Sales and marketing teams help attract, convert, and retain customers to ensure an organization’s long-term growth. Although their individual goals are different, they work in alignment to achieve the common goal of generating revenue.
For instance, marketing teams work toward identifying customer trends and needs and creating promotional strategies with accurate pricing and proposals to attract high-quality leads.
Their efforts are targeted toward helping potential customers reach the decision-making stage. On the other hand, the sales team offers demos and shares quotes according to customer’s requirements.
Here, implementing state-of-the-art CPQ software can ease the “quote-to-cash” process and help teams achieve revenue goals.
In this post, we will explain how CPQ can fuel marketing and sales operations and help an organization generate revenue.
What Is CPQ?
CPQ is an abbreviation for “configure, price, quote,” which reflects the process that teams follow to:
- Configure products according to customer requirements
- Determine the price of the products according to the customization and discounts (if any)
- Produce a quote (agreement between seller and buyer) that outlines the products and services included in the sale, their prices, and any potential discounts or special offers.
CPQ software streamlines and automates these processes and helps marketing and sales teams attract, convert, and retain customers.
It helps teams calculate prices in real time based on the configured product’s specs. Its pricing component comprises setting base prices for specific product features or components and markups for specific customer segments or product options. For instance, an organization might offer discounts for bulk orders or add markups to specific features that customers prefer over other options. CPQ sets up pricing rules based on an organization’s business model.
Besides, it automates price determinations for complex pricing models such as tiered pricing, subscription pricing, volume pricing, and bundled pricing. This eliminates the need to create manual spreadsheets for calculations and ensures accurate quotes.
Most importantly, CPQ software helps streamline the quote creation process. It allows teams to configure products to meet a customer’s needs and automatically applies discounts and special offers as needed. What’s more? CPQ software includes all terms and conditions and packages everything into a single document for easy review. This saves the time required to create quotes for each customer. The outcome? This can help close deals fast while ensuring zero errors.
6 Key Features to Consider While Choosing CPQ Software
The CPQ tool you decide to use should reduce the time required to review products and produce quotes. Let’s now explore the key features to consider while choosing CPQ software for your organization.
Feature #1: Product Configuration
The first and most crucial aspect is product configuration. The CPQ tool should have built-in rules and validations to check the compatibility of products and prevent invalid configurations.
Feature #2: Guided Selling
Guided selling is a technique where the CPQ tool functions as an assistant that makes product recommendations. This feature in the CPQ software can help marketing and sales reps navigate complicated product catalogs by recommending the best products and configurations to customers.
Feature #3: Product Bundling
CPQ software should have a product bundling feature. Selling in bundles allows teams to present the client with pre-configured and dynamic packages. This increases the chances of cross-selling and upselling.
Feature #4: Automated Pricing and Discounting
The marketing and sales teams already have a lot on their plate. Manually calculating discounts and pricing according to the features can create unnecessary challenges. So, one of the key features to look at in the CPQ software is the automatic application of discounts and pricing rules. This feature eradicates the need for manual calculation and creates proposals for specific client requirements.
Feature #5: Quote Approval Workflows
Quote approvals take quite a lot of time and cause unnecessary delays in the deals. The CPQ software should be designed to facilitate the automation of quote approval workflows. Your team member should be able to send quotes to the buyer after automatically passing through the approval process and ensure the prospective customer gets a quote that meets the set criteria.
Feature #6: International Currency Support
The tool should not be restructured to serve only clients from a specific country. It must accommodate the requirements of international clients and help businesses scale. Therefore, choose a CPQ software that accepts multiple currencies. This can help the sales team create proper pricing for clients from the international market.
How CPQ Fuels Sales and Marketing
Here’s how CPQ helps the sales and marketing team deliver peak performance.
Marketing Campaigns for Lead Generation
The first step to acquiring customers is to understand their preferences and create targeted campaigns. CPQ software can help marketing teams create targeted campaigns with accurate product configurations and pricing. This tactic can help attract high-quality leads that are more likely to convert without hassles.
Personalized Content
The next step is to nurture the acquired leads and convert them into paying customers. Here, integrating tools like CRM with CPQ can amplify the power of the marketing team. It enables the marketing team to extract accurate, real-time customer data. Leveraging this data can help marketers create personalized content to convert the leads. For instance, marketers can create promotional materials reflecting a specific product module that the audience wants. This strategy can help the audience make informed decisions.
Passing the Leads to the Sales Team
The marketing team can pass the qualified leads to the sales team with detailed CPQ-driven insights. For instance, they can share details, such as the customer’s pricing expectations, preferred configuration, and more. This type of collaboration bridges the communication gap between marketing and sales. The best thing is that both teams are not required to document anything manually. The system stores all the details and saves their time and effort.
However, even with qualified leads and accurate information, closing deals requires a well-oiled sales approach. Here, implementing a successful sales enablement program can significantly boost conversion rates. A program that equips sales reps with the necessary knowledge, skills, and tools can empower them to confidently navigate complex customer conversations and close deals faster.
Closing the Deal
CPQ ensures that every configuration is valid and eradicates errors. The software helps streamline quote generation by automatically applying discounts and promotions on the customized configuration. This saves time and helps maintain the accuracy. Besides, CPQ allows automated quote approval with discounts or custom pricing. This ensures the deal gets closed without hassle and further creates upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
Summing Up
CPQ is a powerful tool that improves sales and marketing team performance and collaboration.
From helping create targeted campaigns to ensuring lead generation, nurturing, and conversion, CPQ software can streamline the entire quote-to-cash journey. This can help the organization achieve revenue goals and long-term growth.
The key is to find the right CPQ software with state-of-the-art features.
If you are a company looking to fuel marketing and sales, consider choosing a CPQ with features shared in this post and commence your journey.
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.