Quickly generating high-quality quotes is a big challenge for most businesses. It’s not just about efficiency – it’s also about quality, margin, and customer experience.
Having worked through configure price quote (CPQ) projects with a number of clients brings the old “Six Million Dollar Man” TV series to mind. Quotes are badly broken. “We can rebuild them. We have the technology. We can make them better than they were. Better, stronger, faster.”
Let’s take a look at three ways that a CPQ solution can make your sales team better, stronger, and faster.
3 Benefits of a CPQ Quoting Automation Solution
1. Better Quotes
Creating a quote often requires a great deal of expertise. Expertise in areas like your company’s products, financials, engineering, grammar, knowing where the current (and correct) template is, and more.
All of these people interacting to create a quote leaves a lot of room for mistakes, and fixing mistakes costs time. Financial mistakes erode margins and makes that one “slip through” result in lost deals.
A CPQ solution enables your reps to deliver accurate quotes every time.
2. Faster Quotes
All of the expertise and institutional knowledge mentioned above not only can hurt quote quality; it can also hurt quote speed.
Sales win rate studies have shown repeatedly that organizations that respond more quickly to requests for quotes tend to win more deals. And organizations that can produce quotes more efficiently free up time for reps to do more selling, their engineers to do more innovation, and their financial departments to do more strategic planning.
The quickest win on most CPQ projects is speed. It’s not unreasonable to expect a 20%-80% savings in the time required to produce a quote. We’ve seen quoting processes that take over a week reduce to just a few hours.
3. Smarter Quotes
Nothing is more frustrating to a customer than an uninformed sales rep. But in many organizations, reps often function as gatekeepers to the behind-the-scenes experts who are required in order to configure a quote for the end customer.
Let’s say a customer talks to a sales rep from one company and is constantly told, “Let me talk to the experts about this and get back to you.” Then, the same customer contacts a rep from another company who says, “Let me ask you some quick questions, so I can get you a quote in a few minutes.” Which rep do you think is going to win that customer’s loyalty?
Sales reps who are experts in what they’re selling don’t just win more deals and more loyalty (repeat deals); they also command higher margins.
A CPQ solution can transform reps from bottlenecks to instant experts by building in key questions, rules, templates and automation.
What’s the ROI of CPQ?
To help organizations better evaluate the return on investment (ROI) for configure price quote (CPQ), we developed a simple Excel calculator.
Here’s a quick glance of what the CPQ ROI calculator does for you:
