Sellers have always relied on tools to make their jobs easier, including lead lists that identify likely buyers and call scripts that help address customer pain points and objections. Over the years, the products and services many companies sell have grown more complex, and it only makes sense they would need more sophisticated sales tools to account for that growing level of complexity.
One modern sales tool that businesses are increasingly taking advantage of is configure, price and quote (CPQ) systems. CPQ systems make sellers’ lives easier by automating key tasks in the sales process, leading to greater responsiveness, higher customer satisfaction and fewer errors.
Sellers can be more responsive to customer needs
Ultimately, a seller’s job is to determine what customers need and then offer it to them as quickly as possible. Customer needs don’t stay unfulfilled for long, so the quicker sellers can respond to customers, the better chance a company has of being the one to meet those needs.
Sellers become unresponsive when they have to manually assemble complex configurations of products and services, come up with a price for that configuration, and then finally deliver a quote to the customer. As the name suggests, CPQ solutions help streamline each of these processes, significantly reducing the amount of time it takes to get a finished quote into a customer’s hands.
A less frustrating customer experience
Most customers prefer to do business with companies that make the sales process as painless as possible, and CPQ software can help in this regard as well. In addition to decreasing the amount of time a customer has to wait to receive a quote, a CPQ solution can also make sure the quote the customer does receive is relevant to his/her needs and easy to understand.
Many companies that lack an easy way of producing customized quotes will simply provide generic quotes that list everything the company offers. Seeing so many offerings at once can be confusing and frustrating, especially since the majority of those offerings won’t be relevant to the customer’s needs. CPQ software helps companies provide only the most relevant information and offerings; a recent story from cio.com included an example of one CPQ vendor that was able to help its users decrease the average length of their quotes from 60 pages to about 10 pages.
Greater accuracy
There’s nothing wrong with a seller using creative tactics to close a sale, but it’s also nice to know there are guardrails in place to make sure that creativity doesn’t lead to errors.
CPQ systems give sellers templates and guidelines to work from, removing the chance that manual work will lead to an error. Also, instead of limiting what sellers can do, CPQ systems simply provide another level of control. For instance, if a seller attempts to offer a discount that goes above an established threshold, the system will trigger an approval workflow, rather than shutting down the seller entirely.
The quality control benefits of CPQ aren’t just hypothetical, either: research from the Aberdeen Group demonstrates that CPQ users are able to reduce proposal errors year over year at a rate 158 percent higher than non-users.
Like many other modern sales and marketing tools, CPQ software may not be right for every company, and securing seller buy-in would be a prerequisite for achieving the benefits discussed here. However, for businesses with very complex offerings and a sales force that’s open to new tools, a CPQ solution can offer real benefits, and its no wonder it’s becoming increasingly popular in enterprise settings.
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