5 Ways that a CPQ System will Help Drive Inbound Marketing

Every commercial manufacturing organization must make sales to survive. After all, if customers don’t buy your product or service, you won’t be in business long. And while many technology solutions help organizations save money through efficiencies and workflow improvements, fewer help you make money. Fortunately, new sales enablement tools like XaitCPQ are changing all that.

Remove the Friction

One effective way to enable more sales is to remove friction from the sales process. You can do that by improving your inbound marketing. While standard outbound marketing works to entice prospective customers with outreach and content they don’t always want, inbound marketing connects with customers without them even knowing it. Customers come to you when they find that you help solve a problem or meet a need that they already have.

Improve Inbound Marketing

When customers trust you it’s much more likely they will buy from you. Over 80% of buyers do online research before making a purchase. And 46% of buyers say they pay more to purchase from brands they trust. Companies win more customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. In the end, if you can build trust and awareness with buyers who are doing their own research you will likely land them as customers.

Leverage Every Customer Interaction

What if you could leverage the advantages of inbound marketing in every customer interaction? That’s where a sales enablement tool like XaitCPQ comes in. The cloud-based configure-price-quote solution enables you to do much more than simply respond with a quote or proposal.It makes it easy for sales teams to quickly and correctly present any combination of inbound and outbound marketing content in the form of mini-websites, listing relevant benefits, offering ROI calculators, 3D visualization tools, and e-commerce portals.

Capabilities that Give You an Edge

The capabilities built into XaitCPQ are especially powerful for large organizations with multiple product offerings, advanced service options and programs, across multiple countries. Here are some to consider.

• Web Proposals – The goal is to lead with your best foot forward. Many manufacturers respond to requests for proposals or provide quotes for equipment and services using old-school PDFs and spreadsheets. This provides essentially no opportunity to strengthen the conversation and position the organization as a trusted knowledge leader and resource. Web based proposals generated with XaitCPQ, however, change all that with a curated landing page that does more than just deliver the quote requested. It gives marketers and sales teams the ability to put together a microsite customized for that customer interaction. Quotes? You bet. But also any variety of custom videos, spec sheets, cost and configure calculators and more that make the buying decision easy. Meanwhile, you build trust and remove friction in the process.
• ROI Calculator – The first thing that any executive will ask before signing the check for new equipment is “What is the ROI?” It shouldn’t take weeks or months to figure that out. What if ROI was easily calculated right within your quote microsite? What’s more, what if your customer could dynamically evaluate their return on investment by simply changing the configuration and terms in real-time? You can do that with XaitCPQ. Empowered with a thoughtful ROI (not just guesstimates or hype) your customers are more likely to trust you. And they’ll be more likely to purchase because the experience is tactile and immediate (unlike trading email and spreadsheets); users enter figures and move some sliders around, so they become active participants in the sale.
  
  
• 3D Visualization – It’s one thing to talk about a solution, it’s another to see it. XaitCPQ has built-in a 3D visualization feature that gives both sales reps and customers a means to instantly visualize what is being configured or built. Users configure the desired product and see the effect of these changes visually. The system also generates CAD files and quotation drawings that make the buying process more engaging. Seeing is believing. When a customer can see the solution itself, and adjust and configure it as needed, they are much more likely to purchase.
  
  
• Distributor Portals – Your distributors are your best customers, and much like your microsite, distributor portals are customized to engender distributors to continue to engage. Most of us are familiar with login access “Already a customer? Log in here.” This portal presents content and information that is curated to make it easy and frictionless for distributors to purchase again. Engagement could be as simple as clicking on “where is my last quote” to gain access to everything they need to repeat the process. Distributors gain access to ROI calculators and visualization features, as well as curated sales content and distributor discounts that provide a sales incentive.
  
  
• E-Commerce – What if you could sell more without doing more? The e-commerce capabilities that XaitCPQ unlocks allow your customers to purchase on their own. Since most consumers do their research before they buy it makes sense to give them a way to purchase that is easy to access, easy to understand, and makes it easy to buy from you. One good example is Dell Computer; you sign on to their site, select from various systems, add-ons, and configurations, get a price and hit “purchase.” More and more b2b organizations are moving to this style of e-commerce, especially with distributors and repeat customers since it allows you to sell more at higher margins.

It’s time to consider how a CPQ solution like XaitCPQ can help you sell more, and sell in more ways. The software makes it easy to run multiple pricing models at once. With just a few clicks both sales reps and end customers can configure, price, quote, and engage with various scenarios. The result is that manufacturing organizations build a more robust and agile proposal process that increases the chance of making the sale, landing it ahead of the competition, and closing the deal with higher revenue than ever before.

Related article: Three Steps to Driving Services Revenue with XaitCPQ