Making sales is a difficult endeavor! To establish that recognition and promote the product, the team must post compelling quotes about complicated items. The complexity of selling higher-value goods increases exponentially if the company is doing so. To prepare a specific quote for the product, your company’s sales team needs to have a thorough understanding of it.
The majority of businesses continue to encourage their sales staff to complete this task manually. But because this takes so much time, it gradually reduces the productivity of your company’s sales.
Instead of closing agreements, salespeople now spend the majority of their time on non-essential tasks like producing proposals or generating quotations. Your business will generate profits more quickly if it has more automated sales and less physical labor.
According to Salesforce, just 34% of sales time is spent on selling, with the balance spent on chores such as producing estimates and proposals or going through the approval process. A major challenge that today’s sales teams face is wasting time following up on contract status or price accuracy when they could be completing their next deal.
As a result, implementing Salesforce CPQ is the most modern and effective solution for automating the price quoting portions of a business product.
Salesforce CPQ (Configure Price Quote) solutions allow your company’s sales team to spend less time producing quotes and more time selling. If you are new to this solution, this is the article to read.
Here are a few encouraging reasons why Salesforce CPQ is essential for your sales team.
Overview of Salesforce CPQ
CPQ stands for Configure, Price, and Quote. Its primary function is to quickly and accurately produce quotes for any orders entered. CPQ solutions frequently work in tandem with CRM systems and ERP programs. This guarantees that all data is seamlessly incorporated into the system.
CPQ tools are used to generate quotations based on pre-established criteria. This ensures that any information regarding quantity, discounts, or revisions is taken into consideration right away. It reduces the possibility of an incorrect quote.
Consider a scenario in which your company is about to close transactions, but your schedules are reliant on manual tasks, which impede the ability to generate quotes. Does this bother your sales team? You’re not alone here, so don’t be alarmed.
Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, and Quote) has long been the go-to solution for salespeople facing common difficulties in the quote-to-cash cycle. If your company employs historical quote settings and is experiencing troubles with inaccurate quotations, Salesforce CPQ is the ideal software for you, and it offers the easiest order form for most enterprises with a complex selling process.
Configuration, pricing, and great stuff all around
Configure:
More specifically, it has to do with how you configure your order.
As soon as your brand-new CPQ is taken out of the box, you should take this simple first step. Fill out the necessary information about your customer, product, or service, and then continue with the sales process. Be sure to match your product or service to the specific needs of your client’s business. In this case, the service/product elements are arranged and tailored to be offered as a package. Quantity, service or product units offered, and configuration regulations are key factors to take into account in this situation.
Price:
You accurately establish the pricing right away following the product configuration. Set the prices in line with the various price lists. Apply customer-specific discounts at your discretion, and let Salesforce handle the calculations. There has never been a better time to generate precise quotes or use dynamic pricing in brand-aligned PDF documents. With a few clicks, sales professionals can quickly compute unit, block, subscription, and discount prices.
Quote:
Next comes the creation of quotes after the price is decided. You need to obtain quotations’ approval and signatures as the last phase of your sales procedure. The entire process, from the opportunity through the cash collection, is covered by this process, which is also known as the Quote-to-cash process. With the aid of Salesforce CPQ, users can create precisely unique, on-brand quotes. With the help of fundamental data, quotes can be produced quite quickly. Both PDF papers and electronic records of quotes are referred to as quotes. Go to (SF link/optional) for further information.
Product Bundle
A product bundle is a collection of various services and goods that are specifically offered to customers as a single package. The product bundle includes numerous records, including configuration attributes, option constraints, product features, and options. There are three categories:
Static Bundle – The static bundle, sometimes referred to as the classic bundle, is a fixed bundle in which the products are predefined at the bundle creation and do not allow for changes after setup.
Nested bundle: As its name suggests, a nested bundle is made up of multiple previously combined elements. This can increase convenience by allowing users to choose from a limited number of options offered in a single product.
Configurable bundle – These bundles can be tailored to the specific needs of the customer. They allow you to add configurable products to your bundle, however, there are some limitations to prevent unrealistic settings.
In order to configure a product bundle in CPQ, the following records must be present: products, product options, product features, option restrictions, and configuration attributes.
CPQ Product Pricing
Salesforce CPQ provides numerous price options for items. It is critical for CPQ customers to understand the various pricing techniques in order to select the optimal price approach that matches their operational model. This allows you to use all of Salesforce CPQ’s capabilities.
Product pricing techniques are classified into the following categories:
- List price
- Cost price
- Block price
- Batch price
- Percent of Total
- Contracted price
List price
List price is used when the user has set pricing for a product or service. The list prices can be simply accessed from the editable price book entries—but only if the editable checkbox is checked. Discounts can also be applied to the list price.
Cost-and-Markup Pricing enables your sales agents to select a price based on the cost and then add a markup amount. In contrast to the list price and discount paradigm, this gives salespeople entire control over the price quote with dynamic modifications.
Block Pricing
Allow your sales reps to price products based on different quantity ranges, known as block prices. This pricing model can be used when you need to price your products in groups or bundles.
Batch pricing
The batch price is only applicable to product selections within a bundle. Batch pricing does not apply to standalone products. Based on quantity ranges, this pricing model is used to price supplemental product alternatives and components.
Percent of total pricing – Also known as the dynamic pricing model, this pricing strategy allows you to configure products and price them based on the sum percent of other quote line items. The price of the product is entirely reliant on the other products in the quote under this model.
Contracted Pricing – This pricing model is useful when your salespeople wish to keep the negotiated prices even after the contract is signed. Contracted pricing allows your sales representatives to quote the prices that were initially agreed upon.
Best Reasons to Choose Salesforce CPQ Software for your Sales team
Creating Professional Quotes
The company’s professionalism in dealing with consumers is a key component of its identity. Implementing highly personalized and clever quotation templates makes it easier to provide consumers with fantastic sales incentives, accounts, and finely branded offers and merge them with your e-signature to quickly seal deals.
Guided Sales
Salesforce streamlines and improves the sales process via guided selling. It is an intriguing feature that permits entering customer information into a practical tool and giving the best product packages in accordance with particular needs. Customers receive the most appropriate solutions while saving time and effort on manual quotations.
Subscription Billing and Management
Salesforce CPQ is a wise investment when dealing with goods or services that are retailed and invoiced on a recurrent basis. Automating the entire subscription billing process, it optimizes repetitive accounting and revenue management. It also helps you manage Free Trials, setup expenses, refunds, discounts, and renewals in a single dashboard and enables configurable payment criteria for particular customer requests.
Intelligent Analytics and Reporting Automation
Salesforce CPQ will integrate the sales process with sales profitability-based applications and solutions to help you make smarter decisions. You can utilize logic to increase sales activities, data collection techniques, and pricing based on market realities such as trending market prices by applying in-built platform technologies such as Salesforce Einstein Artificial Intelligence. Salesforce’s CPQ feature also allows you to generate automated reports on performance and profitability.
Cloud and mobile compatibility
Salesforce CPQ is totally cloud-based and mobile. It is a highly secure cloud-based solution created by Salesforce professionals to set up, price, and quote complex goods and services. It allows you to provide smart, dependable deals to customers on the go.
Increased Revenue and Lowered Costs
Among the many advantages of CPQ software include formalizing regulations and pricing, providing standards across the firm, enhancing efficiency, and more.
CPQ software generates up-sell and cross-sells proposals automatically. It helps your sales agents to quickly increase the average quote and order size. Companies that adopt CPQ should expect to experience a 105% increase in average deal size.
It boosts income by providing tools for sales to upsell and cross-sell, reduces admin work so that sales reps can concentrate on selling, and makes new pricing structures possible. Additionally, it lowers expenses by ensuring discount levels, lowering errors, and reducing worker turnover.
Encourage easy departmental collaboration
You already know that CPQ makes it easy for salespeople to swiftly write accurate quotes, but it is capable of much more. Efficiency is significantly impacted by CPQ. The ability for the entire organization to participate in one of CPQ software’s main features. If implemented properly, CPQ deployments enable various combinations of the sales, renewals, finance, and legal teams. So, instead of being forced to sell designs that are unworkable from a financial or legal standpoint, your salesmen can.
Integrate With Other Systems
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems can be connected with CPQ programs. These integrations aid in streamlining the overall procedure. Implementing salesforce CPQ is likely driven mostly by CPQ and ERP integration, which connects the sales and operational teams. Because operations, materials, and manufacturing departments are kept informed, integrating CPQ with ERP results in lower operating expenses and improved on-time output. Decisions made by organizations based on data can be improved.
Focused revenues and sales
Do you realize that just 34% of the time spent by salespeople is spent actually selling? For the uninitiated, creating quotations, and proposals, and obtaining approvals take up a significant portion of a sales team’s work. CPQ is a very advantageous remedy for this. Your company benefits from CPQ, and it aids your sales representatives in navigating typical sales obstacles. CPQ might be a better option if your reps frequently submit erroneous quotes to prospects, manually evaluate quotes, or use legacy quote configurators. It results in 10 times faster quote creation and a reduction in approval time, therefore, enhancing the efficiency of the salespeople.
Additionally, as we previously mentioned, billing and CPQ work together to improve the revenue management capabilities of the Salesforce marketing cloud revenue software.
Conclusion: Invest in CPQ Software Right Away!
The potential of Salesforce CPQ in the contemporary business environment is explained by these factors. The sales staff of well-known, large companies uses this Salesforce solution. Additionally, small and new businesses are now impacted by the trend. With the goal of raising sales standards, brands are now ready to use this new tool.
Businesses that wish to increase efficiency and automate administrative activities in the sales process may consider investing in a sophisticated CPQ platform. The Salesforce CPQ Software was created by specialists and offers a variety of configurable features that optimize the entire process from beginning to end, assisting you in enhancing your sales efficiency and generating consistent revenue.
For the reps and the business, Salesforce’s CPQ will result in a better journey and more sales. In order to keep up with the times as a business owner, you must update your outdated procedures with contemporary ones.
Oaktree software offers clients specialized Salesforce consulting services. We assist businesses in successfully improving their revenue. We assist organizations in the proper and efficient maintenance of their Salesforce CPQ services.
Reach out to us at marketing@oaktreesoftware.com To know more about the benefits of the Salesforce CPQ solution.
