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The traditional quoting process often relies on manual tasks, a variety of spreadsheets, multiple data systems, and experts whose time comes at a premium. It consumes time and creates errors, delays, and risks that increase your costs and stall your sales cycle.
Does your company experience any of the following challenges?
- Wasted time better spent finding more customers and closing more deals.
- Limited opportunities due to challenges selling highly profitable spares and service contracts?
- Increased risk based on frequently out of date and inaccurate quotes, contracts and forecasting data?
- Increased costs and delays due to manual errors and expert dependencies?
- Disappointed customers looking for an easier, more personal buying process?
The right CPQ software eliminates these challenges. By adopting a smarter and more automated approach to generating quotes, CPQ software lowers your costs and reduces your risk while boosting your bottom line.
Here are eight 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Using outdated tools to configure products, calculate prices and generate quotes causes risky errors and incurs avoidable overhead costs. Not only are you leaving money on the table with every deal, you are also restricting your ability to scale and grow, and adapt based on buyer and market changes.
2. Sales are growing faster than your sales team’s ability to operate
You’re growing and so to are the number of sales quotes you must generate to remain competitive. Manually generating each quote takes time. To keep up, you feel compelled to cut corners on customer-centric solutions and quality. As a result, customer satisfaction and conversion rates decrease and job satisfaction takes a hit.
3. Inaccurate proposals are reducing profits
Timeframes are tight and complexity is high, which often finds your sales reps running into configuration and dynamic pricing confusion that produces errors. Checking for and correcting these errors, and involving experts, incurs additional overhead costs. But sending out inaccurate quotes is a trust and reputation killer.
4. Approvals are manual and slow
Manually reviewing all quotes to ensure accuracy is the perfect recipe for an inefficient sales cycle. Just like trying to merge multiple cars onto the freeway all at once causes a bottleneck, your operations and expert team are the sales bottleneck. This leaves your sales reps waiting, and making excuses, while your customers lose patience or even look elsewhere.
5. Slow quote turnaround is frustrating customers
When your sales reps pull together a quote, they send it off to an expert or operations and wait for approval. When a pricing error or erroneous discount is found, the sales rep must switch gears, taking time away from customers. When experts are too busy to respond, or are away, another blockage occurs, making customers wait.
6. Lack of personalization is also disappointing customers
Your sales quotes are generic and feel impersonal. They leave buyers confused, feeling like a commodity, and wondering if you’re worth the price tag. Yet, manual effort and error-corrections leave little time for customer-centric solutions and personalized, contextual quotes. Exactly the type of quotes that showcase your value proposition, delight buyers, and propel them toward decision.
7. Buyers are in control
When today’s buyers reach out to your sales reps, they experience a sales pitch. Instead of the consultative experience they crave. Sales reps don’t know all of the product or service options and variations, or contract details, without in-depth expert or technical assistance. This means they are apologizing for not knowing, and delays, instead of closing deals. In fact, Forrester reports businesses that excel at customer experience see a 10% increase in annual revenue.
8. Complexity is on the rise
The complexity of your product catalog is growing rapidly to keep pace with the market and your competition. Perhaps your sales or pricing strategy is focused on servitization or subscriptions, or cross selling and up selling. What was once a handful of products with a handful of options now involves a thousand part numbers on a single quote, and a different price for each customer. Out of date tools, such as spreadsheets, manual processes and custom-built systems do not scale to the level of complexity you need to remain competitive.
Conclusion
To be successful and grow in today’s highly competitive B2B sales environment, your company must increase its quoting capacity and conversion rate. Investing in the right CPQ software to streamline and automate your sales process is vital to achieving these goals.
Cloud-based CPQ software is consistent and scalable, enabling your sales teams, buyers and suppliers to configure and price personalized quotes based on specialist information through any device, 24/7. This reduces the time it takes to create accurate, quality quotes from hours to minutes and even seconds. Moreover, recruits are on-boarded faster to help you meet your sales goals sooner.
In short, excellent CPQ software helps your company become easier to buy from and maximize profitable.
