Penlon Increases Quoting Capacity using XaitCPQ

Operational Improvement Across the Sales Cycle

Today, Penlon has overcome the availability, compatibility, and time challenges they faced. Regional Sales Managers are self-sufficient, creating accurate quotes, and only sellable products and feature combinations. This has increased sales effectiveness and productivity.

“At the end of the day, faster quoting means one thing: More quotes can be produced per employee, without losing quality.”

• Greater Efficiency. “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.”
• Greater Productivity. “Our RSMs only need Internet access; no VPN connection is required to let them access our network. They’ve got full pricing, full configuration. It kind of makes our sales team 24/7 operational, really. They can create a quote anytime, in any place, on any device.”
• Greater Reliability. “This mitigates any technical error on a configuration. We can rest assured that quotes include everything that should be included. So when it goes down into production, they know that this configuration is correct, for that particular region or country’s specific requirements.”

Solution

By removing manual steps, XaitCPQ allows users to confidently build and price tailored solutions without the need to check them. This, in turn, reduces the cost of correcting errors later in the process.

• Configuration. Business rules and expertise guide sales in creating tailored solutions, eliminating errors and rework. 

• Pricing. Business rules, Price books, and currencies govern price calculations, including the manipulation of prices around mark-up, margin, or discounting. 
• Quoting. Business rules, conditions, and branding defines quotes for professional documents in minutes, including features, benefits, specifications and terms. 
• Workflow. Business rules and thresholds automate approval workflows, for example, based on roles, products, and value, to eliminate bottlenecks. 
• Integration. CRM and ERP integration helps teams personalize quotes through buying behavior, and manage financial processes more efficiently. 
• Ease of Use. “We designed it to take them to a country list that only shows their countries. From there, they can then go to opportunities, create the quotes, and then  produce the actual quote.”
• Pipeline Visibility. “The great thing is that whatever the sales team can see in terms of the quote, I can see as well. Rather than trying to share the same spreadsheet, it just makes the support a lot simpler.”
• Adoption Process. “Basically, phase 1 was to replace spreadsheets. So we gathered up all the spreadsheet configurators that we had, and we passed that on to the support team and the deployment teams within XaitCPQ. With little difficulty, they were able to extract that information, look at the compatibility, and start building our first configuration for one of our machines.”
• Training. “I then produced a short video, just going through the screens, to compliment the actual script. We got all the RSMs together via video conferencing, and we went through that onboarding with them.”

Evidence of Efficiency and Productivity

Penlon’s quoting process presented a variety of challenges to both sales and admin teams, as well as management, including errors, duplication of effort, and visibility. With XaitCPQ, they have eliminated these challenges, and have increased both sales effectiveness and productivity.

• Simplified Quoting Process. “RSMs create quotes, and if they fall below a margin threshold that we set in the CPQ system, the system does a lookup. If it’s below margin, it triggers an email alert to the approval team. That way, the approval team can automatically approve it or question it, get on to the RSM, have a little discussion around the price in the deal, find out why it’s below margin, and ask those kinds of questions to the RSMs.”
• Quoting Capacity Increased. “With XaitCPQ, our RSMs only need Internet access; no VPN connection is required to let them access our network. They’ve got full pricing, full configuration. It kind of makes our sales team 24/7 operational, really. They can create a quote anytime, in any place, on any device.”
• Self-Sufficient Productivity. “We were able to empower the RSMs and BDMs to become more self-sufficient, so that they’re not relying on the back office. Penlon is primarily a 9 to 5 business. Our worldwide RSMs work on the sun’s schedule, so rather than having to wait for the next day, they can pretty much cut the quotation and look at pricing information..”
• Accuracy. “We are now able to take an opportunity and put a probability around it. That allows us to take those opportunities where there may be above 75 percent probability, and then push them through the funnel.
• Consistent, Professional Quotes. With greater consistency of presentation can also come enhanced market image, which can often lead to a justification of higher prices with buyers.
• Improved Funnel Management. “Our RSMs could manage the customers more efficiently, putting notes against it. We were able to configure that RSMs could only see their actual regions and customers, so they don’t get confused with the ‘noise’ of other customers. They only see what’s within their regions.”
• Incremental Change. “We’ve ensured that for the RSMs, not only can they run a quotation for a configured machine, they can also add in accessories for it, that are just single items, no configuration, and then start to actually build a full quotation for the customer or the distributor as well.”
• Timely Orders. “In this way, we can make sure that products and their components are ordered in a timely manner, enabling us to meet that requirement. So it’s really helped us achieve an operational improvement across the sales cycle.”
• Competitive Edge. “Moreover, as there are various pricing strategies, we were able to provide better selling price strategies across channels.”

With XaitCPQ, Penlon has improved streamlined their complex quoting process, improved access, and increased margin control. This efficiency has reclaimed significant time for building customer relationships and selling more. 

With the right Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solution, Penlon has increased quoting accuracy and capacity. That’s a good thing considering Penlon continues to expand their product range and portfolio.