Salesforce CPQ is a powerful tool for quoting automation. But is it worth it? And how do you know if it’s suited to your business?
Salesforce CPQ (Configure-Price-Quote) is used widely across Salesforce users of all industries and specialisations to drive powerful, automated quoting processes for any given product configuration scenario. It has allowed countless businesses to get on top of their quoting, saving their teams thousands in both time and cash, while producing more accurate and meaningful quotes for their customers and records.
But if you’re less familiar with the tool, it can be hard to figure out if it will be worth the investment or provide the results you’re looking for within your business. That’s why we’ve devised some key criteria to help our customers answer the million-dollar question – is Salesforce CPQ a good fit for my business?
- Your product offerings and their pricings are often complex
For some businesses, product offerings can range anywhere from a simple, standardised product, to something with multiple specialised add-ons or fittings, or a complicated combination of products. Often, quoting for these types of products relies on a high level of expertise held by sales reps who have typically invested months or even years developing their product knowledge. On top of complex products, many sales teams have to juggle complicated pricing structures for their quotes. And when you have to configure these manually, it can become a lot for your reps to handle.
With Salesforce CPQ, even brand-new employees can complete a complex quote with relative ease. The guided solution removes the hard work and expertise required for the sales teams. Upon choosing a product, the system can display possible add-ons or combinations and automatically calculate and fill pricing structures. CPQ also takes the stress out of pricing, with pre-configured structures of any complexity at your sales teams’ fingertips. Whether you deal in pricing tiers, regional pricing quantity breaks, bundle pricing, option pricing or anything in between, CPQ can automate it. Businesses that previously invested months of sales training in their teams can now be confident in their reps out in the field after a much shorter training period.
- Your quotes are prone to inaccuracies
Whether it be due to complexity of products, or just human error (we’ve all been there!), producing an accurate quote can be hit or miss. Aside from creating confusion with your customers and spending valuable time fixing mistakes, inaccurate quotes can impact the reliability and value of your data and reporting.
Automated quoting with CPQ reduces the potential for mistakes, with a much more intelligent and intuitive process, leaning on pre-fill data and automated calculations where possible. It allows your reps to be more confident in the way they quote and replace time spent sense-checking with valuable customer interactions.
- Quoting is time-consuming – and costing more than it should
When it comes to manual quoting, so much time and money is spent producing, proofing and delivering quotes. CPQ is pre-configured, allowing sales reps to simply select the necessary product or combination and Salesforce will automate the rest. Quotes will pre-fill with prices and other necessary data, Salesforce accounts will sync automatically, and the quote will be ready to be sent in no time. Sales reps will earn hours back in their day to spend more productively on increasing their sales volume and conversion.
- Sales reps produce quotes of varying detail and layouts
All sales reps are different, and, when left to their own devices, will produce quotes that look and feel the best to them. But that’s not always what your business is looking for. A lack of standardisation of your quoting process can result in different reps capturing different information in quotes with different styles and layouts. Not only can this cause issues with putting these quotes to use internally, but it can also cause confusion for your customers, and damage the consistency of your brand.
CPQ’s pre-defined quote fields and layouts ensure that your quotes remain consistent, regardless of which sales rep completes them. By standardising the quoting process, you can be confident that your reps are capturing data that makes sense, provides value and aligns with the brand of your business.
- Your customers value subscriptions and renewals
Subscriptions and renewals are a great option for many businesses and are a sure-fire way to keep your customers happy and engaged. But if recurring orders have to be managed, quoted and followed through with manually every time, doesn’t it take away from the whole point?
With Salesforce CPQ, your customers’ subscriptions can be managed automatically, and you can easily upsell to your customers, and update their upcoming purchases accordingly. CPQ will also deal with renewals and the associated contracts and entitlements for you and give back hours to your sales team’s week.
- You want to deliver a great customer experience
Like any other business, you want your customers to have the best experience they can when interacting with your team. For a business like yours, part of that means delivering comprehensive, accurate and consistent quotes to customers within deadlines. Salesforce CPQ ensures that this is possible, through limiting the potential for error, standardising processes and layouts, and reducing time spent generating quotes.
If some, or even just one, of these ideas resonated with you, that could be a sign for you to see what Salesforce CPQ could do for you! Our team are more than happy to help, so get in touch if you’d like to find out more. You can also read our case study with Polymaster to see Salesforce CPQ in action.