According to the Sales Reps Report – 3rd Edition, sales reps spend a mere 34% of their time actually selling whilst 66% (majority) spend time in generating quotes, proposals, and achieving approvals.
Today’s sales reps – who are expected to not only cater to the unique and various customer needs but also close deals that keep revenue flowing – have far more on their plates than their predecessors.
But, what does CPQ mean?
CPQ stands for Configure, Price, and Quote. It’s basically an extension of your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platform.
What does it do?
- It makes your sales process faster, easier, and even more organized.
- It takes the most crucial parts of the sales cycle out of the spreadsheets and calculatedly organizes them into an automated sales tool delivering error-free quotes.
- It helps sales reps sell the right product combinations, with suitable controls, discounting, and automates approvals.
Why are people using Salesforce CPQ?
In order for sales organizations to be successful, they need to work faster, and smarter. A way to do that would be to take a look at lean manufacturing principles – like terminating waste in the production process and implementing it to your sales tactics.
Hosted within the Sales Cloud platform – Salesforce CPQ gives you a direct link with your CRM to make the most impactful sales decisions.
CPQ applications take into account all the operational features, customizations, quantities, and discounts – allowing sales reps to quote prices as quickly as possible, and quite precisely.
GIF Source: CPQ Billing Overview Jumbotron Screen
Think of it giving your sales team easy to use software available on any device because it’s a cloud-based platform.
The SME-level expertise offered by a customized CPQ application could provide for your customers:
- Expect the right questions and deliver a comprehensive needs analysis.
- Understand the opportunities to make the most of the deal size through cross-selling, and upselling.
- Identify the features that set you apart from your competition.
- Determine the foreseeable ROI, thus minimizing discounting.
- Address any questions or objections.
- Record what happened during the sales call.
How am I benefitting from using Salesforce CPQ?
Salesforce CPQ can benefit your sales team in a number of ways –
Offer the sales leaders an unprecedented level control, and visibility. You must have seen teams accidentally sending out unapproved or erroneous pricing or promise products that may not be currently existing. When companies silo data, it becomes practically impossible for teams to get hold of, analyze, and forecast an accurate solution.
CPQ solves this.
It efficiently organizes data and gives the sales team a clear picture of what they can offer customers.
Assist front and back-office teams to work in sync across your business. Avoid the risk of a deal becoming weaker simply because your sales reps can’t configure the right prices for every customers’ needs. CPQ apps can anticipate any given possible scenario and streamline your efforts for the quoting process. Take for example – Salesforce CPQ user Dexter + Chaney showed a 30% higher quote accuracy after adopting.
Launch new business revenue models. Customers these days want flexibility in terms of what they buy, how they buy –, and companies in all industries are responding by introducing new revenue models, like subscriptions. To do so, they need to be adept with the new technology platforms that support them. Spoiler alert – CPQ just does that!
Source – Salesforce CPQ
Businesses don’t necessarily need to use the banner for hyperautomation for this approach – they just have to ensure that there always is a common cross-functional approach to –
- Connecting the business objectives
- Designing for dynamic business capabilities
- Leveraging the extensive array of technologies
- Architecting an iterative nature on consistent and concurrent efforts.
The Bottom Line
Don’t think of CPQ as a sales solution or “a back-office solution,” but consider it as a means for your entire company to streamline bulky data-agnostic sales processes into lean, productive systems.
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