This is why your scale up should be using CPQ

This is why your Scale-up should be using CPQ

Do you remember what growing pains feel like? The cause of growing pains hasn’t fully been established even though the name seems self-explanatory. The ailment stops usually stops during the teenage years when the body stops growing. Building a business comes with growing pains as well but in this case, you never want to stop growing. So what can you do to minimize the pain during your scale-up phase? Don’t bother with household remedies and guessing games, there is an effective pain reliever and it spells CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote)

Remind us, what is CPQ?

CPQ (Configure Price Quote) is a sales tool mostly used in B2B that helps salespeople automatically create quotes, proposals, and other sales documentation faster. Most CPQ options can be integrated with CRM, ERP och E-signing tools in order to create a seamless process and minimize manual work for your sales organization. CPQ allows you to create customized proposals with the correct pricing faster than your competitors. Sounds pretty useful, right?

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Symptoms that you need a CPQ-tool

Having a key role in a company going through a scale-up phase is not a bed of roses. Your growth journey surely depends on your company's unique situation and what resources you have available. But some challenges are reoccurring for most companies and guess what, CPQ can help you regain control and predictability. Let’s go through how.

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Ramping up new sales hires

A key factor in growing a business is to find and hire more talent. It’s extremely important to shorten the ramp-up period so that new sales hires start selling faster. Starting a new job is challenging already why add more complexity with unflexible quotes and proposal templates? Good onboarding is important for the new hire but there is usually too much information that needs to be internalized and memorized in very little time. It could be price lists, rules for discounts, product information, and agreement dos and don’ts. It’s virtually impossible to learn everything at once. A CPQ-tool can help you decrease your dependence on the actual onboarding program by including guidelines and coaching that will help your sales team create and share custom-made offers with your customers, every single time

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Product launches

Product launches can both be a cause and an effect of a growing business. New products or features are usually great for your customers but could be a stress factor for your sales team. All your product information, sales collateral, templates, etc need to be updated manually. But your sales team could still be using old, inaccurate information because they reuse old proposals they have downloaded locally as templates. CPQ can help your salespeople both sell new products more effectively and replace old templates completely. So, with CPQ it becomes much easier to roll out new products and you can control business-critical sales collateral. This means that you can focus your efforts on driving results and continued growth instead of spending your time making sure that your sales team uses the latest versions available. Another benefit of CPQ is that your entire product offering is gathered in one place which makes combining products much easier, which in turn can result in higher deal sizes and more upsells.

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Price updates

Anyone who has been part of a growth company understands that prices need to be updated from time to time. Both incremental price changes and on a more strategic level as well. You need to quickly make sure that your sales team shares your new prices with your customers. Most companies do this by announcing new rules and guidelines that the sales team is expected to understand and follow. There is a much more effective way to do this with CPQ. Your sales people will never need to use a pricing spreadsheet again since all prices are up do date in your CPQ-tool. CPQ can help you set predefined rules and guidelines to avoid that the wrong prices are presented to your customers. This also mean that you can protect your margins by deciding maximum discount for certain products or product lines. By removing the time-consuming task of finding the correct price information and risk of miscalculations your sales team can instead focus on actualling selling and maximizing deal values.

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Expanding to new markets

Last but not least. Are you planning on expanding your business to new markets? Then you are probably painfully aware that you need to create new sales collateral for each new market. This means new product information, pricing in the local currency, and coaching material - basically all the above. But you don’t need to start from zero. You can use tools that automatically customize the material needed to the specific market. CPQ collects data from CRM, ERP, and other systems so that the sales team doesn’t have to go through different folders for each respective market. They can be selling to Sweden one minute and to Germany the next.