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CPQ, or Configure-Price-Quote, software is a win-win for your business and your customers. It optimizes your sales process for faster, more accurate and more profitable deals. It personalizes your customer’s buying experience for faster, more efficient decisions that drive more repeat business. And it accelerates your time to quote, lowering overhead costs and reclaiming significant time.
Feeling left behind in the wake of this sales revolution? You’re not alone.
If you’re tired of spreadsheets and rogue sales reps discounting on the fly, of losing prospects because it takes so long to produce a quote, and errors that impact margins, then it’s time you learned more about the benefits.
What is Configure, Price, Quote?
CPQ is a software tool that helps businesses create accurate and customized quotes for products, services, and projects. Imagine you're a manufacturer of customized cabinets. Your customers can choose from a wide variety of wood or laminate, as well as various finish, hardware and size options. Instead of manually configuring the cabinet and price for each custom order, the tool does that for you automatically. Here's how:
- Configure: Select products and configure their options without expert assistance.
- Price: Automatically calculate complex pricing based on configuration.
- Quote: Automatically generate error-free, professional, on-brand sales documents.
By governing pre-programmed business rules, you ensure error-free quotes that automatically take into account crucial factors. For example, optional features, locations, quantities, discounts, currency and revenue types. Businesses such as capital goods and manufacturing, energy and renewables, and business services implement quoting tools because they save time, reduces costs, and delivers fast, efficient sales growth.
What Can CPQ Help You Do?
Picture this: Your sales team is bogged down by spreadsheets. They spend countless hours manually configuring products, calculating prices, and generating documents. Operations and experts spend their time identifying errors which leads to more sales time correcting quotes. The result? Delayed deals, lost opportunities, and a frustrated sales team.
This is where Configure, Price Quote comes in. By automating many of the manual tasks, it empowers your sales team to focus their time on what they do best: building relationships and closing deals. As a business, what's in it for you?
- Guide Offers: Embed expertise in every quote and customer experience to prevent unauthorized offers.
- Govern Pricing: Set pricing limits and rules to prevent unauthorized discounts and underpricing.
- Maintain Margins: Automatically calculate margins and highlight deals that are below minimum thresholds.
- Control Risk: Automatically control regulation nuances with built-in compliance and risk checks.
- Activate Bundling: Establish dynamic or pre-configured bundles to support servitization goals.
- Dynamic Approvals: Automatically route approvals based on roles and conditions.
- Automate Documents: Automatically produce quotes and supporting documents like Bill of Materials (BOM).
- Centralize Data: Integration with CRM and ERP delivers accurate information.
- Deliver Multi-Currency: Deliver quotes in multiple currencies, and handle adjustments with ease.
CPQ Benefits
Are errors and missed opportunities costing you revenue? By automating your complex quoting process, Configure, Price, Quote helps your sales team work smarter, not harder. Say hello to increased efficiency and productivity.
- Beat the Competition to the Table: Automate manual tasks and accelerate turnaround times.
- Pricing Accuracy. Eliminate errors, unauthorized discounts, and underselling to protect profit levels.
- Faster Approvals: By eliminating errors, you rely less on experts and reduce your cost per quote.
- More Profitable Quotes: Maximize deal value with bundles, upsells, and cross-sells.
- Improve Visibility: See the big pipeline picture, unblock deals and see buying trends without data compilation.
- Boost Revenue: Faster, more personalized quotes accelerate decision-making for quicker deal closures.
- Thrive and Grow: Leverage your expert knowledge and flatten the onboarding curve to scale up.
How Does CPQ Do That?
By removing manual, time-consuming process steps, this powerful tool reduces the time it takes to deliver professional, error-free quotes that convert buyers to customers, and transform customers to repeat buyers.
- Configure: Your business rules and expertise guide sales reps in the creation of customer-specific solutions. This eliminates errors, expert reviews, and rework. It also flattens the training and learning curve.
- Price: Your business rules, price books, and currencies govern your price calculations. This can also include the manipulation of those prices around mark-up, margin or discounting, and any approval workflows required.
- Quote: Your business rules and branding define your quotes for professional quotes in minutes. This can include content such as features, benefits, specifications and terms and conditions based.
- Workflow: Your business rules automate your approval workflow, eliminating bottlenecks and delays. This can include approval routing based on roles, products, and value.
- Integration. CRM integration helps sales teams personalize quotes through buying behavior insights. ERP integration helps businesses manage their sales, quoting, and financial processes more efficiently.
- Self-Service. Let your customers choose when to engage. This includes secure partner or customer portals that enforce your business rules for greater buying consistency and speed.
- Visibility. Access quoting activities across your organization, without compiling data and spreadsheets. Track performance, identify selling trends, and monitor partner and supplier involvement.
Is it Time for CPQ?
Is your sales team struggling with any of the following? Then it's time to streamline your quote creation.
- Manual Quoting: Are your sales reps spending hours manually configuring products, calculating prices, and generating quote documents?
- Old Information: Is your sales team relying on outdated spreadsheets and product portfolios that drive errors and unauthorized products?
- Inconsistent Pricing: Are you facing pricing discrepancies and errors that take time to fix and threaten your brand and profit margins?
- Delayed Sales Cycles: Are lengthy processes slowing down your team, frustrating customers, and costing you valuable opportunities?
- Limited Sales Insights: Do you lack visibility into sales performance, supplier opportunities, and data for decisions?
Who Else Benefits From CPQ?
While a quoting solution is a powerful tool for sales teams, it's not just about front-line sales. Several other roles within your organization can leverage the benefits as well, including:- C-Suite: Capture intel they can use to drive strategy and investments.
- Solution Architects: Understand how different products can tie together and define new configuration options.
- Pricing Analysts/Business Analysts. Configure complex models and forecast against the competition.
- Procurement/Legal. Insights into how sales makes pricing decisions to better address disputes and reconciliation issues.
- Marketing/Lead Generation/Sales Enablement. Establish consistent, yet flexible content and on-brand quote presentation.
- IT/CISO/CTO/IT Security. Forecast investments, control costs, minimize disruption, and position for growth.
Choosing the Right CPQ for your Business
In the crowded software space, you have a lot of options. To be successful, it is critical to choose the solution that best fits your business and the products and services you sell.
If you don’t have lots of products and services in your portfolio, or products with lots of options in your catalog, then it's probably not a necessity for you. If you do, however, it’s not a matter of if, but when you will implement.
Based on our experience with large, global businesses, there are several factors to consider:
- Tool Type. Some solutions have a wide range of out-of-the-box functionality and allow for customization. Others require require custom development. Choose a solution that balances your needs based on time to first value, scalability, and total cost of ownership.
- Ease of Use. The goal is to make it easier for sales people to more accurately and quickly quote. Choose a solution that empowers your sales team to hit their targets without sacrificing their autonomy.
- Feature Mix. Most systems provide the basics. Do you want to extend your capabilities? Look for CRM and ERP integration, as well as self-service portals.
- Perspective. As benefits are revealed, projects can quickly grow beyond their original scope. Know specifically what you want and what to look for to inform your decision. Prioritize and set expectations and milestones. Solve today's challenges with plans to scale for growth.
- Vendor. Demonstrations are a powerful way to experience how software can help your business. But it’s easy to get locked into a sequence of demonstrations that fail to address your team’s concerns, as well as a succession of “blockers” that stall your decision-making. Look beyond the demo and don’t be afraid to steer the conversation.
CPQ Business Impact
The traditional sales process, laden with manual tasks and prone to repetitive work and human error, struggles to keep pace with today’s dynamic market and buyer demands. Enter Configure, Price, Quote software, a game-changer for streamlining the sales process, boosting efficiency, and closing more profitable deals faster.
Just how impactful is this software? Consider the industry research:
- 38% reduction in quote errors (Forrester Research)
- 20% reduction in sales cycle (IDC)
- 15% increase in win rates (TechnologyAdvice)
How are XaitCPQ Clients Realizing the Benefits?
“XaitCPQ has reduced our time to quote by up to 50%, this significant improvement has enabled us to spend more time improving the customer experience and increasing customer satisfaction.”
- Mike Chesnutt, President at Fabtek
Equip your Sales Team for Success with CPQ
Time is money, and in the sales world speed and quality is the difference between winning and losing a deal. With each passing minute, your warm buyer becomes colder and colder as your competition begins to circle.
CPQ is a game-changer for any business seeking to streamline their sales process, boost efficiency, and elevate customer experiences. By automating product configuration, ensuring accurate pricing, and generating professional quotes, it empowers your sales team to focus on closing more deals with confidence.
