How Salesforce CPQ Can Transform the Way You Sell
Before we get into the details of CPQ, we have five questions for you:
1) How long does it take your sales reps to build a quote? (Minutes? Hours? Days?)
2) How often do you get calls from clients because a quote is inaccurate?
3) How do you know the right time to call a customer to renew a contract?
4) Are you still using Excel to calculate a price?
5) Are you struggling with your quote approval process?
If these questions made you think of any issues in your quoting process, it’s worth having a look at Salesforce CPQ.
So, what is CPQ?
It stands for Configure Price Quote. In a nutshell, it’s an easy-to-use, next generation app that gives you the opportunity to complete your business faster than ever through user-friendly product selection, pricing accuracy and business development features. The main benefit of using a CPQ solution is the ability to build easy and accurate quotes, and create cleaner proposals and contracts. You can thus streamline your sales process with a focus on higher customer satisfaction.
Let’s break it down even further:
C = Configure
Whenever you start a conversation with a client, you need to start building a proper quote by selecting the products your client is interested in. During this stage, Salesforce CPQ helps your sales team by showing only relevant products based on questions you’ve asked your client and products that you’ve added to the quote. CPQ also recommends relevant products based on what your client is interested in. The possibilities are truly limitless when it comes to simplifying product selection and finding the right solution for your client.
P = Price
When you give a price to a client, there’s no room for error! But, when you have thousands of products with various pricing rules and discounts, calculating the right price yourself can be quite complicated. Salesforce CPQ helps you build price rules and discount rules, and automates the calculation. It can cross data over from different objects and run the calculation seamlessly. Users also have the ability to override the calculation if needed.
If you want more flexibility, the multi-dimensional quote lets you define a segment (day, month or year) and adjust quantities and price. It’s a great help to build a multi-year quote if your organisation sells subscription products and services.
On top of that, the advanced approval process can add the required checks from various departments in your organisation if required.
Q = Quote
It’s time to generate the quote document and send it to the client! At this stage, your document must be readable and consistent across your company. Your client must have a clear understanding of which products they are buying, and for which price. Salesforce CPQ has a dynamic quote document generator that is flexible and easy to configure. You can select what to display and where based on various attributes from the quote or the account.
Why Salesforce CPQ versus another CPQ?
Here are a few reasons.
1) Salesforce CPQ is built 100% on the Salesforce platform. Yes, you read that correctly! There’s no integration required with an external application. That means all the data you need is already available, and you won’t need to waste time moving data to another system.
2) The customisation of Salesforce CPQ doesn’t require code, only clicks. It’s easy to configure as long as you have thoroughly prepared which product rules and price rules you want to implement.
3) Partners of your organisation can have access to the power of your quote process from a Lightning Partner Community. Your partners can effortlessly generate a valid, accurate and co-branded quote using self-service quoting with fast, automated approvals.
4) The automation of the sales process makes it clear and simple on how to quote, generate a contract, upsell and renew an opportunity.
5) Salesforce CPQ is one of the most flexible CPQ solutions on the market. It lets you cross the data stored in multiple objects to build product rules and price rules.
What about Salesforce Quote-to-Cash?
Quote-to-Cash is the complete set of business processes involved in selling, from creating initial offers for prospects to collecting cash. Quote-to-Cash starts with CPQ and continues with negotiating, contracting, invoicing, renewals and upselling.
By using Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce Billing (a separate product that allows you to manage your billing), the full sales process can be covered from the first conversation with a prospect to the client payment, all on the Salesforce platform.
If you’re looking for a fully integrated solution in Salesforce, Quote-to-Cash is a great choice and will help you manage the billing (specifically with subscriptions) in a more efficient way, minimize invoicing errors.
