Configure Price Quote or CPQ software, is a sales and quoting solution designed to help businesses generate highly accurate quotes based on specific configuration rules. It centralizes and automates rules on product, pricing, margins, etc. This centralized structure enables sales teams to access critical information in real-time wherever and whenever they need it.
CPQ tools bring a plethora of benefits to VAR businesses leading to increased revenue and overall business growth.
Here are the top signs why your company needs CPQ software
1. Your sales representatives struggle to balance product-pricing complexity.
Do your products have dynamic price structures, and you often find your sales teams struggling with pricing product bundles, configurations, etc., when customizing solutions for customers? If yes, then your business needs a CPQ tool to automate product catalogs, price rules and configurations.
Manual pricing and quoting processes for configurable products, multi-layered discounts, product bundling, etc., can be complex, tedious and error-prone leading to costly revenue loss for your business. Sales cycles become longer, resulting in lost deals, frustrated customers and a negative impact on your reputation, which can harm future business.
2. Your sales teams have a hard time upselling and cross-selling.
A common challenge when you add new products to your product catalog is that not all your sales reps are often in the loop, or even if they are, the chances of them recommending another product intuitively are low.
Many sales reps lose out on cross-sell and upsell opportunities costing the business added sales and an increased order value. New sales reps can find it all the more challenging to keep track of complex products. This can lead to frequent pricing and configuration errors related to complex product bundling and configurations.
CPQ solutions have a guided selling functionality that offers tips, recommendations, compatible products, upsell and cross-sell suggestions and more to help sales reps generate sales quotations that are customer-centric, and stand a higher chance of closing.
3. Your sales quotation process has long approval times
Does your company have multi-level approval workflows for your sales quotation process? Are they manual? If you answered yes to both, consider CPQ implementation to streamline and accelerate the sales cycle.
Slow approval processes result in sales reps getting caught in a web of iterations, delayed responses to RFQs (request for a quote) that often leave clients in limbo resulting in lost opportunities and sales.
CPQ tools like VARStreet have functionalities to build and automate approval workflows expediting your approval process and sales cycle.
4. Your sales team can be more efficient and productive
Do your sales reps struggle to meet customer expectations? Do they take longer than 24 hours to send a prospect a quotation? Are there errors in the quotes they create? These are all signs of a sales staff that is flustered with complex pricing structures and a lack of automation in catalog, pricing and quote creation. In this day and age, CPQ software is what your sales staff deserves.
CPQ software simplifies complex quoting for your sales teams. The time that would otherwise be spent on manual quote creation and cumbersome administrative tasks can be better spent meeting prospects, building customer relationships and selling.
Automated pricing, configuration, approval processes, etc., increase efficiencies and productivity for your sales teams. Empower them with a robust CPQ tool like VARStreet!
5. Your company’s revenue is on a flat trajectory
Growing bigger, scaling up, increasing revenue, and making more profit is what business is about. If your company has fallen into a comfortable rhythm with no upward trajectory, something is amiss.
You need to take a long hard look at all your processes and implement software solutions like CPQ, ERP, CRM, etc., and automate manual tasks, so your employees maximize their time on business development activities.
If any of the above scenarios resonate with you. Your company needs CPQ implementation. Call us 781-262-0610 on or fill in this quick form for a FREE demo.
If you are convinced of the benefits a CPQ tool can bring your organization but are unsure of which CPQ software to buy, read on.
What to Look for when Buying CPQ Software
1. Does what it’s meant to – configure, price, quote
That’s the most basic function the CPQ software should have. Look out for the ease of configuring products, catalog integrations, real-time price availability, ability to set complex price rules based on customer contracts or custom pricing, quote creation, availability of templates, ease of adding products to the quote, quote customization, esignature integrations, calculation of shipping and tax and quote tracking are all important features in a CPQ.
2. The CPQ tool should be within your budget
There are many CPQ tools available in the market. Choose one that fits your budget and has all the features you need. You do not want to pay for features your company does not require. But always plan – the CPQ solution should serve you well when you want to scale your operations and product portfolio.
VARStreet’s CPQ solution is cloud-hosted which makes it affordable to deploy, fast to implement and easy to scale up or down at no extra cost.
3. Is it simple and easy to use?
CPQ should simplify complex quoting, not complicate it further. The easier it is to use, the faster the adoption across your sales teams and the more benefit you will get out of it.
Look for automating quote building, ready templates, easy customization, powerful search engines that make it easy for your sales reps to find and add products to quotes, guided selling capabilities, etc.
VARStreet offers role-based training, FREE demos, tutorials and videos so your sales staff can maximize the benefits of our CPQ application.
4. Seamless integrations with other business applications
Companies today use a variety of business management applications for daily operations. Disparate systems create data silos leading to failed automation implementation. This is one reason many companies fail to get the most out of CPQ implementation.
The CPQ tool should seamlessly integrate and talk to all your other business systems like CRM, ERP, PSA, accounting, eCommerce, eProcurement, etc., to offer holistic benefits to your company.
Another important integration for IT and office supply VARs is distributor catalog integrations for real-time price and inventory information. Configuring products becomes very easy because of these integrations. VARStreet is one of the only CPQ tools with ready integrations with over 45 IT and office supply distributors in the US and Canada.
Shipping, tax, payment gateway and rich content integrations are also important to truly streamline your business. VARStreet also has ready PunchOut integrations with all popular eProcurement applications like ARiba, Coupa, SAP, Oracle and more.
5. Provides secure and legally binding eSignature functionality
A CPQ solution with an in-built electronic signature feature expedites the approval process as your customers can sign the quotes they receive online, and you get notified of the same in real-time.
6. Generates reports for easy analysis
Reporting and analytics features are important to analyze your sales process and pipeline. This data helps you make data-driven decisions to improve and enhance your sales pipeline.
7. Supports your business growth
Any software solution should enhance and support your business goals and growth. Does the CPQ provider offer support?
- What does the support look like?
- Does your potential option offer free onboarding support?
- Do they help with free quotes and proposal templates?
- Do they help with back office support?
- Do they provide role-based training?
- How easy is it to scale your business with them?
We’ll end with a quick checklist of how the lack of automation and CPQ software rears its head in a company.
- Your sales reps take days to respond to an RFQ (Request for a Quote) or an RFP (Request for a Proposal).
- You lose prospects because of delayed quotes.
- You have a vast product catalog, and your sales teams struggle to find the right solutions for your customers.
- Product pricing is dynamic, with an increased dependency on frequent real-time price changes from distributors?
- You deal in complex IT and office supply equipment with many possible configurations.
- You lose out on cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
- Customer interactions are not uniform across the organization. Customers get different solutions and prices from different sales reps.
- There are often errors in the quotes you send to customers.
- The quotes are stored on a computer, and only the sales rep who created the quote has access to it.
- There is no uniformity in the discounts various sales reps offer customers, which eventually affects your bottom line.
Look out for these signs and correct them quickly.
Conclusion
If by now you think your company needs a CPQ tool, check out VARStreet’s CPQ software for IT and office supply VARs. It offers you all of the above benefits and then some more. Get a FREE demo to help you see what a CPQ tool looks like.
