Salesforce CPQ - Streamlining Your Sales Cycle
Many sales teams face a challenge: relying on spreadsheets to manage their pricing and quoting process. Unfortunately, this manual process can be time-consuming and prone to human errors, and the potential for errors increases as the spreadsheet data grows, making it harder to keep track of all the information. In addition, spreadsheets are often not connected to the company’s larger systems, making it difficult for other internal teams like order management, production, and leadership to report and track the team’s performance accurately.
These issues can lead to lost sales and unhappy customers, which can have a negative impact on your company’s overall growth. However, with the right sales tool, you can overcome these challenges and improve your team’s productivity and efficiency, streamline your team’s process to ensure everyone is on the same page, and close deals faster.
This is where Salesforce CPQ (Configuration, Price & Quote) comes in. Keep reading to learn more about ways CPQ can help streamline your sales process and improve your quote-to-cash cycle.
What is Salesforce CPQ
Salesforce CPQ is a tool that helps companies automate and streamline their sales processes. It enables sales reps to generate quotes and proposals for their customers quickly. It includes several features that make it easy to manage discounts, pricing, and product configurations making the sales process faster and easier.
Configuration – Products, services, and systems
Price- Cost, Promotions, Discounts, Margins
Quote – Sales Quotation Proposal
CPQ can be an invaluable tool for sales reps to close more deals and manage more leads effectively and efficiently when implemented correctly.
How Salesforce CPQ Helps Your Team
CPQ boosts productivity, and improves quote efficiency and accuracy: Did you know that sales reps spend just 34% of their time actually selling? Where does the rest of their time go you might wonder– that time goes to administrative and non-selling tasks such as generating quotes, proposals, and gaining approvals. CPQ allows you to respond quickly, and accurately to your customer.
Guided selling & tailored quotes: Salesforce CPQ optimizes and simplifies the selling process by utilizing guided selling. With guided selling, your sales team can use information from prospective clients to generate custom product packages unique to meet their needs.
Automation: When it comes to process automation, Salesforce CPQ makes it easy to get it right. With intelligent rules, CPQ can automatically select a relevant quote related to customers’ needs. In addition, approvals can be fully automated, reducing the need for the inconvenient back-and-forth process.
Standardized proposal management: CPQ allows businesses to create and manage impeccable documents based on quote templates, distinct formatting, and section definition for contracts from start to finish.
Increases Sales: CPQ helps companies increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and improve their bottom line by providing customers with accurate and detailed quotes that let them know upfront what they will pay for the product or service they want. CPQ also reduces friction between the customer and the company by gathering the information it needs up front, leading to higher customer satisfaction and more sales.
Final Thoughts
Salesforce CPQ is an effective tool to assist any sales team in generating quotes, proposals, and closing deals more quickly. It improves visibility for all quoting activities and improves productivity by eliminating manual processes. Having one centralized repository for all deal data allows reps to quickly access previous proposal details and collaborate with their teams more effectively. With all the data in one place, the team can take action and make more informed decisions about closing deals more quickly.
If you’re looking to streamline your sales process and improve your quote-to-cash cycle, Salesforce CPQ is a great solution. But, like with any tool, there are many things to consider. From configuring Salesforce CPQ to meet your specific needs to integrating it with your other systems, having the right partner is crucial.
The Kander team has years of experience with CPQ, so if you are looking for a partner to guide you through these crucial steps, reach out to us here.
Click here for a guided tour
