Sales teams around the world face many of the same challenges. However, larger sales forces with extra variables, products, and roles to manage, often find that those challenges intensify.
Both B2B and B2C sales teams struggle with the speed of approvals, correcting inaccurate proposals, and managing a large or remote sales team. The more complex the environment, the more sales directors need to manage, and the more room for error there is. These can range from a simple error on a proposal, which can damage customer trust and loyalty, to missed opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.
These are the CPQ tools that large enterprises use to meet their sales targets and solve their challenges:
1. Smart product configuration
The simplest sales process can often be the most effective, but with new tools, initiatives, and promotions, processes can become bulky and slow.
Optimising the sales process can mean different things to different organisations. For most, it involves increasing the amount of time the team spends on sales, rather than admin and processes.
CPQ tools can dramatically reduce time spent putting deals together, collecting information, and checking stock levels or service availability. Your CPQ system will store all products and services so your team can easily create quotes and proposals. This includes intelligent discounting, price accuracy, and super fast order execution.
This speeds up straightforward tasks and gives sales teams the freedom to build quality relationships with their customers.
2. Tailored workflows and automation
Profit margins are sensitive and can be dramatically affected by the costs of goods, seasonal changes, pricing, market share, staffing costs, and much more.
CPQ tools analyse profit margins, ensuring every combination of products or services still yields a healthy profit, with and without applied discounts. They also convert languages and currencies, making it easier to do business internationally, and gives sales teams the ability to create compelling opportunities to upsell and cross-sell.
Automation can eliminate paperwork and faxing, giving customers the ability to add e-signatures and close the deal digitally.
3. Personalisation for winning quotes
Sales processes are difficult to measure when there are several variables to consider. A consistent approach can reduce errors and improve results, as well as create measurable, tangible data you can learn from.
A CPQ system fills knowledge gaps, prevents quoting inconsistencies, and uses live data to inform sales processes. Salespeople are empowered to make decisions, put together custom offers and service packages, and personalise their service for maximum results.
4. Scalable CPQ tools and systems
CPQ tools are designed to grow as your team and products grow. Whatever is in your roadmap, the system can adapt. This includes reviewing the sales delivery lifecycle, highlighting where and why bottlenecks occur, listening to changing customer behaviour, and even predicting future pain points.
This also forms a bridge between CRM and ERP, allowing sales teams to use all their systems together coherently and without laborious imports and exports.
Walpole Partnership’s consultants have delivered some of the largest and most successful Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) systems in Europe and the Middle East.
“The team at Walpole Partnership has delivered several projects in budget and on time for us. They helped us to get our salespeople using our CPQ system and they worked closely with our team to make sure we got the right result.” Barrie Homewood, TITAN Sales & Marketing Director, Atlas Converting Equipment Ltd.
For the ultimate guide to CPQ for sales professionals, download our latest eBook. It’s a comprehensive guide written by the CPQ experts.
