BLOG ✦ SCULPTOR CPQ
Benefits of Salesforce CPQ Software for Your Sales Team
• Date: March 2024 •
Estimated reading time: 16 minutes
Estimated reading time: 16 minutes
Subscribe for more useful content
We promise we'll not spam your mailbox!
By submitting you agree to receive a newsletter from Sculptor team. You can unsubscribe anytime.
Customers don't want to be burdened with details about your sales process or the intricacies of your product catalog.
The automation of business operations, especially in sales quotes, currently holds a prominent position in the development priorities of many firms. Automation has evolved significantly since the early days of CRM and ERP systems, including the Salesforce CRM platform. One of the prominent trends in business automation is automating sales rep workflows, such as approval templates, revenue reports, and customer interactions.
However, the benefits of Salesforce CPQ software go beyond these trends.
Implementing CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) solutions offers out-of-the-box capabilities, such as a product bundle configurator, guided selling, automated pricing rules, and interactive web quotes, to streamline sales flows.
Chief Financial Officers Meet CPQ
How can you identify internal signals indicating the need to tune up and automate business flows?
- How can a company assess the need for CPQ in its current business life cycle?
- Is investing in CPQ a reasonable decision?
- What resources are necessary for CPQ deployment and setting up relevant business processes?
- How soon can we expect increased sales revenue with CPQ-based sales flows?
- In what ways will CPQ implementation improve communication with clients and boost customer satisfaction?
Based on these questions, we can point out significant challenges for businesses that use Salesforce when considering CPQ implementation:
- Complex product configurations: Managing and configuring intricate product catalogs and options can be challenging, especially when dealing with a wide range of customizable features and pricing rules.
- Integration complexity: Integrating CPQ solutions with existing systems, such as CRM and ERP, requires careful planning and coordination to ensure seamless data flow and process synchronization.
- User adoption: Ensuring user adoption and buy-in from sales teams can be challenging, as they need to adapt to new processes and tools to utilize CPQ capabilities effectively.
- Data accuracy and maintenance: Maintaining accurate and up-to-date product and pricing data across multiple systems and channels can be a constant challenge, requiring robust data management practices.
- Scalability and Customization: As businesses grow and evolve, the CPQ solution needs to scale and adapt to changing requirements, including complex pricing structures, multiple currencies, and global operations.
The companies that provided us with the insights above are in the logistics, manufacturing, financial consulting, marketing, and retail industries. In these sectors, products, and bundles may involve intricate configurations and dependencies. This is where CPQ solutions can lend a helping hand.
So what are the benefits of Salesforce CPQ software solutions?
Benefits of CPQ Software in Salesforce
In a highly competitive environment, sales representatives deal with complex products and services, create quotes, and interact with customers.
Excel and other data sales tools can no longer provide deal velocity without errors and recalculations.
For instance, an old-school quoting process in a traditional sales flow would be as follows:
- Determine the best products and the required configurations.
- Refer to pricing documentation or static systems for the basic price.
- Track down eligible discounts and apply them manually.
- Wait for approval if a significant discount is requested. Mind that these processes are primarily manual, with time-consuming back-and-forth messaging subject to human error and communication hiccups.
- Create the final quote document that will be delivered to your customer. If there’s anything they are not content with, the whole loop restarts.
The key challenge has always been to improve the quoting process's automation, predictability, and efficiency for both sales representatives and clients.
At the very least, CPQ software implementation significantly reduces paperwork and documentation. Sales reps benefit from readily available price books, saving time by minimizing manual calculations and routine operations.
Сonfigure, Price, Quote (CPQ) Software benefits
In comparing the benefits of solutions like Salesforce CPQ versus standard quoting processes, businesses find that CPQ automation offers guided selling features and dynamic pricing capabilities, providing a significant competitive edge.
Now, let's delve into the benefits of Salesforce CPQ software for sales teams in depth.
1. With CPQ, Everyone on Your Sales Team Knows Exactly What to Do
What impression do your customers get when they purchase from your company?
Regardless of how they engage with you, that initial experience already sets high expectations, and making no mistakes is crucial. Customers prefer not to deal with the details of your sales process or the complexity of your product catalog.
Your products and bundles may simultaneously involve intricate configurations and dependencies. Your team needs to act swiftly and accurately, ensuring customers understand why the price is what it is.
Therefore, it's essential to check if the solution you choose enables you to:
- Ensure successful quote configurations without errors, regardless of how complex the bundles' dependencies are
- Simplify the configuration process for sales reps
- Preconfigure available cross-selling and up-selling items
Your CPQ tool should feature an intuitive interface and provide coherent options for customers to interact with—a seamless process for making additions and changes, ideally done on the go in real time.
2. CPQ for Salesforce Enables Swift Approval and Payment Workflows
How many of your competitors' business proposals will your client read while waiting for yours?
The flawless travel of a quote or proposal through all participating departments for approval is crucial.
Considerations like sales margin, discounts, offered products and services, and location play a vital role in this process. A lengthy and bureaucratic internal approval process can be detrimental to the deal. How many potential customers abandon the process during this step? How many deals are slipping away due to insufficient internal processes? The approval process requires automation.
With a CPQ solution for Salesforce, you can:
- Establish quote and price approval workflows
- Create approval workflows based on configurable criteria such as margin, discount, or region
- Utilize client ratings to determine discounts
3. CPQ Ensures Price List and Promotions Data are Up-to-Date
How do sales teams—whether local or global—receive information about pricing changes?
Many sales teams still rely on outdated communication channels like spreadsheets, emails, or worse. In a flood of business communications, it's too easy for one person to alter a few digits or overlook an email.
Outdated systems for sharing information lead to unnecessary delays. And what about managing promotions? Every customer wants a deal—and it's in your best interest to provide one. But how much profit is lost by offering a larger deal than necessary to close the sale?
Consider the following CPQ features to avoid losing deals:
- Centralized pricing adjustments with seamless team notifications
- Price changes and discounts enabled without IT intervention
- Historical pricing data view
- Offers tailored to individuals or segments based on preset rules
4. СPQ Software Drives Order Fulfillment
When the deal is closed, the next step is to ensure your customers receive what was promised in a quote and at the right time.
The best way to deliver a successful order is to connect all the departments in one system. Salespeople are unaware of what is in inventory or when delivery can be achieved. All changes in an order, such as adding or removing products, shouldn't confuse your system. Fulfillment should be efficient, seamless, and unified.
Consider leveraging these CPQ features:
- Guided selling: assisting sales reps in selecting the right products and configurations
- Renewals and upsells: identifying opportunities for renewals and upsells during quoting
- Contract management: managing contracts and agreements associated with quotes and orders
- Reporting and analytics: tracking key metrics like conversion rates, win/loss analysis, and sales performance
5. CPQ Customizes the Proposal Process with Enhanced UI
Empower your sales team to focus on what they do best—selling. Consider how much of their time is dedicated to creating proposals. While one-size-fits-all templates may not be ideal, crafting a good one can consume a significant portion of their time.
A CPQ app for Salesforce will allow you to:
- Generate template-based quotes and proposals, easily customizable for specific needs
- Help team members and customers interact with quotes based on preset rules
- Enjoy a drag-and-drop editor for lightning-speed modifications
The prioritization of business operation automation is evident in today's corporate landscape, with ongoing advancements since the inception of CRM and ERP systems, including the widely used Salesforce platform.
Is Implementing CPQ for Salesforce a Reasonable Investment?
Reasons to get CPQ software for Salesforce
You, as a business owner, might doubt the need to adopt CPQ for Salesforce software for various reasons, such as perceived lack of need, time constraints, or cost considerations.
Traditionally, CPQ solutions have been associated with high expenses and significant training requirements.
However, there are now powerful yet affordable CPQ solutions for Salesforce available.
Business owners aim for a return on investment, and with CPQ, vendors have diverse pricing models and subscription plans. The most effective method to assess the worth of a CPQ solution is the "try before you buy" approach.
For example:
Sculptor CPQ for Salesforce, available on AppExchange, provides such an opportunity. You can install a free version of CPQ in your production with no expiration date to try out features like pricing rules and interactive web quotes.
Most CPQ solutions necessitate 3-6 months for implementation and the involvement of a certified CPQ specialist or a third-party Salesforce consulting firm. At the same time, CPQ software implementation reduces the use of paperwork and documentation. Sales reps benefit from having price books available at hand and save time by reducing manual calculations and routine operations.
Summary
Some companies perform well without CPQ. In some cases, their business may not offer a wide range of products or services, or there may not be an adequate number of sales reps effectively managing orders using standard tools like Excel for calculations and generating quotes.
The primary indicators for a CFO to consider the feasibility of implementing CPQ are:
✦ The speed of attracting new leads has slowed, indicating sellers spend more time on accurate quotes, approving discounts, and discussing pricing policies, leaving less time for building relationships with new customers.
✦ The product (service) range continually expands or includes numerous independently configurable features and subproduct options with individual attributes (price, block pricing, quantity discounts).
✦ Your pricing policy has become more complex, and sales reps have already devised pricing rules in Excel. While keeping the option for reps to set up prices or discounts manually, you aim to automate the application of pricing rules to quotes.
✦ Despite the increased workload for sales reps, you don't want to hire more people, and the average time to quote is growing.
✦ Your business has expanded into new markets with intense competition, leading to more time-consuming multicurrency management, frequently changing pricing policies, and quote approval management for VIP clients, preventing reps from closing deals quickly.
FAQ: Benefits of Salesforce CPQ Software
CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) in Salesforce offers several benefits. It streamlines the sales process by automating complex product configuration and pricing calculations, ensuring accurate quotes. Additionally, the benefits of Salesforce CPQ software include reducing errors and eliminating manual tasks. It also enables sales teams to provide faster quotes and personalized proposals, enhancing customer satisfaction and increasing sales opportunities.
CPQ helps businesses streamline their sales by automating product configuration, pricing, and quoting. It simplifies complex product configurations, ensuring accurate quotes and reducing errors. CPQ also provides pricing guidance based on predefined rules and discounts, enabling sales teams to optimize pricing strategies. By automating these tasks, CPQ saves time for sales representatives, allowing them to focus more on selling and providing a better customer experience.
The easiest way for your sales team to create a technically viable quote is using a CPQ solution.
Such a solution allows sales representatives to access product catalogs, pricing information, and technical specifications in one centralized system. CPQ software often offers benefits such as a user-friendly interface and guided workflows, enabling sales teams to quickly configure products, select appropriate pricing options, and generate accurate quotes. This ensures that the quotes are technically viable, eliminating errors and reducing the need for manual intervention.
Such a solution allows sales representatives to access product catalogs, pricing information, and technical specifications in one centralized system. CPQ software often offers benefits such as a user-friendly interface and guided workflows, enabling sales teams to quickly configure products, select appropriate pricing options, and generate accurate quotes. This ensures that the quotes are technically viable, eliminating errors and reducing the need for manual intervention.
To succeed in sales quotes, there are several key factors to consider, including the automation factor:
- Leveraging automation: Utilize automation tools and technologies, such as CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) solutions, to streamline the quote creation process. There are a few benefits of CPQ software. Automation eliminates manual tasks, reduces errors, and accelerates quote generation time. By automating product configuration, pricing calculations, and proposal generation, you can ensure accuracy, consistency, and efficiency in your quotes.
- Personalization at scale: With automation, you can personalize quotes by leveraging customer data and preferences. Automated systems can dynamically generate tailored quotes based on customer-specific requirements and pricing rules. This level of personalization increases the relevance of your quotes and enhances the customer experience.
- Real-time pricing and inventory updates: Automation enables real-time integration with pricing and inventory systems. This ensures that your sales team has access to the most up-to-date information when creating quotes. Real-time updates prevent quoting errors due to outdated pricing or unavailable inventory, increasing the accuracy and reliability of your quotes.
- Workflow automation: Automating workflows within the quote creation process ensures smooth collaboration and timely approvals. With automated workflows, you can define approval stages, assign tasks to appropriate stakeholders, and track progress. This reduces bottlenecks, saves time, and allows for faster quote turnaround.
- Data-driven insights: Automation provides valuable data and insights into the quoting process. By analyzing metrics and performance indicators, you can identify trends, optimize pricing strategies, and uncover areas for improvement. Data-driven insights enable you to refine your quoting process and increase overall sales effectiveness.
Considering CPQ implementation?
Let's discuss how Sculptor CPQ can help your business!
Let's discuss how Sculptor CPQ can help your business!
By submitting you agree to receive a newsletter from Sculptor CPQ developers. You can unsubscribe anytime.
Our Best Articles and Case Studies