Salesforce CPQ
Situation:
In tech industries especially with company’s handling various software products for clients, quoting has become an important but a difficult task. Hence, companies have leveraged latest technology to shift from conventional manual quoting to CPQ solutions.
CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) solutions make a company’s sales cycle more efficient, productive, and successful by pushing forward the product configuration and proposal process, and producing accurate quotes.
The Salesforce cloud handles sales quote creation however, for companies with a complex quoting process due to growth, additional features are required which are not covered under the Salesforce cloud. This, therefore, stresses the requirement for a better customizable CPQ solution.
Problems and implications:
Following issues in traditional CPQ solutions highlight the need for a better CPQ solution.
Support for recurring billing: With few products and straightforward prices, quoting is simple. However, offerings like subscriptions require recurring billing that includes monthly service, maintenance fees, rental or leasing fees, or others that require invoice generation and fulfillment which is not covered by conventional CPQ solutions. Therefore, quoting becomes a complex task as a company expands and different subscription and recurring billings are featured.
Flexibility: Customers expect flexibility in every part of the product development and sales from product sizes to packaging materials. Such flexibility is not considered in quotes which may disrupt the quote and the final product the customer receives.
Dynamic pricing: In dynamic pricing, a quoting solution is a requirement to lockdown rules which leaves no revenue on the table and makes the quote very sensitive to slight deal changes. Solutions include Discount ramps, preferred pricing, time-based pricing, etc. However, sales representatives often rely on spreadsheets or memory to choose the best solution which isn’t the best process to choose a solution for dynamic pricing.
Quoting errors: Manual quoting presents a risk to your business as the process controls, approvals, and enforcement of routing, discounts, and quoting rules are in the control of an individual who is prone to error.
Order management: For every client, managing the order is as important as getting the quote accepted. To deliver on the customer’s expectation, the client shall provide every required feature/support to the customer from splitting orders to shipping from/delivery to different facilities as per the original quote. However, conventional quote solutions do not provide a trackable platform to ensure that orders are aligned to the original quote.
Need pay-off:
The quoting process consists of various steps and multiple resources are required increasing the inherent cost of the process. Salesforce CPQ 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 Salesforce CPQ.
Subscription and recurring billing support: Salesforce CPQ allows customers to easily configure, price varying subscription offers co-term add-on orders, and automatically generate renewal opportunities thereby making quoting an overall simple task.
Advanced configuration engine: While offering flexibility to clients, the quotes shall also be flexible to take into account all of the exclusions, dependencies, and other impacts. Salesforce CPQ supports and automatically enforces advanced product configuration rules like services, training, and products with add-ons to provide a valid, complete, and comprehensive first quote.
Dynamic pricing: Salesforce CPQ supports multiple price books for customers by automating variable pricing based on volumes, locations, shipping modes, etc. making it easier for customization of pricing for any order.
Reducing inaccuracies: Salesforce CPQ ensures accurate pricing and discounting, and automates the approvals when required helping the sales team to quickly and accurately deliver quotes. The program also generates a professional quote document that includes the right collateral with eSignature partners.
Improved order management: Salesforce CPQ ensures alignment along the order management process by maintaining downstream connection which includes tracking contracted quantities and reporting every quote detail from quotes and orders to invoices and payments providing a better order management system.
Salesforce CPQ makes quoting simpler, and more accurate to create faster and cleaner proposals and helps clients to manage subscription billing and invoices without complication.