Enhance Your Sales Tech Stack with CPQ
To effectively do business in a fast-paced, global environment means that you need to be on the leading edge of technology and trends. More and more, companies are investing in sales transformative technologies like Configure, Price, Quote software to improve their sales productivity and accelerate their deal velocity.
CPQ, synonymous with quote-to-cash technology, streamlines the quoting process enabling sales teams to deliver quick, easy, and personalized customer experiences. Great user experience means higher customer satisfaction, resulting in customer loyalty and higher retention rates.
With CPQ in your sales software stack, you can improve sales productivity by automating common quoting tasks and increase deal velocity by enabling your sales team to personalize the product, service, and price recommendations for each customer. Read on to learn about the top 9 benefits of adding CPQ to your sales tech stack.
9 Reasons to Add CPQ to Your Sales Tech Stack
1. Improve Your Sales Productivity
If the average salesperson is only spending 32.5 percent of their time actively selling, that means they’re spending a lot of time on other things like creating quotes and managing the approval process. By automating many inefficient processes, CPQ solutions can increase sales rep efficiency and productivity, freeing up more time to nurture customer relationships.
2. Deliver a Better Customer Experience
Key to developing a better connection with customers is improving the customer experience. The CPQ workflow makes this possible by quickly providing personalized product bundles and experiences that are homogenous across channels.
3. Automate the Approval Process
There are many challenges that cause delays in the sales process, but one common issue among organizations is the approval process. Long manual approval cycles can cause unnecessary delays, leaving customers frustrated or worse—seeking service elsewhere. Using a CPQ solution, you’ll be able to automate the approval process.
4. Reduce Configuration Errors
Many B2B products require assembling or configuring products and services, which can be complicated and cumbersome. Organizations have to invest a lot of time to train the sales team on configuration options and even still salespeople make errors due to the lack of familiarity with products and related options.
With CPQ software, you can provide your sales teams with a digital catalog and a guided configuration process that walks them through all the required options for a product or service. CPQ software can also help eliminate human errors by automatically eliminating products from the selection list which are incompatible with a selected option.
5. Use AI to Personalize Your Recommendations
AI has become a buzzword in the industry today. Many people are familiar with AI in the form of personal assistant chatbot systems, such as Siri and Alexa, but many people don’t understand the practical applications of AI or its benefits in the B2B world. AI technology can be incorporated in a lot of different software to automate common tasks and provide users with insights that can accelerate the decision-making process. In CPQ software, AI technology can help sales teams accomplish the following:
- Identify who to sell to and what to sell
- Provide personalized product recommendations that customers are most likely to buy
- Make fast and sound decisions by aggregating and surfacing analytical insights about customer opportunities and quotes
By adding AI-based software to your sales tech stack, your sales team will be able to increase stickiness with your customers and realize greater revenues.
6. Improve Customer Relationships with CRM
CRM software can be extremely valuable in organizing and managing customer relationships and opportunities, but, according to IBM, the average CRM adoption rate is only 47%. Low adoption by sales teams can be linked to a variety of factors, including lack of training, usability, and unclear expectations. Many organizations are requiring that sales teams put a lot of time and effort into populating data into the CRM, but salespeople aren’t getting tangible returns from their hard efforts.
Integrating CPQ software with the CRM is a great way to optimize your sales tech stack and help your sales team increase their productivity and meet their sales quotas.
Such benefits to sales teams include:
- Gaining a lead generation solution so they don’t spend so much time prospecting to customers.
- Using a tool that automates manual quoting functions, such as proposal generation.
- Getting personalized recommendations that enable them to consistently close deals faster at higher rates.
- Finding real-time insights on the impact of every quote decision on their journey to meeting their quota.
CPQ software can boost sales effectiveness and provide the value that your teams will benefit from to ramp up their CRM usage.
7. Sell More Products in Your Catalog
Enterprise businesses have many products and services, which can be a challenge for sales teams that want to accurately speak to all their offerings. If they are familiar with just a handful of products, they may stick to those products, leaving other valuable offerings behind.
With a CPQ platform in the sales technology stack, your team will receive guidance on what products are the best fit for customers–even products they may be less familiar with. No more searching long catalogs and guessing. The automation process helps sales teams to the boost they need to educate customers on the variety of products they offer while reducing the organization’s cost and burden associated with maintaining these catalogs.
8. Improve Overall Profitability for Every Deal
The more you sell and the faster you sell, the more revenue you’ll generate; however, many salespeople sacrifice speed for profitability. They rely on their gut instincts and over-apply discounting methodologies that cut into profits.
With CPQ software, you can ensure that your sales teams are getting the appropriate value for your products. Solutions that leverage AI-based price recommendations help calculate the right price for every customer for every product so sales teams don’t have to guess at what price can win the deal. With personalized pricing recommendations at their fingertips, your team will be more confident in their quotes and can close deals faster.
9. Launch Products Quickly
When businesses launch a new product, there’s considerable work that goes into marketing it, adding it to the catalog, choosing accurate pricing, and training your teams. With CPQ, your product teams can streamline this process for a faster go- to- market process. With CPQ, your product teams can:
- Add or remove products from the catalog
- Update necessary configurations
- Make price adjustments that can be deployed to the sales teams immediately
- Provide sales workflows that make it easier for salespeople to sell products and services
- Offer bundles and promotions for their products
Make Your Sales Teams’ Lives Easier by Adding CPQ to Your Sales Tech Stack
Adding CPQ to your sales technology stack improves processes for sales teams, which in turn drives revenue and profitability for your business. By fostering stronger face-to-face relationships through AI-powered insights, automation, and customization, you can take your sales performance and your enterprise to the next level. Learn more about how you can accelerate your sales with PROS Smart Configure, Price, Quote.