Marketing and sales teams often work in tandem to achieve a common goal — generating revenue for the company. The marketing team works to create awareness and interest in a product or service, while the sales team is responsible for closing deals and making sales.
The marketing and sales teams are crucial in creating and presenting proposals to potential customers. A proposal is a document that works as a pitch to sell a specific product or service that addresses the customer’s needs. In marketing and sales, a proposal is used to present a product or service to a potential customer, convincing them to purchase.
Both teams are responsible for researching and understanding the target market, identifying potential customers, and developing a compelling quotation explaining why their product or service offers the best solution.
That’s when the CPQ comes in.
Let’s explore.
What Is CPQ?
It is an abbreviation for configure, price, and quote. Often, it comes up as a tool that helps the marketing and sales team create proposals. Both teams can use it to configure and customize products based on the customer’s needs and generate accurate pricing estimates. The end goal with CPQ is to create professional and well-organized quotes.
- The first step is to configure via collecting customer requirements, customizing products to meet those needs, and ensuring that all components are compatible. This requires working with customers to identify their needs and preferences, designing a product configuration that meets those needs, and ensuring that all components are compatible.
- The next step is to price it. Pricing involves determining the product or service’s cost based on the selected components and options. For instance, if a customer selects software with a feature upgrade and additional support, the product price will be higher than if they had selected a basic version.
- The final step requires generating a quote or proposal for the customer. This quote includes all product details, pricing, delivery, and payment terms. It allows the customer to review the information before making a purchase decision.
CPQ helps sales teams close deals faster by enabling them to create more accurate and customized quotes in less time. While marketing teams can gain insights into customer preferences and trends, enabling them to create more targeted campaigns.
Key factors to consider when choosing CPQ software —
1. Usability: The CPQ software should be user-friendly, making it easy for the sales and marketing team to configure, price, and quote products or services quickly.
2. Integration with Other Systems: Ensure the chosen CPQ software integrates easily with existing customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
3. Customization: The software should provide a customizable interface better to suit the needs of the sales and marketing team.
4. Automation: Your CPQ software must ensure automated pricing, discounting, and approvals to help the team work faster and more efficiently.
5. Security: The CPQ software should ensure the security of customer data and protect it from unauthorized access.
How CPQ Fuels Sales and Marketing
CPQ is becoming increasingly popular among businesses in many different industries as it can help them improve the efficiency of quote generation, accuracy of quotes, and customer relationships.
Let us now explore the role of CPQ in the sales and marketing team and how it can significantly improve their performance.
CPQ for the sales team
1. Streamlines the quote creation process
CPQ makes it easier for sales reps to generate custom quotes faster than ever before accurately. It automates complex pricing calculations to ensure accuracy and saves time by eliminating the need for manual data entry and calculations. Sales staff can quickly search for available product configurations and create order forms without leaving the CPQ platform.
2. Identifies cross-selling and upselling opportunities
CPQ helps sales reps identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities by providing easy access to customer purchase history and product cross-reference capabilities. This allows them to recommend related products or services that interest customers based on past purchases.
3. Allows the team to tailor CX
CPQ tools enable businesses to personalize their communication with individual customers by providing dynamic pricing and quotation features. This allows the sales team to customize the specifications according to current market trends to serve customers better. Not only does this benefit the business by satisfying customers with pricing offers that they find appealing, but it also creates a great customer experience.
4. Drives productivity & efficiency
By automating all aspects of quote creation, CPQ eliminates repetitive tasks requiring manual effort from sales reps. This leaves them more time to focus on activities that are more likely to generate new leads or close deals, resulting in increased productivity and efficiency.
5. Offers accurate and consistent quote
Another major advantage of CPQ is that it helps to ensure that quotes are accurate and consistent. The software automatically calculates prices and discounts based on predetermined rules and pricing structures. This means that sales teams can avoid making mistakes or inconsistencies when creating quotes, which can lead to lost sales or unhappy customers.
CPQ for the marketing team
Most of the CPQ benefits are leveraged by marketers via integration. Choosing the CPQ software with high-level integration with marketing tools helps leverage some key benefits.
1. Accurately measures campaign performance
Besides helping sales teams maximize their performance, CPQ also provides valuable insights into campaign performance for marketing teams. CPQ analytics capabilities help easily track deal size, average selling price, conversion rates, customer lifetime value, etc. This helps the marketing team to gain valuable insights into which campaigns are most successful in generating new leads or closing deals.
2. Improves lead management & qualification processes
CPQ enables marketing teams to improve lead generation and management by offering automated lead qualification capabilities. This allows them to easily identify potential buyers by understanding their needs so they can focus their efforts on the most promising prospects and ensure a higher success rate in their campaigns overall.
3. Allows marketers to leverage demand generation strategies
The marketing automation tools can integrate with CPQ, enabling marketing teams to implement demand-generation strategies easily. This includes creating email or social media campaigns while leveraging real-time insights into customer behavior for optimal results.
4. Identifies key customer segments
The software can generate reports and analytics to help marketing teams better understand their customers and effectively target their marketing efforts. This helps them identify key customer segments, target specific demographics, and develop marketing campaigns that are more likely to be successful.
5. Offers a peek into customer interaction
CPQ helps marketing teams with detailed information about how customers interact with their products and services. This can help them to identify areas where they can improve their offerings and better meet the needs of their customers.
Overall, CPQ is a powerful tool that can help sales and marketing teams improve their performance and achieve better results. Whether you’re looking to streamline your sales processes, create more accurate and consistent quotes, or gain a deeper understanding of your customers, CPQ can help you to achieve your goals and drive your business forward.
Wrapping Up
The CPQ adoption by sales and marketing teams has been a win-win situation. The CPQ tool has allowed sales teams to generate precise quotes quickly. Marketing teams have been able to drive better customer engagement and increase customer retention. Thus, organizations have improved their competitive edge and maximized their profits.
To get started, teams should start by understanding the benefits of the software and how it can be integrated into their existing processes. Once they understand the functions available and how the software works, teams can create specific processes to leverage all that CPQ software has to offer. With proper training and implementation, sales and marketing teams can unlock the full potential of this powerful tool.
Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.