Do your sales teams need help creating quotes for customers? Are they over-discounting products and losing revenue?
The right CPQ system can help. It will allow them to create a quote in minutes using preprogrammed rules that consider the capabilities of your product and any customer add-ons.
Getting Started
CPQ Configurators allow sales reps and customers to build out products on the fly in a 2D or 3D virtual environment, adding features, options, and extras. They can choose colors, patterns, and amounts to customize a product that meets the customer’s needs and budget. They also add pricing and discounts to the mix, determining whether or not to include delivery charges, taxes, and other costs related to the configured product.
A CPQ solution allows businesses to streamline the quoting and purchasing process, from product recommendations to contract generating. The software can also provide data on what customers buy (and what they walk away from) to help with future product development and marketing efforts.
When choosing a CPQ solution, it’s essential to ensure the software has built-in security features, such as profiles and permission sets, that restrict users from seeing or changing CPQ rules. This ensures that only authorized team members can access and use the system, reducing the risk of human error and keeping sensitive company information private.
Moreover, a good CPQ solution will efficiently give users choices by analyzing their configurations and eliminating those that aren’t feasible for the business or wouldn’t fit with the original request. This helps save time and resources on designs that would never be sold and lets sales teams quickly get back to closing deals.
Customization
Customers want more choice and customization in their purchases. That’s why CPQ systems are becoming essential tools for businesses. They help salespeople create personalized, accurate quotes for their customers in a fraction of the time they would take using traditional methods. They also free up salespeople’s time to spend more time interacting with their customers, leading to more satisfied customers and higher sales.
Using a CPQ Configurator, sales reps can configure products and service bundles quickly and easily. The Configurator uses a web-based user interface that displays all the options and combinations available for a particular model and provides images of those configurations. Then, the Configurator generates a quote with all the possibilities and combinations the customer chooses.
For B2B sellers with complex configurable products, a CPQ system can help them avoid order returns and other costly mistakes by automating the entire product configuration, pricing, and quoting process. In addition, a CPQ solution can leverage advanced technology like augmented reality to give customers a realistic, to-scale view of their products before they are shipped so that they know what to expect when it arrives at their home or office.
Ultimately, a CPQ solution helps optimize the entire sales process so everyone wins. Adding another software to the stack shouldn’t be done lightly, but it can improve productivity and streamline the sales process. It can also allow for powerful automation mechanisms that protect profit margins, limit rogue discounting and speed up quoting times.
Pricing
A Configure Price Quote system helps you streamline the sales process so that it scales with your business. This is especially important when you sell a complicated configurable product that requires salespeople to compile every potential option and price, which can only be possible with the right tools.
Good CPQ software efficiently gives customers choices while ensuring that every possible order is valid and profitable for the company. It can accomplish this by applying rules to inputs, eliminating the need for spreadsheets and other manual pricing calculations, and ensuring that quotes are accurate. In addition, it can be set up to collect data on all the options that a customer chooses not to purchase, which can be helpful for future marketing purposes.
CPQ Configurator solutions that incorporate augmented reality, for example, allow customers to see a lifelike rendering of the product they are purchasing as they make their choices, which can be incredibly effective for several different products, such as furniture and vehicles. This functionality is similar to how a coffee app lets users customize their drink and see how the price changes as they add and remove items from their cart.
The CPQ process also saves time for the sales team, allowing them to spend more time with customers while ensuring that each quote is accurate and up-to-date. It can also help reduce costly errors, and if the tool is integrated with your ERP, it will automatically update inventory data.
Integrations
As most modern sales processes have become digitalized, it’s imperative that all systems can communicate with one another. Integrations are vital and are typically done with webhooks, plugins, or low-code platforms like HiveConnect, Microsoft Power Automate, or Dell Boomi. This prevents data re-entry, errors, and inconsistency between different software programs.
CPQ solutions can also integrate with other sales tools, such as CRM, pricing optimization, and contract management, to provide a more streamlined workflow for sales reps and their customers. By allowing sales teams to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time connecting with potential customers, businesses can see an increase in revenue.
When a customer or business wants to change an existing quote, the CPQ solution automatically updates the pricing and product information for that specific instance. This ensures that the customer gets a valid, accurate quote every time.
With more and more products becoming highly configurable, it can be difficult for salespeople to keep track of all the options, relationships between them, and their prices without a CPQ tool. This type of software can speed up the process dramatically and reduce errors by ensuring that all available options are included in each quote. It can also help to find new upsell and cross-sell opportunities that might otherwise be missed.
