What Is Salesforce CPQ?
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Sales teams spend 66% of their time generating quotes, proposals and getting approvals. Salesforce CPQ is an excellent tool for sales teams to automate quoting processes and increase the speed at which quotes are created. It can help companies reduce costs, eliminate errors that might occur when generating manual quotations and free up time for salespeople to further improve the customer experience.
What is Salesforce CPQ?
Salesforce CPQ stands for Configure, Price and Quote. It is a sales tool for companies to quickly and accurately generate quotes for orders. Quotes produced with Salesforce CPQ are automated according to a preprogrammed set of rules, to ensure that error-free pricing takes into account quantities, discounts, revenue types, and more. It can be customised to support any type of business requires you have.
What can Salesforce CPQ do for your business?
Sales teams can use Salesforce CPQ to streamline processes for proposals, quotations and orders in a single tool.
What are the benefits of using Salesforce CPQ?
Increased quote speed and accuracy
Salesforce CPQ can help your sales teams simplify the quoting process. This can be achieved with the help of various features such as Product and Pricing rules, Accurate Prorations and Advanced Approvals. Each of these features has distinct characteristics which can help the sales teams create and modify quotes in real-time with the customer.
Product and Pricing Rules
With the help of Product and Pricing rules, your sales teams can put together the right products and bundles every single time. In addition to that, they won’t have to worry about checking whether products and options are compatible with one another, or whether a specific SKU is appropriate for your customer’s business size and use case. CPQ automates this for your business needs and changes the quote in response to the presence of other products.
Accurate Prorations
Accurate Prorations in Salesforce CPQ will help your sales teams to calculate and invoice accurately, according to the requirements.
This can be really useful for subscription-based companies that offer streaming services, as they can use Salesforce CPQ to offer specific prices to clients based on their contract terms.
Advanced Approvals
In complex businesses that deal with large numbers of products and different pricing strategies, you might need more control over what quotation is sent out to the customer. With Advanced Approvals, you can set up the right approval process irrespective of business size and complexity. This will help you shorten the approval cycle.
For example, let’s look at a scenario where Bob is a Sales Manager and Sarah is his CRO. When a quote submitted by the sales team is approved by Bob but rejected by Sarah, the same quote won’t be sent to Bob for approval when the next change is made. Salesforce CPQ remembers the sequence and only Sarah will now be sent an approval request.
Parallel approval can also be set up within Salesforce CPQ which allows separate approval threads for different approval groups. This reduces the overall sales cycle duration and helps sales teams close deals faster.
Increased precision of products and services for your customers
Salesforce CPQ can be used to determine the right product and service combinations for your customers. This is extremely helpful for companies that have a large product catalogue. Salesforce CPQ helps you to streamline your sales process and increase your conversion rates.
Let’s explore some of the features that can help you do that within Salesforce CPQ.
Guided Selling
Guided Selling enables your sales teams to find the right product or service for your customers by asking just a few simple questions. For example, if you’re a clothing store, you’ll have a large product list with various dresses, trousers, tops, and shirts. Rather than choosing items from a large list, one at a time, your sales staff can use the guided-selling method to sort products by colour, type, size, and other features. As a result, this decreases the time to quote and increases efficiency.
Make complex sales cycles easy for sales teams
Not all sales situations are created equal, and your sales teams need to know how to quote in different scenarios. Salesforce CPQ helps your sales teams to model different deal possibilities based on discount combinations. This helps the sales reps to quote with accuracy and transparency.
Pricing Engine
Your Pricing Engine in Salesforce CPQ can be set up in a way that will automatically determine discounts based on the volume of purchases, number of users and more. If your customer wants custom user pricing or pricing bundles, then your sales team will be able to quickly access information, rather than rummaging through hundreds of pages in the catalogue.
Solution Configurator
Solution Configurator in Salesforce CPQ works by understanding which products and/or services your customers need and then enables them to configure their unique solution. Based on the configuration selected, Solution Configurator calculates the price of a specific quote and if necessary recalculates it in real-time. This reduces errors, shortens the sales cycle and improves accuracy.
You’ll also get alerts if there is any additional product or service that can be added to the quote. These features empower your sales teams to sell smarter and close deals faster.
Faster quoting for repeat business
Salesforce CPQ provides a number of advantages for your existing customers so that you can serve your customers faster and ensure they always get the best customer experience.
Contracted Pricing allows you to make exceptions for repeat customers in Salesforce CPQ. This solution helps sales teams to quote faster by creating a contract for your customers. You can set up the duration of this Contracted Pricing and define who is eligible for it, including what products are eligible for this option. Once agreed, you can set up CPQ to prorate your customers with Contracted Pricing based on their active period.
Without Salesforce CPQ, you would only have two choices to handle this scenario. First, you can create a separate price book for this customer specifically. The second choice is to rely on sales reps to manually apply the right adjustments. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of work to maintain and it doesn’t scale well. This solution creates the opportunity for both error and unnecessary complexity in the approval process. However, with Contracted Pricing, whenever a sales rep adds a quote to the customer, CPQ automatically looks for exceptions to see if prices should be adjusted – for accurate quoting that meets the pricing exceptions.
Easy up-selling
Contract Amendments in CPQ helps you to easily update quotes created for up-sells and cross-sells. This feature helps your sales reps to quote new or updated products that might be of interest to existing customer contracts without creating a new quote.
It enables the sales reps to validate pricing before attaching a product, which makes it easier for them to create accurate quotes with minimal effort. This also helps recommend appropriate new products based on customer usage patterns
If you are selling business equipment, say for example sales of mobile devices to your customers, Salesforce CPQ can help you by understanding what applications are in use and when they’re used. With this insight, CPQ will suggest which device is best suited for your customer’s needs.
Hassle-free renewal quotes
With the help of Automated Renewals, Salesforce CPQ enables your sales teams to create accurate quotes for your renewal customers. With this solution, all you need to do is set up a contract and let the pricing engine figure out the renewal amount based on usage and attach it to an existing quote.
Each new contract comes with a renewal date and renewals will get automatically added to the quote for your customer. It helps sales reps to easily attach any additional contract amendments and closes the deal faster while providing more transparent pricing throughout the entire sales cycle.
Why should you choose a Salesforce Partner to implement CPQ?
A Salesforce partner can identify what your company demands to assist you to create a bespoke Salesforce solution that is tailored to your specific needs. This will allow Salesforce CPQ to work more effectively and efficiently. But it’s critical that you choose the right Salesforce provider who can help you get ahead in this competitive market. Experienced Salesforce partners can create custom pricing and product rules, discounting schedules, contracted pricing, etc.
By involving a Platinum Partner like us, you can:
- Ensure that your CPQ is built to your bespoke needs, using recommended best practices and scalable methods.
- Set automation up for when you launch, resulting in a more efficient Salesforce CPQ that can save you time and resources.
- Alleviate pressure on your teams to mould the platform to their needs, without the right technical knowledge or training.
- Benefit from our team’s technical knowledge and their experience in building digital transformation projects successfully.
- Give your teams the start with Salesforce with our custom training, to ensure they can get the most out of your custom configurations.
- Save time and money, by fast-tracking your custom needs with expert teams who have the right knowledge and project management skills to ensure that your platform will launch when you need it to.
If you’re ready to jumpstart your Salesforce CPQ journey to success, then our team of experienced Salesforce Consultants can help you. Salesforce, as a platform, can seem overwhelming and our Salesforce experts can do much of the heavy lifting for you. Choose a Salesforce Partner that understands your needs and has a history of successful Salesforce implementations. To find out how Pracedo can help with Salesforce CPQ, get in touch today by clicking here to schedule a call with our Consultants.
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Pracedo is an award-winning Summit (Platinum) Salesforce Consulting Partner that delivers innovative Salesforce implementations to forward-thinking customers.
With over a decade of experience focused on Salesforce, we work with our customers to unlock the platform’s power through tailored implementations that facilitate achieving business goals and ambitions. Our talented team of over 80 Salesforce professionals globally means that Pracedo offers a boutique consultancy experience, delivered locally to you, with the breadth and depth of knowledge earned from delivering over 1000 projects across our locations.
Pracedo specialises in Digital Transformation and Change Management. Implementations and customisations include: Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Service Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Salesforce Revenue Cloud, Salesforce Experience Cloud and Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud.
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