
What is CPQ?
Sales productivity is critical to achieving business growth. When your sales teams perform well, you are likely to grow your revenue. Unfortunately, driving new sales is not always an easy path.
Data from HubSpot suggests that sales representatives spend only 34% of their time talking to prospects. The remaining time goes into writing emails, entering data, researching leads, scheduling calls, and going to internal meetings.
Binging CPQ software into sales workflow can help boost sales efficiency, increase pipeline conversions, and drive customer satisfaction.
Let’s look at what CPQ is and how it can add incremental value to your business.
CPQ: An Overview
CPQ stands for “Configure Price Quote” and is the process of defining the price of goods or services and generating price quotes. In the simplest form, CPQ refers to managing product pricing based on constantly changing market variables.
CPQ software solution aggregates these market variables, thereby allowing you to generate accurate pricing quotes, explore bundling and upselling opportunities, and provide the most competitive price to your customers.
The Importance of CPQ for Sales Teams
Achieving productivity is a significant challenge for sales teams, especially in organizations that do not use CPQ. Moreover, non-CPQ users take 73% more time to produce a proposal or quote. Since your sales team drives revenue for your organization, an inefficient, low-performance sales team can hurt your revenue and profits in the long run.
Let’s look at some common sales challenges in a business and how CPQ can address them.
Dependency on Sales Personnel: Your sales reps could be very skilled and experienced but expecting them to be always updated with the right product knowledge to handle customer enquiries is unrealistic. Your sales reps, can leverage CPQ software to provide instant pricing to customers and generate accurate quotes in real-time with professional proposals.
Longer Conversion Time: Customers tend to make conscious purchase decisions. They conduct in-depth research and pricing comparisons before making a purchase. A CPQ system allows your sales reps to guide customers to make the right purchase decisions. The reps can share Product price comparisons and other essential product information with the customers, which shortens the sales cycle by up to 28%.
Saying “No” to Customers: As a sales organization, you cannot accept all business opportunities. It is not because you did not want to serve them but because the returns wouldn’t balance out the cost of sales efforts. When your reps spend too much time on each deal, they need to let go of potential deals. With CPQ software, you can shorten the sales cycles and get more customers on board. The software does the heavy lifting for you and speeds up the sales process.
Changing the Offer: In this dynamic marketplace, companies need to change and tweak their offerings quickly. You might need to introduce a discount or slash your price or come up with a new offer. CPQ software adds more agility to your organization, allowing you to be more adaptable and make changes quickly.
Sales Inefficiency: Manually managing the entire sales process is prone to human error, which can deplete the efficiency of your sales reps. CPQ software can eliminate 40% of human errors, thereby boosting the efficiency and productivity of your sales reps.
Lack of Omnichannel Selling: Omnichannel selling is not a choice anymore. Companies that implement omnichannel strategies witness a 91% year-on-year increase in customer retention. However, considering the extent of operations, services, and products needed, implementing omnichannel selling can be challenging for companies. CPQ streamlines omnichannel selling, allowing you to reach more customers across multiple channels.
How to Choose the Right CPQ Software for Your Business?
Having looked at the benefits of CPQ, you might already have made up your mind to implement a CPQ solution for your company. However, with numerous CPQ systems available, finding the one that best fits your needs can be challenging.
Here are a few things to consider when looking for Configure Price Quote Software.
Your Goals
First things first, determine why you need a CPQ software solution. Implementing CPQ is an investment, so knowing the exact problems you want it to resolve is essential. A CPQ system can help you overcome several hurdles, such as high sales workload, low sales team productivity, a high number of back-offs, and many more.
Usability
The purpose of CPQ software is to make your sales reps’ lives easier. You certainly do not want them to spend several days figuring out how to use the tool. When looking for a CPQ solution, always prioritize usability.
Features and Capabilities
Each business is unique and has different requirements. The features and functionalities of the CPQ system you choose should align with your objectives.
Flexibility and Scalability
Lastly, make sure the solution is flexible and scalable as per your requirements. The requirements of your customers can change at any time, and you need a system that enables you to respond to those changes promptly.
How Can Yagna iQ CPQ Software Benefit Your Business?
Now that we have looked at the challenges CPQ software resolves, let’s dive into how it can benefit your business. Here are some tangible benefits of Yagna iQ CPQ for your business.
1. Shorten the Sales Cycle
Without a doubt, a shorter sales cycle is one of the most beautiful sights for B2B companies. Data from Aberdeen Group shows that CPQ software can shorten the sales cycle from 4.68 months to 3.42 months. It allows your sales reps to respond to potential customers first, which increases the chances of a sale by 50%.
Yagna iQ’s innovative excellence can help you reinvent the whole selling experience by applying Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to the selling process. This intelligent CPQ software quickly guides the partners or customers through the product configuration, creates quotes and provides Cross-sell / Upsell recommendations.
2. Improve Sales Team Performance
The best CPQ software like Yagna iQ can boost sales team performance in many ways. First, it improves quoting productivity. Data from Zety shows that exhaustive processes consume 66% of sales reps’ time. CPQ software automates recurring tasks, allowing sales reps to be more productive.
Second, CPQ allows reps to discover up-selling and cross-selling opportunities. As a result, 12% more sales reps achieve their sales targets in companies that use CPQ. Lastly, it simplifies the ordering process, which increases the likelihood of customers completing their purchases.
3. Reduce Order and Quoting Errors
No matter how capable your sales reps are, they cannot stay on top of price changes every time. Sadly, this results in order and quoting errors. These errors can deteriorate customer experience, lengthen your sales cycle, and leave a terrible impression on customers.
Yagna iQ’s world class CPQ comes with rules & validations in place to make sure you have a seamless sales experience. Yagna iQ allows you to integrate with the CRM system itself.
4. Reduce the Amount of Training
The amount of training your sales reps need depends on the type of products or services you sell. If what you sell is complex and configurable, the training process may take several months. With a Yagna iQ CPQ solution, you can drastically reduce the training time and enable your sales reps to start selling as soon as they join your team.
When sales reps use CPQ software, they do not need to memorize the specifications for each product model. All they need to do is follow an efficient product configuration process, and they can avoid expensive configuration mistakes and awkward sales conversations. In fact, CPQ can increase sales reps’ proficiency by 45%.
5. Boost Prop Volume
Using CPQ software can increase the average deal size significantly. When sales reps use CPQ, they do not need to memorize product accessories and bundles. With all the data on hand, they can explore potential selling, up-selling, and cross-selling opportunities in real-time, which helps elevate the average prop volume and achieve greater profits.
6. Increase Sales Efficiency
Sales efficiency has always been a matter of concern for organizations. Most sales reps take ten months or longer to become productive enough to contribute to company goals.
CPQ software ensures that your sales reps spend most of their time selling and contribute to the company’s bottom line as soon as possible. When your reps no longer need to work on manual, administrative tasks, such as data entry and sending emails, they can focus on what they do the best – selling.
7. Boost Sales and Profitability
Last but not least, implementing a CPQ software solution can increase the lead conversion rate, sales, and profitability. Your sales reps can send accurate orders to your customers instantly, which can go a long way in increasing the conversion rate.
In the absence of CPQ, sales reps would have to spend hours, even days, on determining if a particular product configuration could be manufactured and the price associated with it. CPQ speeds up this process to a few minutes, resulting in better lead conversion, sales, and revenue.
Unleash the True Potential of Your Sales Team with Yagna iQ CPQ Software.
In this hyper-competitive landscape, sales productivity is the key to more sales and revenue. With Yagna iQ CPQ software, you can increase sales reps’ efficiency, engage more prospects, and convert more leads. Do you want to ignite your sales and business growth?
Get in touch with us at sales@yagnaiq.com.