Advanced CPQ Solutions for Robust, Digital Buyer Journeys

Adjustments to the COVID-19 office closures and travel restrictions accelerated the process of digital transformation in business drastically. In Europe and North America, the average company experienced three years’ worth of digital customer interactions in just the first six months into the pandemic.

The migration to online channels–where global competition is supremely high–has put buyers in a very strong position to dictate their sales dynamics and interaction preferences. And what they prefer is self-directed, compelling digital experiences, on-demand and on their own terms.

As this transformation of customer expectations continues, advanced configure, price, quote (CPQ) solutions have become crucial to meeting the challenges and demands of this complex new business environment.

Businesses looking to adopt CPQ technologies and arm their sales teams with tools to deliver what customers really want through augmented digital experiences are completely transforming challenges into opportunities across multiple industries.

In the words of Juniper Networks CRO Marcus Jewell, “The biggest opportunity for technology and systems to improve the selling, by far, is enhancing the value of a sales interaction.” This article defines CPQ systems and then looks at the role advanced CPQ solutions have to play in augmenting the capability of sales teams to meet customer expectations.

Takeaways

• In this era of accelerated digital transformation, sales teams require tools to deliver fast and accurate quotes while creating engaging digital experiences to tailor customer preferences.

• Configure-price-quote (CPQ) platforms enable sales teams to create quotes for highly configurable products with significantly reduced risk of errors in pricing and design capabilities.

• Advanced CPQ solutions integrate other applications like CAD and business rules engines for breaking up bottlenecks and consolidating the technical proficiencies of sales teams.

CPQ

Configure, price, quote (CPQ) software refers to a program or software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform designed to allow sellers to create fast, accurate quotes for complex, highly configurable products.

CPQ applications contain exhaustive information about product configurable like parts and features while having access to live market prices. This information interpreted by predetermined rule sets allows users to quickly explore any possible product configuration in a complex system without the risk of miscalculating pricing or offering customers unworkable designs.

In simple terms, this means that CPQ users–sales reps or end-users interacting with a web interface–can configure a product that’s guaranteed to be error-free. They can access an immediate price and quote document for their configurable product, saving them a lot of time and money.

Why Businesses Look Into Advanced CPQ Software

Companies use CPQ platforms for helping sales teams appropriately allot their time to profit-generating customer interactions. Across multiple industries, sales representatives spend 66% of their time on redundant manual tasks like data entry, proposal writing, and combing spreadsheets with obsolete tools to try and assemble specific quote requests from multiple unintegrated sources.

CPQ software automates the more time-consuming tasks in the process while significantly reducing the risk of errors. With real-time access to trusted product configurations, sales teams can then simultaneously handle higher sales volumes to deliver a better service overall.

CPQ automates and also simplifies the in-person sales process at a time when skilled labor is short in supply. It also enables buyers to self-serve online, providing better control over their customer journey and also reducing the burden on sales teams. Buyers can also configure, price, and quote their products any time of day, from anywhere, cutting down the sales cycle duration from weeks to just a few minutes in multiple instances.

Advanced CPQ solutions render slow and confusing legacy software obsolete, replacing them with scalable solutions to improve performance while also keeping pace with swift revenue growth as well. A rules-based system ensures configuration, pricing, and quoting accuracy without any need for tiring checks and balances, topping up with a manual supervisory review.

3 Features of Advanced CPQ Solutions for Better Sales Customer Interactions

In the past few years, CPQ service providers have developed newer, more advanced features to enhance the sales experience further on. To completely appreciate the dynamic role CPQ can play in sales and customer interactions, let’s get into three advanced CPQ features that every manufacturer needs to look for when assessing new CPQ solutions.

Visual CPQ Software

The complex product configurations common to modern manufacturing should be able to do more than accurately reflect pricing and design possibilities. They need to be able to convince customers that you can deliver exactly what is being imagined. For this very reason, product configurations represented in a dynamic visual medium outperform even some of the most descriptive text-based deliveries.

Tools to bring products to life in 2D, 3D, and Augmented Reality transform the complete CPQ performance and change how manufacturers look into product management. Recent studies have found that visual CPQ tools with visual configurators show 40% more online conversion rates and boost the average sales price by 30%.

Integration Capabilities

In today’s increasingly integrated software ecosystem, nobody has the time to toggle multiple application interfaces and databases to reassemble information they have but cannot access everything in one place.

CPQ, CRM, and ERP systems have succeeded in consolidating the application boost in their respective domains. But these inaccurate systems also need to be integrated and create a single source of truth.

Though complex custom development in the past, integrating multiple SaaS platforms has become as simple as clicking a few buttons, making the most of APIs. As development costs are no longer a barrier, complete app integration is now becoming standard for competitive CPQ platforms.

CAD & Manufacturing Automation

The ability to create compelling visuals for custom product configurations gives customers the confidence that their requirements have been fully communicated and that you can deliver what they are looking for.

Nevertheless, passing design specifications back and forth between sales teams as well as engineering departments often bottlenecks the complete sales process and also cancels out the benefits of generating quotes faster with CPQ.

CPQ solutions automating CAD functionalities as per custom engineering rule sets can eliminate this issue. With the ability to render CAD drawings on their own, sales teams can turn compelling quotes around more efficiently while also routing material as well as design information to engineering and manufacturing.

CPQ Solutions That Match Your Requirements

The best CPQ solutions for any business depend on the industry and scale of operations. Nevertheless, the advanced functionalities mentioned above will largely enhance the ability of sales teams in any possible context to do more with less and also keep pace with dynamic customer expectations.