CPQ: A Major Breakthrough in Sales Cloud

Gone are the days when a Sales rep used to spend more than 60% of their time generating quotes, writing proposals, and waiting for the approvals to be done instead of closing deals.

Ask your reps: 

1. How many times did they sent inaccurate pricing in their Quotes to prospects?
2. How much was it painstaking to configure products, reviewing their pricing manually?
3. For how long they used to wait to get approvals from their managers?

To help your reps overcome all such common hurdles, you need to dig into CPQ model. For the current scenario, CPQ has been upgraded with many different features including Einstein Analytics, billing criteria, great user interface allowing customers to customise their own products according to their needs, integrated with different third party like Docusign etc. These all features has made the tiresome work very easy just with few clicks.

For now, we’ll discuss only about fundamental crucks about CPQ which all CPQ model which are there in the market contains.

What does CPQ mean?

CPQ stands for Configure, Price and Quote. It helps the sales reps sell more and sell fast by automating & managing the process of Quoting. It provides answers to the following:

1. What products does the customer want to buy (configure)?
2. How much do those products cost (price)?
3. How can we give the customer details about the sale (quote)?

So,

• Configuring means “guiding sales reps to select best mix of products for each customer according to their needs”.

• Pricing “assigns the price of the products automatically and assures that the pricing and discount is accurate and optimized”.

• Quoting “automatically creates a quote with all the information and emails error-free quotes to the customer”.

Why there is a need of CPQ?

Earlier, sales reps used to rely upon the bulk of spreadsheets. Instead of moving on to their next deal, they would waste hours chasing down contract approvals or trying to review accurate pricing of products.

After the arrival of CPQ, it can benefit your sales teams and overall organization in a number of ways:

1. It helps sales reps close deals faster by replacing manual workload by automation.
2. It gives sales reps unprecedented control and also visibility over what’s being offered and what’s being sold. Imagine when companies have data in bulk, it’s practically impossible for anyone to track, analyze or forecast accurately. Here comes CPQ for their rescue.
3. It enables companies to launch newly advanced revenue model. In this competitive era, where customers want flexibility in how they buy and what they buy.

Companies across the globe responding to it by introducing new model for revenue generation —

1. Allowing Subscriptions policy.
2. Automating changes to contracts and renewals.
3. Varying discounts/uplifts.

It’s obvious “if you’re selling fast, you’re selling more and thus making more money”.

It’s high time to uplift your business by adopting CPQ on your Salesforce customer relationship management platform. Do it fast!!

She is an established Salesforce Certified functional consultant at Manras Technologies, acquainted with various Salesforce Platform terminologies, and an enthusiast content strategy articulator. She has given her contributions to various projects of Salesforce CRM. Always up for a challenging task. She is obsessed with the intersection of technology, automation, and media. Her principle is “Never Give up, rather Live up all challenges and don’t Go through but Grow through all the difficulties that come on the path towards Goal!!“

 

Written by Juhi Kumari