Today’s business environments are fast-paced, demanding, and competitive.
Using technologies that simplify the handling of otherwise complex proposals can give you a clear advantage over your competitors.
For that reason, businesses that don’t want to fall behind are using CPQ (Configure, Price, Quoting) software to increase efficiency, reduce workload, and effectively eliminate the errors that come with dynamic and complex pricing structures.
With so many CPQ solutions out there, finding the perfect one with the specific features you need can be overwhelming, to say the least.
We cover what capabilities you should look for, how they can increase operational efficiency, and provide helpful tips to ensure you pick the best solution for providing tangible results for your business.
The importance of selecting the right CPQ solution
For any business that needs to generate quotes and proposals, whether it be to other businesses, service providers, manufacturers or wholesalers, the goal of CPQ software is to simplify the process and increase pricing accuracy.
In a nutshell, it improves your business.
By removing the manual work and having automation handle the pricing process, you can get quotes out faster, more accurately, and increase your close rates.
This is important when multiple departments (such as sales and operations) are involved, as anyone can work from a single dataset source.
The system keeps all teams informed by updating data in real time.
CPQ platforms vary significantly in their capabilities.
This means you must carefully evaluate your business needs to find a solution that provides all the required features, analytics, and system integrations you require.
What is CPQ and what can it do?
When taking a 10,000-foot view of CPQ software, it is a sales tool designed to automate the systems involved with pricing so your business can get quotes to clients faster.
For any business that uses dynamic pricing rules, such as tiered pricing, or configuration discounts, providing these quotes can be time-consuming, and carry a significant risk of human error.
Automating these tasks ensures accurate, real-time price calculations for your customers.
CPQ isn’t only used by sales teams—customers can also use it to customize their purchase and get immediate pricing without having to go back and forth with a sales rep.
This also frees up your sales reps to focus less on manual pricing, and to spend more time on solidifying relationships and closing deals.
In the B2B space, it has similar applications. A company might customize order specifications or may need to factor in volume discounts or delivery lead times based on inventory.
CPQ can handle all of it in real time.
For a more comprehensive look at what CPQ can do and how it can benefit your business, we encourage you to check out our detailed guide here: What is CPQ?
Enhanced features for businesses
When it comes to business efficiency, the benefits of CPQ solutions extend far beyond that of just providing a price.
Business operations can be complex and fast-paced.
Modern CPQ software’s enhanced feature set accommodates these complexities and ensures cross-team data coherence at all times.
Complex product configuration
Suppose your business offers products or services with intricate customization options, dependencies, and rules.
You’ll be able to present everything to your customers with clear visualizations.
You have full control over dynamic rule enforcement to ensure any order placed with you conforms to your specified criteria and is priced accurately.
Products can also be customized on a per-customer basis to accommodate things like contract agreements, facilitating a bespoke experience tailored to each customer.
You’ll never need to commit client-specific pricing adjustments to memory or have to defer to the sales rep to figure out what’s going on.
The system provides access to all the information needed at any time.
Real-time dynamic pricing
For businesses using timed sales, volume-based discounts, or promotions, having to manually apply pricing adjustments to every quote is both time-consuming and prone to errors.
CPQ software can integrate business-wide dynamic pricing in real-time, ensuring quotes given to customers always accommodate any necessary adjustments. Sales reps will never be behind on what they can offer clients.
Guided selling
Guided selling is a helpful feature that can assist sales reps through the quoting process.
Providing structure to the quoting workflow and offering helpful prompts, recommendations, and reminders so you can ensure their sales ethos is in line with your businesses.
This is particularly helpful to less-experienced sales reps, increasing their efficiency while reducing training time.
New sales reps will feel less stressed thanks to the helping hand provided by CPQ.
Seamless CRM platform integration
Many businesses rely heavily on CRM platforms such as Salesforce or HubSpot to manage interactions between customers, sales, finance, and marketing teams.
CPQ integration allows data to be synchronized between multiple systems.
Giving sales reps full access to a customer’s buying history, any support cases, and other relevant information.
This cross-team communication reassures everyone is in the loop at all times and reduces time spent sending emails to find out what another team has discussed with a client.
Production and manufacturing teams can benefit from being alerted to potential upcoming jobs, which helps when creating production schedules, managing inventory space, and logistics planning.
In-depth analytics and reports
Accurate data tracking is essential for identifying buying trends, sales performance, and process optimization.
CPQ systems provide powerful analytics and reports across your business.
Giving you valuable insights into how things are running and allowing you to make well-informed, data-driven decisions to optimize your business.
Business-wide benefits
CPQ platforms are transformative systems that allow other departments within your business to figure out what’s working and what isn’t.
Let’s take a detailed look at how different teams benefit from the variety of tools a good CPQ platform offers.
Sales teams
Sales teams are the primary users of CPQ. They are your first points of contact for customers and responsible for providing an enjoyable experience and accurate information.
CPQ makes sales reps’ lives easier by offering user-friendly and accurate quoting systems that automatically accommodate all the complexities of pricing (such as dependencies, discounts, and customer-based pricing).
It efficiently organizes the workflow so they can operate faster and with more accuracy, even when dealing with complicated products or services.
By automating their otherwise laborious pricing tasks, your sales reps are free to focus on more important things, like building relationships with the clients, using upselling strategies, and closing deals.
RevOps teams
RevOps teams thrive off of accurate analytical data. It’s crucial for their ability to determine sales performance.
CPQ software offers a suite of reporting tools that provide invaluable information on pipeline health, allowing RevOps to identify inefficiencies and develop strategies to address bottlenecks, speeding up the sales process.
With this data, RevOps can monitor the performance of your business’s pricing systems, such as discounts, pricing tiers, and product configurations.
Thanks to cross-platform integration, data flow across teams is seamless and accurate.
Marketing
One of the challenges businesses face is facilitating strong collaboration between the marketing and sales teams.
Manually communicating information is time-consuming and can lead to errors because of missed information.
This then turns into incorrect quotes and potentially embarrassing situations with your customers.
CPQ helps here by providing real-time price updates, instantly reflecting marketing promotions or specials in the software and confirming no one is left out of the loop.
Marketing teams will have access to valuable buying trends and customer demand.
Allowing them to target marketing campaigns and identifying opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.
Finance
Finance needs to ensure that pricing policies are being adhered to and can use CPQ to protect revenue margins..
Finance can implement internal pricing within the quoting system. Ensuring the marketing team and sales only works within the parameters your business has set.
Finance plays a role in supporting RevOps by providing information on deal profitability over time or identifying key areas where revenue is being lost.
CPQ can help report on data and share it across teams so both finance and RevOps can create refined pricing strategies and tighten margins.
If your business uses subscription-based services, CPQ can also integrate with billing systems to automate processes such as renewals and upgrades.
Reducing finance workload and improving the customer experience by allowing them to manage their service by themselves without having to go through a salesperson.
Product development
Thanks to the detailed analytics provided by CPQ, product development teams gain valuable insight into customer preferences and buying habits.
They can use this information to refine development strategies based on real-world demand, ensuring product alignment with consumer buying habits, which reduces risk and maximizes profitability.
Implementing CPQ into your business
CPQ solutions are multi-faceted tools with considerable customizability.
After all, they need to be used across a range of industries, with each business having its own goals and motives for CPQ implementation.
Let’s look at what’s required to ensure successful CPQ implementation in your business and how you can ensure you’re using it to its maximum potential.
Identifying your businesses needs
We’ve spoken about the myriad of benefits a CPQ solution can provide to your business.
Before starting the process, you need to identify which ways CPQ is going to benefit your teams so you can use them to their maximum potential.
Try to get a clear understanding of your goals, problems, and pain points that you wish to address with the use of CPQ.
For example, manual pricing might be eating up a lot of the sales team’s time and there are frequent errors in quotes.
Or perhaps orders are being placed in configurations that you did not intend to supply, which causes production delays.
Communicating with all relevant teams to identify these challenges allows you to implement CPQ software directly to counter these issues in a way that aligns with your business objectives.
Tangible return on Investment
The goal of CPQ is to bring real-world benefits to your business, such as efficiency improvements, error reductions, and enhancing your customer’s experience.
Establishing clear expectations of what you want to get from the system will clarify that the investment and implementation of a CPQ system will be a worthwhile undertaking.
Implementation and management
To ensure all relevant departments’ needs are met, it’s beneficial to put together a task force that includes representatives from each department.
These members can ensure the CPQ system accommodates the needs of each team during its implementation process.
Having a dedicated project manager who can oversee the overall implementation can ensure the process keeps moving and features are being rolled out according to the arranged schedule.
Choosing the right platform
Choosing the right CPQ platform is crucial for success.
You need to find vendors that can meet the needs of your business, can scale based on your requirements, and can integrate with the currently-existing systems within your business.
You want to pick a vendor who wants you to succeed and will support you during and after implementation with excellent customer support.
Once you have identified your business needs and solidified a team that can oversee its implementation, the next step is deciding which platform will work best for your business.
Here are the key features you should consider when picking a platform that aligns with your business goals:
1. Detailed Analytics
Produces reports that track key points of data across multiple teams, enabling you to adjust your strategies in a given area to improve effectiveness and address bottlenecks.
This may include things such as tracking sales performance, identifying trends, and quoting insights such as win rates and customer success data.
2. Guided Selling
This feature offers tailored solutions to customers based on their needs and budget.
It helps simplify complex product configurations with helpful recommendations specified within your business parameters.
It helps your sales reps by ensuring they follow your business guidelines, offering helpful prompts, and assisting with onboarding new hires.
This cuts down training time and gets people on the job faster.
3. Dynamic Pricing
For configurable sales, products, and services, dynamic pricing is an essential tool that adjusts pricing in real-time based on the chosen product configuration while factoring in sales, discounts, and taxes.
It warrants everything in your business adheres to a specified pricing structure and you can tailor it to specific customers, regions, and product lines.
Allowing for absolute quoting accuracy down to a per-customer level.
4. CRM Integration
Having your CPQ system integrate with your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software will enhance the accuracy of pricing, facilitate collaboration between sales, marketing, and support teams, and ensure all that information is shared in real-time across all teams.
This increases access to information, helps customer service and sales reps respond faster, and ultimately boosts customer satisfaction and retention.
5. eSignature capabilities
eSignature enables customers to sign documents remotely, which is a huge timesaver when you need legally compliant signatures for proposals and contracts.
This eliminates the need for physical documents. It’s just as secure and often easier for the client as it’s all done digitally.
6. Payment processing
CPQ payment processing allows customers to pay for products or services directly from the provided quote.
This simplifies the process and reduces job complexity.
Allowing you to close deals faster, leading to better cash flow and less overall work for finance.
It’s helpful for services with recurring payments as it can all be handled automatically which customers find very convenient.
Additional features include customized document generation, enabling you to populate generated quotes and contracts with the relevant sales representatives’ details and include additional company branding.
This guarantees that the interaction stays between the customer and the allocated sales rep, resulting in a smooth customer experience.
Integration with your current tech stack can be invaluable in eliminating the need for manual data entry. Saving time and reducing error margins on sales operations.
How to find the perfect CPQ solution for your business
Choosing the right CPQ solution for your business requires careful consideration of both your current and future needs.
Start by defining your business requirements—such as your sales process, product catalog, and integration needs.
Once you have a clear understanding, you can evaluate various platforms based on their capabilities and features.
By taking a methodical approach to evaluating different CPQ solutions, you can find the one that aligns best with your business needs and sets your teams up for success.
Ready to streamline your sales process?
Try PandaDoc CPQ today and experience the power of an intuitive, feature-rich solution designed to boost efficiency and close deals faster.
With flawless document generation, guided selling, and easy integration with your tech stack, PandaDoc CPQ helps your sales teams work smarter, not harder.
Disclaimer
PandaDoc is not a law firm, or a substitute for an attorney or law firm. This page is not intended to and does not provide legal advice. Should you have legal questions on the validity of e-signatures or digital signatures and the enforceability thereof, please consult with an attorney or law firm. Use of PandaDoc services are governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
