What You Need to Know About Managing Agreements in CPQ

April 4, 2023

PROS, Inc.

Sales agreements and contracts are core to business, but they can throw a wrench in the sales process. They’re notoriously difficult to manage: contracts and sales agreements require a ton of manual work and coordination between internal pricing, sales teams, and your customers. That’s a recipe for lost revenue and missed opportunities, which is something no business can afford, especially in a volatile, inflation-riddled market.

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Here are some of the common challenges we often hear:

“We lack visibility into sales agreements.”

Managing the entire agreement lifecycle is often a manual process, which opens the door to errors, wasted time, and a negative customer experience. Not a good way to start a new business relationship, especially when today’s buyers are increasingly selecting vendors based on their ability to offer fast and harmonized customer experiences.

“We aren’t able to align contracts with pricing strategy.”

If there's no collaboration between your pricing and sales organizations, pricing teams won’t be able to leverage the account-specific knowledge that the sales organization possesses, and the sales team won’t have visibility into what pricing is doing, and what process they're going through to come up with these new prices.

“We have difficulty managing dynamic cost changes.”

Say all your agreement prices are in place and customers are ordering off those agreements, but what happens when there are fluctuations in the market and specific material costs change? How quickly can you adapt your pricing? It’s difficult to respond quickly enough to these triggers if you don't have a system that allows you to do that beyond spreadsheets.

“Our manual processes make us slow to react to business opportunities and cause errors.”

Siloed, manual, and cumbersome contract processes related to the creation and modification of prices and terms, renewal of sales agreements, etc. can slow down the sales process or even grind it to a halt, resulting in losing to a faster competitor.

Introducing the New Sales Agreement Portal and Repository

PROS Smart Configure Price Quote, part of the PROS Platform, now includes a sales agreements portal and repository. The solution ensures that your sales and pricing teams are working together, making price changes based on market conditions or changes in business requirements, creating contracts quickly and accurately, and delivering a positive experience for customers.

The new agreements portal enables you to store and view all aspects of a finalized agreement in one place. You can quickly view key agreement details at a glance, including start and end dates, line items, agreement prices, and terms and conditions. This unified and seamless user experience helps improve sales productivity and accelerates deal velocity. The benefits to your organization are transformative.

A central repository for storing all aspects of an agreement

Now pricing, sales, and (most importantly) management teams can easily view and determine the business impact of every agreement on the business in a moment’s notice. This drives collaboration and ensures that strategies are executed correctly. If the business or an external factor necessitates a change that affects multiple agreements, PROS makes it easy to perform a mass price sync across all agreements.

A system of record and enhanced user experience

PROS Smart Configure Price Quote accelerates the management of complex sales agreements from days to minutes. This tool streamlines the lifecycle of sales agreements with workflows that create, amend, renew, extend, and end these agreements. Using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence algorithms, PROS Smart Configure Price Quote delivers prescriptive recommendations along the sales agreement journey — enabling salespeople to create fully personalized contracts tailored to each buyer.

PROS Portal brings your CPQ to your CRM instance

Salespeople are looking for ways to simplify their lives, not complicate them. PROS Smart Configure Price Quote integrates with both Salesforce and Microsoft, with the same UI for both customer account information and quote-to-cash opportunities, including agreements. By centralizing all this pertinent information in one place, reps benefit from a comprehensive view of each customer’s business and can act on deals faster (greenfield or cross-sell/upsell) with a higher likelihood of success.

Here’s a real-life scenario using PROS Smart CPQ Agreements functionality:

Your salesperson uses PROS Smart Configure Price Quote to quickly create and negotiate a competitive quote and sales agreement.
The pricing team makes modifications due to material price changes, using AI-generated intelligence.
Sales leaders are provided real-time insights of agreement changes, including amendments, pricing, renewals, etc.
The pricing team executes the adapted strategy via a mass price sync on pricing across sales agreements.
The pricing team can make continual modifications due to changing market conditions and help support the long-term strategy for this customer.
Management regularly visits the portal to ensure that pricing strategies and profitability are being executed according to forecasts.