4 min readFacing the challenges of market uncertainty and rising competition, the world's leading companies are striving to provide the best customer experiences while delivering complex deals, taking control of margins, and managing how salespeople allocate revenue on a deal. Driving productivity in this new sales environment requires elimination of manual processes and applying new technology to deliver accurate and customized quotes quickly.
Salesforce CPQ helps our clients to close complex deals faster considering multiple products, services, divisions, regional offerings, and other parameters that add complexity to the Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) cycle.
Salesforce CPQ businesses shorten sales cycle by utilizing the full potential of the salespeople.
Gartner names Salesforce as a Magic Quadrant Leader for configure, price, and quote application suites. Salesforce CPQ simplifies inherent complexity by consolidating channel, customers, and partners in one place—providing a multitude of contract and proposal templates and more.
Core Capabilities of Salesforce CPQ
| Guided selling | Renewals | Workflow and Approvals |
| Dynamic configuration | Quote templates | Product bundles |
| Quote generation | Pricing and discounting rules | Integration with ERP and CRM |
| Contracts lifecycle management | Reports and dashboards | Salesforce Custom Development |
Common pain points of managing complex sales and CPQ processes
Long sales cycle and operational challenges inside the sales process
Research shows salespeople spend about 66% of their time on generating quotes or writing proposals and do not help generate more leads or increase convert rates.
Increased product and pricing complexity
Managing corresponding complexity of the products and services can be very challenging. Managing complex quoting is neither about engineers nor salespersons. It is about building the effective conversations between the company and a client.
Challenging implementation of recurring revenue business models
While new business models like a subscription or usage-based increase revenue and provide an enhanced customer experience, they also create unexpected operational challenges. For instance, two of the operational issues that frequently arise for recurring revenue businesses are the visibility and continuity of data, and the ability to scale.
Complicated implementation of sales systems with other systems
A modern business tends to utilize various sets of applications to enable its business architecture, as well as enhance its operational consistency and efficiency. Software needs to be integrated with other business applications which requires strategy, planning, and execution. While Salesforce integrations share common patterns, they have many requirements for cloud integration, and pose challenges for outside system integration.
Salesforce CPQ simplifies complex pricing by providing flexibility to set margins and discounts at various sales types.
Speed is a business imperative in today’s marketplace. Proactive preparation for complex proposals while applying proper technical solutions will yield dividends. After adoption of Salesforce CPQ, Dexter + Chaney showed a 30% higher quote accuracy. CPQ helps companies offer their products and services in a modular way, across multi-channel selling environments:
- Dynamic product configuration eliminates inaccurate product selections and economically not feasible combinations.
- Complex quoting works for individual sales of standalone items or a combination of several products or services that are sold to customers as one combined product or service bundle.
- CPQ provides discounts compliance by allowing sales reps to set discounts across an entire quote or on individual products and product groups.
Salesforce CPQ helps to sustain growth and adapt to recurring revenue business models.
68% of businesses get 20% or more of revenue from recurring streams. Yet, subscription models need recurring customer relationships. Salesforce resolves visibility and continuity challenges by consolidating data on a single platform to enable smarter business decisions.
- Quick set-up of new revenue models in Salesforce CPQ enable businesses to be agile in automation and do not depend from legacy applications
- An integrated CPQ platform enables a single source of truth across every team and business units involved in deals renewal.
- Continuous renewals tracking delivers a better view of an entire customer lifecycle keeping customers engaged and maintaining the quality of their experience high. Forecasting features in CPQ provides a vision on renewals pipeline and makes reports on metrics like attrition rate or annual recurring revenue
Conclusion
The global business landscape has grown even more complex as a result of the global pandemic. In response to numerous business challenges, enterprises are striving to streamline the entire opportunity-to-quote-to-order process by investing in configuration, pricing, quoting (CPQ) solutions.
For an example, after implementing Salesforce CPQ Politico reported a 17% average revenue contribution and Mitsubishi showed a 50% increase ROI in quote-to-cash. CPQ tackles the most difficult tasks that sellers face—configuring and pricing complex products and services, maximizing margins, and capturing upsell and renewal opportunities—consistently and more efficiently.
Let’s talk about where you are in your CPQ journey and how SoftServe and Salesforce CPQ provide salespeople the best tools available to sell faster, accelerate market positions, and dynamically compete in today’s digital economy. Download a whitepaper in which leaders from our Salesforce CoE review the features and benefits of Salesforce CPQ, a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader in the configure/price/quote space.