQ, it’s quick and easy to get up and running. Plus, with Spekit’s intuitive interface, reps can learn and cut training time in half as they work.
The key to successful sales is having the correct information at the fingertips of your salespeople. With Salesforce CPQ, you can automate the configuration and quoting processes to make it easier for your team to generate accurate quotes. It will allow them to provide better customer service and close more deals.
With CPQ, your sales teams can automatically check and correct product configurations to ensure they’re valid. It will help you avoid errors resulting in unhappy customers or even returns. It also helps your team to create quotes faster and with fewer mistakes by ensuring that each quote fits your company’s policies.
With CPQ, your sales reps can also easily set up pricing tiers and discounts to make it easier for customers to buy the products they need. It makes the quoting process more flexible while ensuring that your team is profitable.
Automation of Pricing
Using a CPQ solution, sales reps can create professional proposals and quotes ready to be sent to customers. It helps them close deals faster and saves valuable time navigating complicated configurations and pricing structures that can get lost in translation.
The best way to ensure a successful CPQ implementation is to plan the project carefully. Start by reviewing existing bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and backlogs, and work with your teams to identify critical areas of improvement. Then, prioritize testing and training to ensure broad adoption by your sales team.
One of the most significant benefits of CPQ is that it automates pricing rules, reducing quoting turnaround times and eliminating manual review. It enables your salespeople to focus on what matters most: building relationships with customers.
In addition, CPQ can help your company improve quote-to-order times and streamline bill-of-materials creation by using rules to determine what products and services are needed for each customer. It can save your company money by reducing inventory and shipping costs and helping you maintain margins.
Automation of Configuration
By automating these processes, CPQ helps make it easier for sales reps to configure and price products. It allows them to focus on their customers and build strong relationships. As a result, quote accuracy increases, and the back-and-forth that comes with incorrect pricing and configuration is reduced.
For tech companies with complex product offerings, CPQ supports the entire sales process—from customer-facing quotes to revenue recognition. It supports configurable and nested bundles to manage product complexity, automates rule-based pricing, and delivers insights for improved profitability (e.g., contract pricing and intelligent discounting).
Additionally, a CPQ solution can help reduce backlogs by eliminating duplicate efforts and simplifying the quoting process. It can also help improve quoting-to-order speed by implementing configurable product catalogs, standardized quotes, and approval workflows. It can even create a bill of materials for each configured item to help ensure accurate pricing and avoid over-discounting.
Regardless of your industry or business model, a CPQ program can improve the efficiency of your sales and support teams. Just be sure to implement the solution with best practices in mind. It means focusing on a smooth and fast implementation and providing your sales team with adequate training. Getting references and talking to existing users before making a final decision is also a good idea.
Automation of Order Management
The B2B sales model has evolved to the point where one-size-fits-all is no longer an option for customers. To meet these demands, companies must offer highly specialized and customized products that fit unique customer needs and provide a competitive advantage.
CPQ software automates configuring product combinations, pricing these configurations, and generating quotes for the customer. This software helps to eliminate bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and backlogs by eliminating manual steps and reducing time to delivery. It also provides guardrails to help protect margins, control rogue discounting and ensure consistent pricing across all channels.
In addition, CPQ software allows for a seamless and personalized buying experience. It offers to upsell and cross-sell recommendations to help sales reps optimize deal sizes while providing an easy self-service for customers. It makes the buying experience more delightful for the customer and increases retention rates and recurring revenue.
In today’s fast-paced and highly competitive business environment, a slow and error-prone quote generation process can cause businesses to lose out on potential sales opportunities. CPQ software can dramatically accelerate quoting, improving the customer experience and helping to increase sales win rates. Studies show up to 50% of sales wins go to the vendor that responds first. It is especially true for complex and high-volume configurable products. CPQ software streamlines these processes, increasing accuracy and enabling rapid quoting for a scalable sales team.
