Have you considered targeting the growing market of SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) to drive more revenue?
Many service providers use resellers rather than having their in-house sales teams deal directly with smaller businesses. However, as SMEs increasingly demand more sophisticated technology and service offerings, B2B companies should consider the lucrative opportunities in this market.
Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) systems offer a range of solutions for sales teams to optimise their processes and meet the demands of SMEs. In this blog, we outline the reasons to adapt your sales strategy and how to sell to businesses in the SME market.
Tapping into a large pool of growing businesses
Whilst individual deals with SMEs (businesses with fewer than 250 employees) might be deemed low value and not the right fit for your sales team, the size of the SME market makes it worth considering adapting your sales approach.
Its reported that 99% of businesses across Europe are categorised as SMEs. Not only is this a huge percentage, but this is also a growing market which is seeing an increased demand for new technologies and digital transformation. So, there is plenty of scope for B2B service providers, especially in the Telecoms and Tech industries, to reap the rewards.
The argument against this would be that sales teams shouldn’t waste time configuring quotes with complex requirements for smaller business, with a smaller return. This is why Telecoms service providers often use resellers to deal with smaller businesses. But with an efficient system for configuring requirements and pricing up orders, this SME market presents lucrative opportunities to convert a large volume of smaller deals, to drive more revenue. This is where a CPQ platform comes in.
Meeting the demand from SMEs looking to enhance business agility
SMEs striving for growth are demanding more sophisticated tech solutions to increase business agility. They are looking to new technologies to enhance and transform their operational capabilities. As a result, SME deals are becoming more complex.
CPQ systems offer solutions for sales teams to manage complex orders from both small and large-scale organisations, helping to close deals in a shorter space of time. Service providers should no longer overlook the SME market.
A CPQ platform can sit at the core of your sales organisation, acting as the heartbeat of your sales activity and connecting all your key processes and assets, from your deal desk and sales management to legal considerations and compliance.
CPQ systems offer guided selling, including recommendation rules, bundling and solution optimisation capabilities. Heres how to sell to businesses more efficiently with CPQ:
- Use intelligent configuration and feasibility checking to ensure accuracy
- Create automated workflows for order reviews and approvals
- Set up triggered upsells and cross-sells
- Improve product/quote management and forecasting with analytics and insights
- Integrate data to reduce manual processes, duplication and inaccuracies
- Auto-generate branded documents, quotes and reports
- Improve continuity
Using CPQ software to simplify complex product & service orders
One of the overarching benefits of CPQ software is the capability to configure vast amounts of data. Whatever the number of variations that are possible and however complex your product and service orders can become, a CPQ system simplifies the data automatically, saving your sales teams a huge amount of time.
Automation rules and triggers enable the system to configure and simplify complex product orders and ensure accurate pricing and valid quotes.
Here’s a rundown of the key benefits of CPQ software:
- Shortening the sales cycle – the efficiency of a CPQ system reduces delays, including governance, due to pre-set rules and automated thresholds and triggers.
- Reducing bottlenecks – CPQ speeds up buyer decision-making by removing many manual processes and preventing deals from stalling, caused by delays from the Sales team.
- Improving order accuracy – CPQ technology assesses and manages data, based on configuration rules, to ensure that products and services don’t appear on the sales order which cannot be fulfilled.
- Creating more upsell and cross-sell opportunities – CPQ systems identify opportunities for product or service upgrades and upsells, complementing existing offerings that are under consideration. This drives more revenue and also benefits the buyer, i.e. when they can get price-breaks for ordering larger quantities.
- Offering analytics, reporting and auditing – CPQ software configures a wide range of data and product information, which offers key insights and analytics for businesses to use to streamline processes and improve strategy. CPQ systems also offer an audit trail to provide visibility for users and key stakeholders, plus transparency for external auditors and compliance purposes.
- Saving time and money – removing manual processes and preventing delays and inaccuracies will save your sales teams a lot of time and make them more efficient, saving your business money and, in turn, driving more deals and revenue.
Also, you can integrate CPQ with other systems within your organisation, such as your CRM and ERP, to share data across your business efficiently and harmonise key systems and processes.
Summary
Have you got an intelligent system in place for optimising your sales process? CPQ systems manage and configure data to turn around B2B order quotes quickly and accurately. This, in turn, presents new opportunities to service providers in the Telecoms and Tech industries to better leverage their in-house sales teams to target new markets.
We recently put together a white paper report with MDS Global, which explores the opportunity the growing SME market presents for Telecoms service providers and how they can sell directly to SMEs using CPQ software. Download the free report, How Service Providers Can Use CPQ to Access the SME Market, to learn more!
Walpole Partnership is a highly-experienced IT consultancy, specialising in Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) technology. Our CPQ experts advise, implement and support CPQ software to help businesses optimise their sales process. Book a consultation today to discuss a project.
