Written by -Liz Duggan – January 2023
Does configuring, pricing, and quoting takes your sales team hours instead of minutes? If so, there’s a ripe opportunity to embark on a digital transformation. By simplifying the quoting process, complex solutions selling can become a pleasure instead of a pain, freeing up your sales team to spend more time helping customers and prospects and less time crunching numbers and chasing approvals. The end result? Lower cost of sales and higher revenue.
At Smith, we have first-hand experience helping hundreds of companies level-up their digital efforts. The transformative power of simplifying complex sales processes with Configure Price Quote (CPQ) capabilities has earned CPQ a trusted position in our playbook for helping B2B companies reach that next level of performance. Here are six ways CPQ continues to completely change our clients’ B2B sales game.
- Serious simplification of processes
It’s not uncommon for an organization’s processes to revolve around their own needs rather than their customers’ needs. When looking to simplify processes related to complex sales, configuration, pricing, and quoting, CPQ creates a lens that helps you see the experience through your customer’s eyes and redesign your processes to serve them better.
- Digitalization and automation of low-value tasks
If your organization is like many, despite technical automation, there are still multiple processes and workflows that involve manual work and disconnected systems. CPQ encourages new levels of data connectivity and automation to remove unnecessary tasks for both internal teams and your customers.
- Quote optimization intelligence
CPQ helps you increase each sale’s total value. Strategic pricing and intelligent systems automatically identify upselling and cross-selling opportunities for your sales team to drive more revenue. Equipping sales reps with intelligence, including suggestions for additional products to add to the quote, discounting thresholds and margin health indicators, sets everyone up for more success in their sales endeavors.
- New levels of personalization and customization
Whether you’re serving B2B or B2C customers, their expectations around receiving a personalized experience are increasing exponentially. Customization increases the complexity of sales when done manually. CPQ helps simplify that by providing customers with self-service options that can be customized. CPQ’s intelligent platform uses data to help predict what customers are looking for, making their lives easier and helping them buy faster.
- A sales team enabled to do their best work
Your sales team needs every advantage to get the customer in the door. CPQ helps streamline the sales process, allowing sales reps to work more independently with greater speed and accuracy to produce better, faster quotes for their customers. Collaboration among sales reps also becomes far less cumbersome, as conversations are cataloged centrally instead of in countless collections of email threads.
- Silo-busting integration
Success in today’s digital space requires systems that speak to each other and work well together. Implementing CPQ helps get you to that critical new business baseline where all the systems in your technology stack, such as variant configuration, commerce platform, and partner or distributor self-service tools, are connected and communicating.
