How can CPQ increase your business bottom line?

As you might know CPQ stands for Configure, Price, Quote but in truth it offers so much more than just these three lettered initials suggest.

It may be seen as a cliché when we say the business world (in particular the sales function and routes to market) is constantly evolving. But no one can deny that the rate at which the business world has had to change and adapt has been faster in these past twelve months than in the previous five years combined.

Ignoring the events of this year, one thing we (as well as Salesforce) must acknowledge and respond to is that no two clients are the same. Having inflexible bundles of products, fixed pricing rates & tiering models and offering a set number of prebuilt packages no longer “cuts the mustard”. Customers want exactly what they want. They want a tailor-made mix of products and services to suit their precise needs. They expect consistent, accurate and tiered volume discounts. Otherwise they will walk on by to the next vendor that IS willing to bend over backwards to win their valuable business. 

This is where a powerful and reliable CPQ tool fits the bill perfectly. Salesforce saw this trend emerging a number of years ago and promptly decided to acquire an existing CPQ powerhouse called Steelbrick for their CPQ product suite, their knowledge and capability. They promptly re-engineered and enhanced the Steelbrick CPQ engine and moved it onto the Salesforce platform, ensuring that it sat neatly within their own well proven SalesCloud product suite and called it (perhaps unimaginatively) Salesforce CPQ.

Salesforce CPQ enables your sales team to provide accurate and scalable pricing, with a seemingly unlimited flexibility that will handle even the most complex product configuration scenario with ease. The business value provided by the tool’s flexibility, scalability and ability to help your sales people sell more strategically is unquestionable. 

It’s quite obvious that the more add-ons, more up-selling, and the ability for a business to ensure that every quote that is sent by their sales team will maximise revenue is a game changer. This added to the vastly increased efficiencies of the quotation building process and the ability to automate discount approvals, tracking each step of the sales process and ensuring any discounts are only approved by the management team when & if required. All of this while ensuring that every quotation is 100% accurate means that sales people love it too. They can do what they want to do and do best; sell. The burden of painful administrative and repetitive tasks, often fraught with cumbersome processes and with the potential for very costly errors could be a thing of the past. To a sales person this is pure gold.

The title of this blog asks how CPQ can help increase your business bottom line? Well thanks to Salesforce CPQ there are a number of areas where we can look at to provide really impactful results: 

• Vastly reduces the time taken to produce pricing quotes
• Reduces manual tasks and tedious repetitive processes
• Automated volume based tiered pricing approvals 
• Electronic and in-app discount approval processes
• Guided selling to recommend add-on and up-selling opportunities to maximise revenue potential for even the least tenured and experienced sales people – upsizing all sales deals
• Will only permit publication of approved pricing discounts and quotations
• Can pull in approvals and input from finance or legal departments for complex legal agreements or exceptions
• Completely removing the chance of costly errors or discounting too much
• Increasing confidence in the sales team by providing accurate quotes all of the time
• Sales people spend more time selling rather than doing low value admin, so they can sell more or spend more time offering a better service to your customers
• Your team will be less frustrated 

Whilst CPQ is a crucial tool in terms of process automation and streamlining, our customers get most excited at the prospect of substantially increasing the size of every sales deal by even a small amount. This makes a huge difference when you tally up all add-ons and up-sells on all deals over the course of the year. This is what makes the real difference.

Like everything Salesforce, CPQ is completely scalable. So if you have just 10 sales people right now but want to grow to have 100 or 10,000 in a number of months or years, no extra work is required. 

As with any technology project, once Salesforce CPQ is correctly configured and deployed across your teams, it will transform any existing sales process into a streamlined machine that maximises efficiencies, minimises time and resources required to provide accurate and profitable sales quotations, whilst making the sales journey for both clients and Sales team seamless.