Price Quoting Solution Boosts Efficiency, Drives Sales Increase

SUMMARY

A top global manufacturer of material handling equipment wanted to simplify and accelerate its complex quoting process, improve back-office efficiency, and use those changes to drive an increase in overall sales. With win rates closely correlated to how quickly prospects received quotes, and greater sales efficiency creating cost savings, a pilot program built around PROS Smart CPQ solution provided substantial gains. Going live in early 2017, the PROS solution delivered a 58% reduction in time-to-quote, a 17% increase in sales efficiency, and is expected to deliver an estimated USD $6 million gain in profitability. The project success is now poised to roll out globally.

CHALLENGE

Fragmented and ad hoc sales processes were causing major inefficiencies – and limiting the company’s growth potential. Every local sales and marketing organization utilized its own quoting processes. Those workflows were almost entirely manual, involved hard-to-document e-mail, text and phone communications, and required multi-level approvals. In addition, extensive duplication of data entry wasted time and created multiple opportunities for human error. After an extensive evaluation of several vendors, the manufacturer chose a PROS solution pilot program that would focus on several European marketing/ sales units in a specific region. This European region typically produced 55,000 final quotes and as many as 25,000 orders per year. Time-tracking showed that the 650 salespeople in the pilot region spent 30% of their time generating quotes and orders – and that 200 sales support personnel spent 60% of their workday on those tasks. By addressing these quoting practices, the PROS pilot program targeted a major opportunity to gain efficiencies. 

SOLUTION

The PROS Smart CPQ solution helped automate and simplify the configuration, pricing and quoting process for sales teams. This enables sales to instantly create accurate, personalized solutions for each customer while driving down back-office costs. With configuration and quoting capabilities of the PROS solution, this manufacturer of material handling equipment was able to:

• Build an entirely new quoting process – a single process that works across all marketing/sales units.
• Accommodate a complex product range, including 11 product families and 249 different models along with a virtually unlimited set of options.
• Create a harmonized price structure and quote process that could be rolled out successfully to business units that were accustomed to more autonomy in the pricing process.

PROS offered extensive experience in European markets, and the proven ability to deliver  significant efficiencies. The PROS Smart CPQ toolset was deployed atop Oracle CRM to create a single customer database, enable simplified workflows, set up a single price structure, and build a highly automated quoting and order-management system.

CONCLUSION

With greater process efficiency, marketing/sales units can sell more effectively, and sales support personnel can focus more on sales enablement. The gains from streamlining the sale quoting process are significant. For example, the manufacturer discovered that its existing processes required data to be input into siloed systems between five and 10 times for every quote/order - with the opportunity to generate errors with every entry. The new PROS-based quoting process required data to be entered only once. The PROS solution also reduced the time-to-quote from more than seven minutes to less than three minutes – a 58% reduction multiplied by 55,000 quotes per year.

RESULTS

Significant benefits delivered by the PROS Smart CPQ solution start with a 58% reduction in time to quote for the region in the pilot program. Fewer hours spent managing quotes was the key to a 17% increase in sales efficiency – an improvement that is expected to deliver USD $6 million additional profit. In addition, the PROS solution offers huge potential for further improvements, including additional gains in quoting/ordering efficiency and approvals workflow. Its single price list will also ensure price accuracy and require less maintenance. And, as marketing/sales units gain experience with the system, the company will likely realize new efficiencies. Based on the success of the European pilot program – and the value it provided – the manufacturer is planning to roll out the PROS price quoting solution worldwide.