CPQ: Configure. Price. Quote.

Sounds very straightforward, doesn’t it? In business terms, we can turn to Gartner for a definition:

“The sales configure, price and quote (CPQ) to revenue (cash) market supports traditional sales quote configuration as well as supporting self-service, e-commerce, contact center and partner channels. These solutions improve the guidance, governance, and efficiencies of selling unique combinations of products or services for different sales situations. At the same time, they reduce the non-selling work and selling cycle times, and improve overall sales effectiveness.”

The CPQ cycle, in a nutshell, is to produce accurate sales quotes for business prospects, a process that applies to many different industries. One of the most important suppliers of CPQ solutions, Cincom, addresses its products to a range of enterprise that operate with highly customised or personalised products or services. Some of these include;

• Specialty vehicles
• Industrial equipment manufacturing (IEM)
• Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC)
• Utilities
• Technology device supply and distribution
• Medical device sale, lease, and hire
• Services
• Financial Services

In sales, being found at the right time by a potential client (or pro-actively finding new clients) is key. And as well as the sense of timing required, the time taken between initial contact and quote creation is also key.

Savvy buyers will always garner multiple options, and to delay at an early stage – e.g. holding back a price or specification document due to internal obstacles – can write your organization out of the question.

Cincom’s CPQ quote generation capabilities help businesses to:

• Rapidly create and manage quotes for multiple products and services, in combination where necessary
• Use built-in rules defined by experts in your business such as, sales management, product management, engineering or even finance, that guide your sales reps, distributors, authorised dealers and partners through each step of the quoting journey
• Have privilege sets to access different levels of quoting capability
• Capture feature, option and pricing details for quotes across all channels for the purposes of analysis and reporting in different departments at management level
• Simplify quote approvals and the processes around quote rewrites, revisions, and resubmissions

For the salesperson at the coal face or the reseller at a distributing business, Cincom’s CPQ solution enables guided selling, which for internal salespeople reduces training time required.

Every company has its own complications and price books, e.g. seasonal alterations or pricing according to purchase history, to name but two factors. In some markets, social media is driving pricing policy to an increasing degree, as customers expect immediate responses.

As well as an increase in accuracy right across all selling platforms and channels, a good system – such as Cincom’s – will allow a degree of flexibility in the sales process, at the same time ensuring all changes applied on-the-fly or as part of a larger sales drive are accurately reported on for future analysis.

With Cincom CPQ sales and sales operations departments can play more strategic roles in the business. The ensuing fulfillment processes can be more accurate, which increases rates of customer satisfaction and return.

Cross-selling and up-selling are fine arts, but even the most inexperienced salesperson can be guided through the possibilities by powerful software. This increases the overall knowledge and involvement of sales forces, as well as, of course, increasing revenues.

When quotes are quickly assembled, often from multiple documents, and well presented in a timely manner, the customer can make informed decisions from available options. If one of those options (hopefully yours!) arrives quickly and is bespoke to the customer, the chance of sales conversion is notably higher.

With CPQ solutions from Cincom, businesses flourish. While no size fits all, Cincom’s offering is powerful, scalable and will improve the whole sales cycle for businesses ranging up to multinational enterprises.

You can see a video explainer here, or get in touch with Cincom here.