Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) software is one of the many useful tools offered by the software giant Salesforce. But what exactly is this software, and how can it help your business prosper? Here’s what you need to know.
What is CPQ Software?
Salesforce CPQ is a sales tool within the Salesforce platform that businesses can use to simplify the quote generation process for orders.
Without the help of tools like CPQ software, delivering error-free quotes can be very complicated and time-consuming. It may require extensive spreadsheets and emails that are frustrating for the sales team. In addition, the more complex and customizable a company’s services are, the more difficult it becomes to offer accurate estimates.
This software is an automated solution to address that problem. By using CPQ software, you can take the guesswork and human errors out of generating quotes for clients.
Using CPQ Software
As the name suggests, there are three main components of CPQ software: configuration, pricing, and quoting. Let’s break those down further.
Configuration
Within the realm of CPQ software, the configuration is all about tailoring your products or services to each client’s needs.
Some businesses only offer products or services with no variation whatsoever, but this is becoming increasingly rare. Instead, many businesses are capitalizing on the trend of mass customization and offering their clients the ability to tailor products/services to their specific needs. “One size fits all” products often don’t cut it these days.
The issue with offering many different options to customers is that the more extensive your business’ offerings are, the more complicated it is to come up with an accurate quote for each client. In addition, these individual customizations make things more complicated for your sellers.
CPQ software can help with this problem. The tools contained within the CPQ software aid in configuring custom products that perfectly match your clients’ needs. The software can also find opportunities for cross-selling and upselling that your sales reps might otherwise not notice.
Offloading much of the configuration work to CPQ software cuts down on human error and makes the process flow more smoothly.
Price
The second letter in “CPQ” stands for price.
Determining prices shouldn’t be difficult if you only offer limited configuration to your product or service offerings. However, as mentioned previously, many companies have multiple configuration options. Therefore, pricing gets increasingly complicated as you offer greater variability in your product configuration.
It’s possible (and even likely) that when you offer many configuration options, you’ll frequently have to estimate an accurate price for specific configurations your business has never sold before.
Instead of having your sales team manually wade through all the relevant data to craft a price, eventually, you can let CPQ software do that work for you.
When sales teams draft their prices without the help of software, they may lose customers by arriving at less than ideal estimates or taking too long to arrive at those estimates. That shouldn’t be an issue with CPQ software.
Using CPQ software also allows your sales team to use artificial intelligence. The software can identify buying patterns and combine that information with market research to estimate what customers are willing to pay for a product/service like yours. It’s a means of maintaining profitability while reaching a reasonable, customized price for each customer.
Quote
The final component of CPQ software is the quote.
CPQ software helps your business create a final quote that’s completely free of any errors or discrepancies. It will pull together all the work from configuration and pricing and create the quote your customer requested.
It’s important to remember that when customers request a quote from you, they have often also requested quotes from one or more of your customers. Therefore, the quicker you get a personalized quote back to your prospective customers, the more likely you are to close those sales.
Once you create a final quote with the help of the CPQ software, you’ll have the opportunity to look it over before sending it off to your prospective customer. At that point, if anything needs to be changed, you can easily do so within the platform.
The Value of CPQ Software
Instead of spending hours (or even days) crunching numbers to get back to your potential clients with estimates, you’ll be able to get those clients a quote quickly and accurately. That way, you greatly reduce the chances that one of your competitors will swoop in and provide an attractive quote to the client in the meantime.
It also reduces some of the inefficiencies that arise when clients change their minds about their desired specifications. Without CPQ software, you can waste considerable person-hours and effort repeating the process of preparing an estimate each time the client changes some details.
CPQ software helps your sales team sell products while drafting consistent, reliable quotes. As a result, each sales team member has the data and tools they need to get quotes back to customers in no time. As a result, they’ll have more room to focus on creating meaningful connections and closing sales.
Gone are the days of a lost and confused sales team. Salesforce CPQ software can help the entire sales team, including team leaders, get on the same page about product offerings and pricing. The software goes as far as to take things like discounts, tiered pricing, and product bundles into account to reduce the chances of any inaccurate quotes greatly.
In the end, using CPQ software can help your company reduce the time it takes to create quotes, increase the value of deals, and cut down on order errors, among other benefits.
Final Thoughts
CPQ software can be a game-changer for businesses, especially those that offer various customizable product/service offerings. For example, if you’re interested in making the quote crafting process easier, CPQ software could be the solution. Try it for yourself today to see what a difference it can make for your business.
Would you like to know more about Salesforce CPQ? Cirrius Solutions can help maximize your investment in Salesforce by providing you access to a team of named Salesforce certified support engineers who would love to help you get the maximum out of Salesforce and turn your sales team into a sales powerhouse. Please contact us to learn more about how Cirrius Solutions can help you make the most of your Salesforce investment.
