Modern software solutions offer many benefits for sales and customer relations. CRM systems are now standard for a wide range of businesses, but quoting is catching up too, with significant growth in recent years. However, many businesses still use spreadsheets to configure product options and assess market and customer variables when producing quotes. CPQ sales tools provide an efficient, accurate and fast alternative, offering streamlined quoting and a significant boost for business profitability.
What Does CPQ Software Do?
Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) software is designed to optimise sales performance, particularly with highly configurable products and market variability. In such cases, configuration options may have many interdependencies and it can be difficult to accommodate customer preferences with an accurate offering. This makes pricing more difficult. CPQ provides data-driven performance metrics that help to optimise quotes and boost transaction volumes while still allowing for personalised pricing and discounts.
The Benefits of CPQ Software
CPQ software offers several improvements for sales processes over spreadsheet-based data handling and manual analysis.
Efficiency Gains
With products that are highly customisable, customer selections require an intelligent assessment to retain mutual compatibility. Customer choices can also affect price offerings. And with market factors like competition, location, discount structures and economic conditions, it can be time-consuming for sales staff to generate appropriate proposals or quotes. CPQ software automatically handles and integrates data from a range of sources to produce accurate quotes, leaving staff more time to find and develop new leads, and close deals.
Better Speed and Accuracy
Market and product conditions can change fast, so it is vital to expedite sales cycles. CPQ software’s automated data handling function allows sales reps to produce rapid quotes for customers with the assurance that they are up-to-date and accurate. Quotes can be produced in minutes rather than days and leads followed up quickly.
Improved Customer Matching
Maximising business profitability requires sales teams to match product profiles with suitable customers, or ‘buyer personas’. Complex products can be marketed by different aspects, to best meet the demands of variable client profiles. CPQ software provides better data analysis to configure products for greater sales volumes along with price optimisation.
Furthermore, an improved understanding of customer requirements can identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. CPQ software offers intelligent insights without having to trawl manually through diverse customer and product data sets, and can thus significantly boost transaction numbers.
Greater Transparency
Effective sales can no longer rely on maverick reps. CPQ solutions take the guesswork out of selling, with complex data collection and analytics. This provides transparency in the sales process, helping to identify which strategies, configurations and price points are effective for any given marketplace. CPQ applications offer a strategic view of sales activity, bringing data intelligence into every quote and proposal. They can also identify the performance of individual sales reps, territories, and market sectors, helping to direct allocation of resources.
Overall, through intelligent data analysis and strategic development, CPQ improves sales strategies and processes. What’s more, cloud accessibility means that online CPQ software can be used from any location or device. This leads to faster sales cycles, better use of team resources, increased sales volumes and, ultimately, better profitability.
Find Out More
To find out more about our CPQ software solutions, please call Quintadena today on 0121 669 1111.
