7 Reasons to Invest in CPQ
If you’re aiming to improve your sales productivity, one of the first places to look is CPQ (configure, price, quote) software.
Price quoting has historically been a manual process, slow and prone with errors. And as every good salesperson knows, when it comes to sales success, speed is everything.
CPQ streamlines the price quoting process, equipping your sales team to deliver fast, easy, and personalized customer experiences. By centralizing all available pricing and customer data in real time, salespersons can provide detailed, accurate quotes to meet their clients’ needs.
The benefits are numerous, but here are 7 reasons to add CPQ software to your business:
1. Deliver orders that are error-free
Getting new employees up-to-speed with product and service configuration options takes a tremendous amount of sales team training, and it still leaves plenty of room for mistakes.
As a wise woman once said, “Nobody has time for that.”
CPQ software gives your sales team access to a digital catalog to help guide them through all the available product and service configuration options—while automatically eliminating products that are incompatible with a selected option. You get instant recommendations on solutions that are the best fit, filling the knowledge gap about options that team members may not be that familiar with. As a bonus, you’re able to reduce the cost and burden of catalog maintenance.
A well-designed CPQ solution also helps make sure your systems talk to each other. This prevents inaccurate orders from making it to the administration stage, thus causing delay, by catching orders before they can go through. Score another win for customer satisfaction and your credibility.
2. Unlock sales opportunities
CPQ software delivers the right information at the right time, creating big opportunities for your sales team. You can set rules that pull up recommended products and complementary products, leading to added profit potential. Graphical price histories are available, too, so you can gauge how heavily to push a sale based on data from similar deals. You can even link your sales commission systems into CPQ to further inspire your team toward success.
3. Use AI to create customer value
Anyone who’s used virtual assistants such as Siri or Alexa is familiar with AI technology. But how does it apply in B2B? Behind the scenes, AI technology automates tasks, helping you identify who to sell to and what products to offer them. Informed by analytics, sales team members can personalize recommendations based on what prospects are most likely to purchase—increasing stickiness with customers and creating additional revenue opportunities for you.
Over 90% of B2B buyers desire personalized pricing, more than half are willing to pay a higher price for a personalized product.
4. Maximize margins to ensure profitability
Many salespersons rely on gut instinct to determine the price that can win a deal. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long before such guesswork can eat into profit margins. CPQ software makes it clear what the current prices are so that all team members are operating from the latest list—and all while handling the calculations for you. This can be particularly helpful with complex deals involving promotions, customer-specific pricing, and fluctuations in international currency.
If deal approval is needed, managers can get an instant look at base prices and discount levels, and make any necessary chances to maximize margins.
5. Go to market faster
A lot of things factor into a new product launch, and key among them is rollout timing. Getting to the market first is critical. CPQ expedites this process by making it easy to add products to your catalog, including technical, marketing, and pricing data. All of this can be adjusted on the fly and made accessible to your sales team immediately.
Added bonus: there’s no need to memorize massive amounts of product information. Instead, your team has access to expert-informed workflows to help guide every sales conversation. This gives them the chance to start selling right away, while keeping their focus on selling instead of clerical duties and processes.
6. Create professional-looking quotes
Sales decisions are often made based on presentation. However, few salespeople have the time or design layout skills it takes to create properly branded documents.
CPQ provides a comprehensive composition tool to help you maintain brand compliance. You can customize proposal templates specific to the sales deal, add pricing summaries and quote details as desired, and include data updates right as they come in. Team members can even add notes or cover letters that speak to the unique customer relationship.
The result is a proposal that’s accurate, professional, and personalized.
7. Make auditing a breeze
No one looks forward to being audited. It’s time-consuming, stressful, and creates anxiety that something might be discovered to put your organization in jeopardy.
Unfortunately, audits are necessary to every organization.
CPQ makes auditing easy by keeping track of who authorized what pricing decision, and when. You can document all discount requests, attribute approvals to specific individuals, and time-stamp everything—all with the click of a button. Information is stored securely in the cloud, making it easy to share with anyone who’s been granted access.
Through more than 16 years of implementations, our customers have seen these and many other benefits of adopting a CPQ application. To start experiencing similar results with your organization, contact ArganoKeste today.
