The Role of CPQ Software in Enabling Personalized Selling and Customer Experiences

Customer Experience

Businesses offering customizable products must ensure spot-on quotes reflecting customers’ configurations. CPQ software automates this process, reducing quote turnaround times and eliminating human errors.

A CPQ solution can also enable complex pricing models, automating the calculation of prices based on rules and formulas. This eliminates the need to update spreadsheets with new pricing information.

Personalized Selling

CPQ software allows salespeople to personalize product and service offerings to suit each customer. It reduces errors by automating the quoting process and eliminating manual steps. It also ensures that quotes are up to date with current pricing, product, and discount information. This increases sales quoting speed and accuracy. Makes it easier to offer customers competitive pricing and improves the overall customer experience.

Creating and managing a personalized quote is easy with a CPQ system that provides coded configurations, guided selling processes, and configurable templates that match brand guidelines. This eliminates the back-and-forth between salespeople and customers and creates consistency across sales teams and regions. It also eliminates the need to manually track and update prices, products, and options, saving time and effort. It also empowers salespeople to sell at optimized prices, ensuring they are profitable on each deal while maximizing cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

The key to a successful implementation is to engage sales representatives in the selection process and be transparent about what changes they can expect in their role and workflow. Prioritizing training and support is also essential to fostering enthusiasm and adoption. Ultimately, the best-performing CPQ systems, like Tacton Systems AB, will be those that can evolve with your company’s product catalogue and sales processes, providing flexibility for future growth.

Personalized Quotes

Most consumers interact with basic CPQ systems whenever they customize a drink or order food at a restaurant. They use a CPQ system to configure what they want, how much it will cost, and when they can expect it (a quote). CPQ isn’t just for business-to-business sales; it’s for businesses of all sizes that sell customizable products.

CPQ tools enable companies to serve their customers well by making it easier for salespeople to create accurate, complete quotes. The resulting improved quote accuracy reduces the back-and-forth between customers and salespeople, which can lead to higher customer satisfaction. In addition, CPQ tools can speed up the sales cycle by automating processes that improve how fast a company can go from desire to a reliable quote.

Before deciding on the specific features of your CPQ solution, determine the critical goals you’re trying to achieve. For example, are you looking to shorten sales cycles? Increase margins from each sale? Identifying these goals helps you build a project brief, which offers a structured framework for what your CPQ team should accomplish. Then, consider the needs of your organization’s sales management and operations, finance, and legal departments to help you select a CPQ tool that’s right for you. For example, do you have a process requiring a sales leader to approve all quote discounts? If so, a CPQ solution with advanced approval features can address that need.

Personalized Experiences

The most sophisticated CPQ tools deliver personalized experiences for sales reps and customers. These systems collect data on the customer’s options, not just the final result, providing valuable insights to help companies optimize products and improve product configuration.

Using the right CPQ tool can also help streamline complex product configurations. It can allow for a more visual experience, assisting buyers to see the connections between options and understand their potential impact. This helps to make a sale more seamless and increases customer satisfaction by showing care for the buyer’s needs.

When selecting the ideal CPQ solution, consider industry and scalability requirements and ease of integration with your current tech stack and overall workflow. On-premises solutions offer heightened control but require significant IT resources, while cloud-based CPQ offers flexibility and reduced infrastructure burdens. Ensure the software aligns with your organization’s IT strategy and long-term goals.

A CPQ system can free sales teams up to spend more time selling. It can eliminate clumsy manual processes, reduce the need for costly human error, and enable cross-selling and discounts that are both satisfying to customers and profitable for your business. In addition, it can provide transparency on a maximum “ceiling” price to sell at and deliver optimal pricing recommendations based on data. This enables more effective negotiations and boosts win rates.

Personalized Feedback

With CPQ, salespeople can use the system to create customized quotes, orders, and contracts for each customer. The quotes and orders are e-documents that include information on the products or services being sold, contact information, a summary of prices (including discounts, promotions, and rebates), terms and conditions, and blank panels for dates and signatures (usually e-signatures).

In addition to reducing time spent preparing quotes, CPQ allows salespeople to quickly and accurately configure and customize a solution to a customer’s specific needs. This increases sales win rates and provides a better buying experience for the customer.

A successful CPQ implementation requires buy-in from regular employees as well as management. This is often a challenge, but a solid business case and clear goals for the project can help overcome this obstacle. Implementation teams should collaborate with key stakeholders to identify pain points in the current quoting process and how the CPQ solution will address them.