4 Signs You Need CPQ Software

Increasingly, forward-leaning B2B companies are turning to CPQ software to help them create accurate, compelling quotes quickly and with greater control.

Traditional quoting processes often rely on disparate systems, data silos, and knowledge experts that create bottlenecks and risks, in turn making the quoting process disconnected, slow, error-prone, and costly to maintain.

Read more: What is CPQ?

Does your company experience any of the following challenges?

• Sales teams struggle to maximize the deal size and demonstrate the value of your company's products and services.
• Forecasting is difficult, inaccurate and frequently out of date, increasing business planning risk.
• Service teams are reactive, needing to spend extra time researching what your customers are entitled to under their contract, and ensuring your company delivers what has been agreed upon.
• The opportunity to sell highly profitable spares and service contracts is severely limited.
• Sales teams waste time that could be spent finding and landing more customers. 

If any of the pitfalls mentioned above sound familiar to you, consider adopting a smarter and more automated approach to generating quotes.

Here are four tell-tale signs it may be time for your company to move to a CPQ solution:

1. You use spreadsheets or custom-built systems to price and quote

Using outdated tools to configure products, calculate prices and generate proposals means that you incur avoidable costs, leaving money on the table with every deal, thus constraining your growth. Your ability to scale is restricted, as is your flexibility to change.

2. Sales are growing faster than your sales team’s ability to operate

As your company grows, so will the number of sales quotes you need to generate – and the amount of time your sales team will spend generating them. To be able to keep up with the demand, you are compelled to cut corners, ultimately hurting your ability to provide quality. Consequently, conversion rates will decrease, and job satisfaction takes a hit.

3. Inaccurate proposals are reducing profits

When time frames are squeezed and/or complexity is present, your sales teams regularly run into problems with producing accurate quotes. Correcting these at a later stage incurs cost. Without accurate cost calculation and margin control, you may win quotes – but not always generate the expected profit. You can even suffer financial and reputational loss: Sending out inaccurate quotes to prospects is embarrassing, kills trust and costs money.

4. Approvals are manual and slow

Manually reviewing all quotes to ensure accuracy is a recipe for an inefficient sales organization. Plus, it doesn’t scale. A constraint exists, and when this person is out of the business, a blockage occurs. When your sales teams are regularly waiting for approvals, your customers could be losing patience or even looking elsewhere.

Conclusion

To be successful and grow in a highly competitive B2B sales environment, your company must increase its quoting capacity and conversion rate. Investing in the right CPQ software solution to streamline and automate your sales process is vital to achieving this.

Cloud-based CPQ software is consistent and scalable, enabling your sales teams and buyers alike to have updated specialist information available to them through any device at all times. This reduces the time it takes to create an accurate quality quote from hours to minutes and even seconds. Moreover, recruits can be onboarded faster to help you meet your sales goals sooner.

In short, excellent CPQ software helps your company become easier to buy from.