How Your Business Can Benefit From CPQ Solutions

CPQ is an acronym for configure, price, quote. As a business owner, you may have heard of it before. If you’re wondering whether CPQ solutions are right for you, consider this: do you offer various products or services and need to produce sales quotes to your customers based on their specific needs? If so, CPQ tools like IQuoteExpress can help take your business to the next level with customised accurate sales quotes for your customers.

In the business world today, most successful enterprises from large to small provide some degree of product or service flexibility. Adjusting the way you sell and thus do business through offering your potential clients with more options on price makes good business sense. Once you’ve worked out what you can provide i.e. variations of service and product and the pricing options managing the quoting process with a CPQ solution is easy.

CPQ software has proved successful in various industries. In the highly competitive vehicle insurance industry, for example; sales reps need to be able to deliver quotes quicksmart however first they need to mine data to get the best quote. They need information on: the customer’s driving record, the vehicle’s make and model, and the policy holder’s age etc to generate an accurate insurance policy quote. Speed is of the essence and the early bird is sure to catch the worm so here’s how CPQ tools can help take your business to the next level:

Shortens The Sales Cycle

When someone requests a quote from your business, the longer they wait, the more inclined they are to request quotes from your competitors. Shorter sales cycles should always be the goal. CPQ solutions prevent time from resulting in the death of a potentially lucrative deal. As a business, you should be able to deliver right away without compromising service or quality. This not only increases the chance of a customer deciding to do business with you, but speaks volumes for your business credibility and commitment to the client.

If a potential client has requested a quote from two companies, and one takes 3x longer to respond with a quote because they’re busy working out a deal, the client will likely make the wrong assumptions about the business that took longer to respond. They’ll assume that the business that look longer to produce a quote has lower quality offerings than the other, even if that isn’t necessarily true.

Profit Increase

Thanks to those shorter sales cycles, you can take on more work. For example, let’s say it took you 12 hours to generate a quote prior to CPQ. Now, you can produce several per day. Additionally, CPQ software can make quick, automated upsell and cross-sell suggestions that can lead to revenue increases and higher average purchase prices. These systems are smart enough to understand what the client needs without sales rep interference. Lastly, when you use CPQ pricing tools, you’ll feel much more confident about your pricing decisions and will know that they honor your margins.

Higher Productivity

CPQ will take care of the pricing and product rules, which allows your sales reps to focus on other important resources in the business, thereby increasing productivity in the workplace. You may find that currently, you have several hands in the quoting process; perhaps people from marketing or developers are throwing in their say and suggestions. Through automation, you can eliminate the “too many hands in the pot” syndrome and close deals quicker without compromising in-house productivity.

Greater Customer Satisfaction

Studies have shown more than half of all customers will switch to your competitor after a bad customer service experience. Slow response times is a major contributor of “bad” experiences. CPQ allows businesses to set up alerts that remind sales reps when it’s time to replace products ore renew contracts. This will help improve retention and quickly generate new sales. Your clients will feel valued, knowing that you’re on top of their business needs. This is also the result of your sales reps having to spend less time on quote generations and various other administrative duties, and focus more on stellar customer service.

Valued Reputation

CPQ solutions detract from the “pushy salesman” practices that many businesses employ during the quote generation process. This can hurt your reputation. Clients find that you’re much easier to do business with when you’re not number-crunching and grasping for a sale. You don’t have to push too much, because your CPQ tool is doing the work for you. Customers will appreciate this, and it speaks well for your service and overall reputation.