What is CPQ and how can it help your sales team?

What is CPQ and how can it help your sales team?

There are many advantages to being a successful sales professional, however, a big disadvantage is all the extra time that needs to be spent on admin. In order to sign a customer, you need to create quotes and proposals. How long it takes to create this quote depends on the products you’re selling and the tools you use. The customer expects a clear quote in a timely manner with all the necessary information in order make an informed decision and choose you as their supplier, or else this deal goes to your competitor instead.

Being able to quickly get back to your customer with a customized and appealing quote, is a big part of why your sales team needs to use a CPQ-system. CPQ-systems used to be associated with large industrial companies. Now, it is easier, and cheaper, to get started for companies of all sizes and in all industries.

CPQ help you choose the right products

If you sell products that are customized after your customers’ needs, then you need to be able to make changes easily in your quote with a configurator that has access to your entire product catalogue. Once you’re up and running with your CPQ-solution, it is vital that all the rules and logic are added so the sales team is confident they can deliver on their promise.  

It often comes down to being able to change parts of a product or combining several products through the configurator.

‍

Use CPQ instead of Excel to set more accurate prices

Being confident you are always sending quotes with the correct pricing isn’t as self-evident as it sounds. A product can have several different pricing options if the customer has a frame agreement or not. Keeping track of discounts and package deals on top of that is impossible if you are selling a range of products or solutions.

Many sales organizations try to make the workflow of calculating the correct price easier, either through endless product lines in your Customer Relationship Manager-tool (CRM) or by creating enormous Excel-sheets where the sales associate can calculate the price by using complex formulas. The Excel solution comes with several risks since it’s easy for the users to make manual mistakes.

With a CPQ-tool, you can determine the rules and logic that sets the price uniformly for the entire sales team, no matter how many discounts and package deals may be on the table.

‍

Create the quote or proposal faster with CPQ

When you have chosen the right products and calculated a price, it is time to create the quote to send to the potential customer. Easier said than done, as many organizations have set rules on the esthetics of the quote (graphic profile) and which appendices to send along (General Terms, product sheet etc.).  

By connecting the CPQ to your product database in the business system (ERP) and creating a collection of templates that follows your graphic profile, you can create a quote with all the necessary documents and send it off to your potential customer with the click of a button.

As a sales professional, you should use a CPQ to create customized sales documents in less time

Here's an example of the results. Elon will tell you how their sales team started creating quotes in 10 minutes, as opposed to the 2 hours it used to take them.