How Much Have You Lost Before You’ve Signed the Client?

In the world of sales, time is money and every minute lost is money being left on the table for enterprises. Disconnected, decentralised spreadsheets, outdated product data, and inaccurate pricing configurations distract and waste the time of sales reps, taking the attention away from clients and their unique requirements.

In the absence of a single source of truth accessible by every member of your sales team, the question becomes…how much money are you losing before you’ve even signed the client?

If you want to sell more, you need to sell smarter. Having a robust CRM tool in place that all sales reps can access is the first step but alone, it’s not enough to overcome siloed product data and knowledge gaps that produce unstructured pricing quotes.

Salesforce CPQ is the solution, bridging the gap between seamless customer experiences and fast, accurate quotations.

What is CPQ?

CPQ is Salesforce’s answer to the question on every sales rep’s mind: How can we sell better to our clients? Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) is a sales tool that enables businesses to generate and provide accurate quotes and pricing for their products and services in any configuration scenario.

CPQ walks your sales reps through the process of putting together complex quotes by providing relevant product information and accurate pricing. It takes into account customisations, optional features, discounts and quantities, allowing reps to put quotes together quickly and guide customers through the sales cycle.

Operating from a cloud-based platform, CPQ provides a single shared interface to all sales reps, ensuring they have the most up-to-date information at their fingertips. The sales team can also access it from anywhere, allowing them to work no matter their location.

What Are CPQ’s Features?

Within the B2B sphere, accuracy in combination with speed and efficiency is paramount to closing current and future deals. CPQ is designed to streamline the process of quoting, increasing efficiency and turnout, with powerful features like:

• Product Search — CPQ’s search function allows you to crawl all values within a product, including product name, description, SKU and category. The search function also contains autocomplete which suggests products as sales reps type, speeding up the selection process. Reps can also customise the search results based on descriptions, product family and other categorisations besides product name to select the best fit.

• Product Filters — If an enterprise has an extensive product catalogue, searching the entire database can take time and effort. CPQ’s filters function helps to reduce search time by allowing users to apply filters to narrow down search results. The filters are fully customisable, meaning admins can add filters as required by reps, such as products available in certain quantities or location-based availability. After applying these filters, sales reps can conduct a much quicker, easier product search.

• Favourites — CPQ’s Favourites feature allows each member of the sales team to create a customisable list of “favourite” items that they sell regularly. This helps improve efficiency and reduce needless search time as reps can quickly access the product or service they’re looking for. Reps can share their lists, allowing other team members to bookmark items and boost team productivity.

• Guided Selling — With Guided Selling, CPQ employs machine learning to help sales people make the right decisions regarding product and service selections for assembling quotes. When users access the product selection page, a list of predetermined questions will appear. The user’s answers to these questions will determine the products they see at the end.

In addition to these features, CPQ is hosted from within Sales Cloud, allowing your team to enhance the quality of their quotes with access to customer profiles and past purchasing histories.

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What Benefits Does CPQ Offer?

1. Reduces lost time and productivity

To increase sales, we must reduce time lost on repetitive tasks. CPQ allows sales teams to do just this by simplifying quoting, allowing reps to assemble quotes more quickly, preventing bottlenecks in the sales pipelines, and winning more deals. Sales reps no longer have to waste valuable time pouring through endless spreadsheets and catalogues and manually typing up quotes.

With CPQ, instant access to product data and quote templates make assembling quotes a breeze, allowing sales reps to refocus their time on adding value to the customer experience and nurturing client relationships.

2. Improves sales numbers through accuracy

Accuracy is also essential to winning client deals. Clients shouldn’t be kept waiting when it comes to receiving quotes, and all details should be present and accurate.

Going back and forth amending quotes because of inaccurate or missing information wastes the client’s time and impacts their confidence in the company’s capabilities. CPQ configures accurate prices and can anticipate any possible scenario in pricing, streamlining the quotation process.

Going back and forth amending quotes because of inaccurate or missing information wastes the client’s time and impacts their confidence in the company’s capabilities. CPQ configures accurate prices and can anticipate any possible scenario in pricing, streamlining the quotation process.

3. Increases deal sizes through customisations and specialisations

CPQ helps sales reps to add value to their customer exchanges by simplifying order customisations and specialisations. Because CPQ houses all item data and options, sales reps can easily pull up relevant information on a product to offer add-ons, customisations, or adaptations, resulting in bigger deals and, ultimately, greater profitability.

In combination with Sales Cloud, CPQ has the power to transform the quotation output and deal aggregation of any enterprise. The key lies in its configuration and enablement, which requires the knowledge and expertise of the right implementation partner.

At CloudSmiths, we help multi-industry businesses transform their sales and grow their revenue with Salesforce. In addition to roll-out and implementation, we offer Salesforce training, consultation and development among other services.