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Your competitors are leveraging cutting-edge technology to streamline their operations and provide exceptional customer experiences. Meanwhile you're still using outdated methods and information that is slowing you down.
Read on for how CPQ establishes your competitive advantage, including a powerful mix of revenue-driving features and benefits.
Key Competitive Benefits of CPQ
This is your wake up call. Your customers don’t have the patience to wait days for a quote. They expect instant gratification, just like they get from Amazon. If you’re still relying on manual processes, you’re at a significant disadvantage.
Configure, Price, Quote software has become an essential tool for businesses seeking a competitive edge. By automating the quoting process, and providing valuable insights, CPQ helps streamline operations, improve customer satisfaction, and drive growth.
Here’s how CPQ delivers a competitive advantage for your business:
- Faster Response Times: Fast quotes beat competitors to the table, hold customer attention and expedite their decisions.
- Higher Conversion Rates: Customer are more likely to understand personalized quotes, leading to faster decisions.
- Increased Customer Satisfaction: Customers are more likely to buy when sales reps quickly and confidently share details and options.
- Enhanced Negotiation Power: Having a tailored quote ready to go gives you more leverage at the negotiating table.
- Reduced Lost Opportunities: Customers are more likely to be loyal when delays and errors don't force them to consider the competition.
- Data-driven Insights: Customer preferences and buying behaviors helps sales reps refine offerings and personalize the buying experience.
- Competitive Pricing: By accurately configuring and pricing, and analyzing different pricing scenarios, you deliver optimum deals instead of eroding margins.
- Optimize Deal Size: Sales teams optimize opportunity value with customer-specific upsell and cross-sell recommendations. For example, equipment-as-a service, advanced service contracts and aftermarket items.
Key Manual Quoting Challenges
Manual quoting processes are a significant drag on your business, hindering growth and limiting your ability to compete effectively. It slows down your sales reps, creates extra work, and frustrates your customers.
By automating the quoting process with a CPQ solution, industry-leading manufacturers and service providers overcome these challenges:
- Time-consuming: Manual quotes are labor and time-intensive. They divert your sales team’s focus away from building relationships and closing deals.
- Error-prone: Manual data entry and calculations lead to rogue discounting, errors, and rework. This results in low margins and lost sales.
- Lack of Standardization: Manual processes limit your ability to govern client-facing information. This leads to a fragmented, unprofessional image.
- Limited Visibility: Manual quoting requires information gathering and compilation. This makes it difficult to track sales and identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.
- Overhead Costs: Manual quoting leads to errors which require rework. This diverts experts and sales staff away from projects and customers.
- Scalability Issues: As your business, or product offerings, grow, manual quoting becomes increasingly difficult and inefficient to manage.
Key CPQ Features for a Competitive Advantage
By streamlining your quoting process, CPQ software helps you increase efficiency, reduce costs and deliver consistent customer satisfaction. That is, if you select a CPQ solution that supports your goals.
When selecting a CPQ tool for your business, consider three factors: complexity, ease of use, and scalability.
A well-equipped CPQ software combines all three, putting everything your sales team needs at their fingertips by including:
- Configuration: A robust rules engine automates your business rules. By guiding complex configuration, including options, add-ons and dependencies, you eliminate manual tasks, errors, and expert dependencies.
- Pricing: Automatically calculate dynamic, accurate pricing based on your business rules and real-time data. For example, costs, discounts, locations, multi-currency, and regulations.
- CRM and ERP Integration: Seamless integration bridges the quote to order to contract gap. This ensures data accuracy and consistency across the sales ecosystem.
- Visibility: Real-time tracking and audit trails give sales managers a clear picture of your pipeline as well as your supplier pipelines. So you can quickly identify and address bottlenecks, reduce risk, and improve forecasting. And easily manage renewals and amendments to agreements.
- eCommerce: Customers, partners, and suppliers, can access your offerings at any time. They can accurately generate quotes and place orders based on your business rules, without having to wait for sales. For today’s buyers, this eliminates back-and-forth communications to accelerate decision making.
- Approval Workflows: Automatically routing quotes based on predefined criteria means the right authorized individuals review and approve quickly. For example, by routing by product type, price or regulation thresholds, reduces manual intervention and delays.
- Document Generation: Automating compiling and generating quotes saves time while ensuring on-brand, professional documents. Including quotes, proposals, and contracts.
- Mobile-ready: Anytime, anywhere access provides prompt customer collaboration and faster response times. Without sacrificing the personalized buyer experience.
- Scalability: As your business grows, the right CPQ system will grow with you. Easily incorporating increased product, services, or project complexity, volume, and user numbers, without losing performance.
- User-Friendly: Guided selling through an intuitive, easy-to-use interface with product visualizations improves sales productivity and accuracy. This reduces training time and boosts adoption.
The B2B Buying Process has Changed
The B2B buying process has evolved significantly in recent years, presenting new challenges and opportunities for sales teams. Today’s buyers are more independent, doing their own research, and carefully weighing their options. This limits sales interactions, placing adaptability at the forefront.
Here are just some of the challenges your sales reps face with today’s buyers:
- Increased Buyer Autonomy: Buyers are more informed than ever before, and have a clear idea of what they need before reaching out to sales. This means sales must have a myriad of accurate information locked and loaded.
- Larger Buying Committees: They aren’t working alone anymore. They are working with a team of stakeholders. This means sales reps must be prepared to address the needs of multiple decision-makers.
- Emphasis on Buyer Value: They are increasingly focused on product, service and project value. This means sales needs to be better at articulating the specific benefits, clearly and convincingly.
- Digital Transformation: They use a variety of digital channels to conduct extensive research and interact with sales. This means sales must be comfortable using digital tools and platforms to engage potential buyers.
- Data-driven Approach: They want relevant information and insights backed by data, fast. This means sales must be able to quickly and easily leverage data to personalize their approach and demonstrate value.
Ready for CPQ software?
The quickest way to gain a competitive advantage in today’s fast-paced, buyer-driven landscape, is to shift your mindset. It’s not about you, it’s about them. It’s not about your process or your products, it’s about the value you deliver.
Then implement a CPQ solution that empowers your objectives. For example, deliver accurate, personalized quotes fast to outpace the competition and boost revenue.
In fact, industry research shows:
- CPQ can reduce sales cycle times by 17%. So, sales reps increase productivity and close more deals faster. (Aberdeen Group)
- CPQ can improve quote accuracy by 27%.. So, businesses eliminate errors that introduce risk. (Aberdeen Group)
- CPQ can increase win rates by 18%. So, sales teams close more deals and increase revenue and profit. (Aberdeen Group)
Ready to Unlock Your Competitive Advantage with CPQ?
Then it's time you met XaitCPQ, the powerful and flexible rules and calculation engine.
Proven to reduce quote time by 50% and increase profitability by up to 30%, XaitPorter. simplifies sales to deliver the competitive advantage you crave. What do our customers have to say about XaitCPQ and their competitive advantage?
- “Previously, representatives had to contact the company to quote almost every job. Using XaitCPQ has significantly eased the workload within Fabtek and improved speed of delivery of compelling quotes to buyers.” - Mike Chesnutt, President, Fabtek
- “Having the CPQ system has revolutionized the whole quoting process. It’s allowed us to empower the RSMs to do their own quotations, making them more efficient. There’s no delay. Now that we’ve got XaitCPQ, we’ve got full visibility of quotations and deals that are out there.” - Tony Serratore, Head of IT, Penlon
- “XaitCPQ has enabled us to reduce the time taken to prepare accurate quotes by more than 50%, and virtually eliminate errors on entry of configured products to our ERP system.” - Paul Tilbury, Senior Project Manager, Eurotherm
Take the next step
In today’s fast-paced, hyper-competitive business landscape, having an efficient sales process is critical for success. XaitCPQ software offers a powerful solution to today’s product complexity and independent buyer realities, helping businesses achieve a competitive advantage.
If you’re looking for that competitive advantage, consider implementing CPQ. By harnessing the power of XaitCPQ, you can unlock opportunities, drive growth and outshine your competitors.
