CPQ – Transforming Healthcare
Situation:
Healthcare is a field where sales teams deal with a wide range of products each with precise product specifications which adds complexity and pressure to the team members while executing the orders. Moreover, the sales teams are spread across various regions with a different set of customer data that isn’t available to each of the teams all across the world. This, therefore, creates errors, and bottlenecks negatively impact customer experience and hence lead to low growth and revenue.
CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) solutions help companies to automate and speed up the sales process to improve customer experience, make sales representatives' jobs easier, and thereby improve the overall revenue and reputation of the firm.
Problems and implications:
Following problems are faced by healthcare firms that inhibit the sales and growth of the company.
1. Complexity: For products with a fixed portfolio, quoting is simple. However, healthcare products and services are ever-evolving due to new developments and research in the field. Therefore, manual quoting tools struggle to keep up with the complexity involved.
2. Customization: Customers expect flexibility in every part of the product development and sales in every industry be it software or healthcare. Moreover, each person’s likes and requirements would be different. However, conventional systems don’t provide similar flexibility in quoting.
3. Unlinked system: Many healthcare product sales teams are operating in different regions of the world with knowledge of the customer needs to be restricted to that particular place. Hence, by using conventional tools and spreadsheets, the important configurations, quote information, and order is locked to that particular sales team.
4. Missed opportunities: With conventional quoting solutions, there is a restriction on price creation, identification of new revenue streams, etc.
Need pay-off:
Sales teams need to go through various steps to manage the quotes and pricing of products. CPQ solutions can automate much of the process of performing pricing, configurations, formatting, and approvals to save time focus on other opportunities, and increase profits.
Following are the unique features offered by CPQ solutions to improve healthcare revenue.
1. Speed-up quote turnaround time: CPQ solutions directly connect to the product portfolio and automatically generate quotes based on fixed programming rules. It also decentralizes all product details and pricing thereby eliminating any issues while introducing a new product in the market. By directly passing the quotes to finance, it automates the sales orders. It also helps the sales representatives by automating the contracting and onboarding process after quoting. Hence, no matter how complex the product catalog is CPQ can efficiently manage sales and improve revenue.
2. Flexibility: CPQ solutions help sales representatives create bundles and quotes based on subscriptions, usage, deal scenario modeling, new revenue models, etc which would be a game-changer in the healthcare field from product manufacturers to medical insurance sales representatives.
3. Operation clarity: CPQ solutions analyze the existing chaotic sales data and help in offering the right product, tracing the offer, and checking the forecast. The solution minimizes error due to preprogrammed rules and also keeps the sales representatives updated such that relevant product offerings and configurations have complied.
4. New revenue opportunities: CPQ leverages analytics to guide sales representatives towards price creation, right upsell and cross-sell opportunities which would lead to bigger deals. Through automated renewal, billing reminders, and better-implemented discounts and promotions, CPQ reduces customer attrition and improves their experience.
CPQ solutions are a necessity for healthcare industries due to the inherent complex quoting, pricing systems, and also the criticality of the products which reach hospitals, practitioners, and patients where no error or bottlenecks can be afforded. CPQ solutions not only simplify quoting but also improve its accuracy, creates faster and cleaner proposals, improve customer satisfaction, and help clients grow their revenue.