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B2B sales process automation accelerates your sales process and shortens your sale cycle. Freeing up more time to engage in high-value activities, like prospecting and qualifying leads. And closing more profitable deals.
Imagine this. While you’re juggling spreadsheets, data entry, and errors, your competition is responding faster, and expanding their customer base. It’s frustrating.
The B2B landscape is a battlefield. This blog unlocks your secret weapon for being first to the table, from initial quote to purchase order.
Sales Struggles: Drowning in Admin
Your sales reps are bogged down with repetitive administrative burdens. Instead of prospecting, they are doing data entry. Instead of taking customer meetings, they are correcting quote errors. Instead of issuing purchase orders, your business is busy reconciling pricing inconsistencies that delay order fulfillment.
This leads to a frustrating situation for you and your customers. One that hinders your sales performance and customer satisfaction.
- Manual Effort. Mistakes occur when manually selecting products and services, their features, options, and add-ons and manually calculating pricing.
- Inconsistent Quotes. Different sales reps generate quotes with slightly different variations in configuration and pricing without a centralized source of information.
- Unavailable Products. Sales reps quote unavailable solutions and outdated pricing when looking at outdated spreadsheets.
- Data Entry. Manually processing orders is prone to typos and mistakes that delay payment and impact order fulfillment and delivery timelines.
- Complex Quotes. Manually crafting detailed, complex quotes is slow and tedious, requiring in-depth knowledge and expert reviews.
- Missed Opportunities. Slow quote turnaround times and errors cause delays in closing deals, leading to lost sales opportunities.
Benefits of B2B Sales Automation
A manual quote generation process causes configuration errors that lead to pricing errors that require time to correct. Delays caused by manual processes lead to customer frustration. By the time customers reach delays in order processing, they are dissatisfied with their purchasing experience.
That's an ideal situation for your competition.
Automation builds a bridge between quote and purchase order, ensuring a smooth transition from initial contact to order fulfillment. This translates into a more efficient, accurate, and customer-centric buying experience.
- Faster Quote Generation. Automation eliminates the errors and inconsistencies manual effort causes, and the time it takes to correct. Customers receive fast, accurate, and professional representations of their order.
- Increased Sales Productivity. Automation frees up your sales reps to focus on building relationships and closing new deals. Customers receive fast, personalized quotes that inspire repeat business.
- Faster Order Generation. Automation eliminates errors and inconsistencies caused by data entry, and the time it takes to reconcile. Customers receive fast, accurate purchase orders that keep fulfillment on schedule.
- Enhanced Customer Experience. Automation eliminates the errors, inconsistencies and delays that frustrate customers. Customers experience faster response times and accuracy that builds credibility and trust.
- Shorter Sales Cycle. Automation eliminates the administrative burdens that bog down your sales team. B2B sales cycle optimization frees up time and reduces overhead costs associated with rework and lost opportunities.
Automation Tools
Ready to streamline your sales process and empower your team? Consider Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) software. CPQ acts as a central hub, automating product and service configurations and pricing calculations, for fast, accurate quotes and purchase orders.
- Configure. By guiding sales reps through configuration based on your data and rules, CPQ eliminates errors and rework. Your rules, expertise and B2B sales workflows are baked in. This also flattens the learning curve from day one.
- Price. By automatically calculating costs and pricing based on your data and rules, CPQ eliminates errors and inconsistencies. Including the manipulation of prices around mark-up, margin or discounting, and any approval workflows required.
- Quote. By automating quote generation, or the presentation of the solution, CPQ eliminates data and document compilation. Templates transform complex configurations into professional, on-brand quotes in a matter of minutes.
Advanced Features
CPQ software also offers a wealth of advanced features designed to further optimize your sales process and elevate customer experiences. These features empower integrated data for faster customer insights and purchase orders.
- Integration. CRM integration helps sales teams personalize error-free quotes through buying behavior insights. ERP integration helps businesses manage their sales, quoting, and financial processes more efficiently.
- Self-Service. Be available when and where your buyers choose to engage. CPQ's central hub enforces your rules across your sales ecosystem, including partners and suppliers, for realizing uplift and more accurate forecasting.
- Visibility. Improve your B2B sales pipeline management, track performance, identify selling trends, and monitor partner and suppler involvement. CPQ quickly delivers the big picture on your customer's quoting journey.
Automation with CPQ: Get Started
With CPQ, you leverage the power of automation and improve your B2B sales efficiency and effectiveness.
Here’s a roadmap to get you started:
- Needs Assessment. Look at your sales process, and identify your pain points and goals. What repetitive manual effort is stalling your quotes? According to The Economist, 70% of sales reps say they spend too much time doing data entry.
- Prioritize Your Goals. Your quotes are complex and your sales cycle is lengthy. Align your sales cycle with your business goals. According to Forrester Research, businesses like yours can realize a 20% reduction in sales cycle with CPQ.
- Software Selection. Research CPQ solutions and vendors. Be clear; the more specific you are about your goals, the more specific vendors can be about enabling functionality. Gartner reports business like yours can realize a 15% increase in customer satisfaction.
Empower Your B2B Sales Team
The B2B sales landscape is fiercely competitive. To thrive, you need every advantage at your disposal. For automation, CPQ is a game-changer, boosting productivity, reducing costs, and enhancing customer experiences.
By embracing CPQ software for B2B sales automation, your sales team can focus more time on what they do best - building relationships and closing deals. And that’s a secret weapon for B2B sales victory.
