One of the biggest challenges that every seller eventually faces is generating accurate quotes for complex products in a diverse range of scenarios. This is particularly the case with elaborate, high-value products and services in industries such as software, IT, FinTech, Manufacturing, Telecoms, and Financial Services. Products and services in these industries often require advanced product knowledge and multiple product items in order to produce an accurate quote. This can be rather time-consuming if generated manually. It is for this reason that businesses are beginning to rely more and more on Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solutions.
Thus, in order to keep pace with the ever-increasing complexity in pricing for products and services, companies have begun adopting CPQ, a type of configuration software capable of delivering the highest level of accuracy in quoting. By implementing pre-set rules to pricing and discounts, CPQ software helps sales teams significantly increase their productivity and boost overall revenue. However, oftentimes, most CPQ applications are complex and tedious to use.
Majority of the CPQ applications are designed to be connected with a separate CRM or ERP, resulting in a large user experience downside of making it difficult to use. CPQ software helps sales teams manage the complexity of the products and services, pricing, bundling and market rules, but it doesn’t help them with other important aspects of the sale. In most setups, there isn’t any content, the CPQ tools are not mobile-friendly or designed for customer facing situations, and they don’t work on all types of devices. It would be difficult for a salesperson to be productive if the CPQ tool isn’t designed to meet their needs.
Fortunately, Salesforce CPQ has solved this dilemma by natively integrating their CPQ software with the core Salesforce CRM. Salesforce CPQ provides sales teams user-friendly, easy-to-use software, and it can be accessed on virtually any device, due to it being a cloud-based platform. Companies that rely on CPQ are growing their profit margins at a 57% greater rate year-over-year in comparison to non-adopters of the technology. Below are some of the ways in which Salesforce CPQ boosts revenue and can transform the way you sell.
Sales Teams Spend More Time Selling
If your organisation is already using Salesforce CRM to monitor leads and customer relationships, adopting the native Salesforce CPQ software ought to be a no-brainer for your sales team. They won’t need to learn an entirely new software program and this will, in turn, increase the time they can allocate to closing more deals and the accuracy of the quotes they provide and the proposals they’re generating, since they’ll be able to handle an opportunity from start to finish, all within the same software.
You could even hire a Salesforce consulting firm to assist you in rolling out a bespoke Salesforce CPQ implementation to meet your needs, in order to get your sales team acclimated to the system in the soonest time possible.
Shorten Sales Cycles
When your salespeople are taking hours just to configure products and generate quotes for prospects, they tend to lose their momentum and sense of urgency that is crucial to closing new deals. Your sales team can make use of Salesforce CPQ to configure products and services based on established business rules and logic, and then store all of these configurations in one location, where they can be updated on an as-needed basis.
Sales professionals can enjoy the ability to generate customer-centric quotes easily and on-demand, secure in the knowledge that the information they’re providing is accurate and up-to-date. With Salesforce CPQ, quotes are generated and sent within mere minutes, rather than over the course of several days, considerably reducing the time required from the initial opportunity to a closed sale.
The quoting features you’ll find in Salesforce CPQ also lend themselves to guided selling capabilities. Sales professionals can select the correct products and services for each prospect or customer, and easily identify potential cross-selling and upselling opportunities with the products and services configuration features without spending a considerable amount of time sifting through data.
Reduce Your Operational Costs
To augment your overall revenue, your operational costs will also need to be decreased. When you use Salesforce CPQ in conjunction with the Salesforce CRM, it can dramatically improve your team’s operational efficiency and, in turn, your cost savings. By operating within one fully and natively integrated platform (i.e. Salesforce), you can enhance your organisation’s internal communications while improving your sales team’s efficiency and effectiveness while they’re selling.
Transparency Into Your Sales Process
You’ll be able to use the insights provided by Salesforce CPQ to see firsthand what’s effective for your sales team, and which areas need improvement. Salesforce CPQ gives you a strategic view of your sales activities, adding more detailed business intelligence in every quote generated, and with every product or service recommendation.
You can also access custom revenue reports and dashboards within Salesforce CPQ, which enable you to easily identify top-spending customers, the most profitable customers, and the most popular pricing models in specific segments.
Quote-to-Cash Anywhere, Anytime, and from Any Device
A substantial part of maintaining success in sales is to ensure that both your salespeople and prospects can go through the sales cycle in the field or on-the-go, and from virtually any device on hand. A cloud-based CPQ such as Salesforce CPQ provides greater visibility across the entire sales process by being accessible from all devices, anytime, and anywhere.
Your sales reps need to be ready to meet the prospect wherever they are, to build a customer-centric brand; a brand that is generally more profitable in its respective market.
Salesforce CPQ isn’t just a sales solution or a “back office solution,” but a platform for the entire company to streamline bulky sales processes into lean, productive systems across the organisation. When you add Salesforce CPQ to your existing Salesforce services, it defines sales as a process and helps your teams focus on maximising their time and resources, optimising your overall sales process to be efficient and lean.
