Preparing a quote for a highly configurable product with actual pricing can take a lot of time and effort. It is important that you don’t keep your prospect waiting when they are ready to buy your product. If you are involved in sales, you might know how difficult it is to provide pricing to a prospect or customer. This is particularly true when your company offers a lot of products and services. Managing the entire process can be a challenging task at times. There are tools that will support you during your sales pipeline, like Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) Software. In this blog, you’ll learn the basics of CPQ software.
What is CPQ?
Configure price quote software (CPQ) is a program that helps companies to work with pricing. With constantly changing variables of goods, it helps to define pricing with more accuracy. It is difficult to provide the best solution when a company offers a lot of different products or services, so CPQ software becomes an effective way to handle it. This software combines all necessary information and makes everything centralized.
CPQ solutions can help businesses to keep prices more in line with current market conditions. This software is sometimes written as “configure, price, quote” to illustrate that these software products can help with all three of these core operations for setting and controlling prices.
Why Configure, Price, Quote?
Standardization across the company is one of the most important benefits that CPQ offers. Often sales, manufacturing, and development are very separate entities within the company. CPQ has proven to be a critical link between various departments, allowing effective communication and standards to be firmly set in place. CPQ can be integrated with ERP systems, and when such integrations are established, entire processes are streamlined. Essentially, CPQ software solutions help companies to streamline some of their core processes around the prices that they set for customers. Sales can monitor the status of deliveries, executives can monitor the sales process, operations can monitor trends to plan for new deals. Sales can work with product design. Better decisions can be made to meet customer needs. On-time production is greater because operations and materials and manufacturing departments are in the loop.
CPQ programs can help companies to understand market conditions at a glance. CPQ products help companies to set the right prices to get sales or contracts accomplished quickly. Common features of CPQ software systems include handy interfaces for price sheets, cloud-based hosting and other easy features for handling and storing data. Other visual components of these kinds of software can help companies to move quickly through multiple stages involved in price quoting. In many cases, these types of products may involve detailed analytics that will help businesses to not only set current prices but to project future demand and price quotes.
Key Takeaways:
The final goal that CPQ tools look to pursue is to increase sales, therefore, revenue. So, sales teams get a real solution that help saves time and provides actual and reliable information on goods and prices. CPQ products also give possibilities to set a successful selling strategy. It helps better define what channels to use and what prices to set for each of them. They give access to all discounts, partners, and other groups. As a result, CPQ software allows you to choose the best combination of products with the best prices for each customer. For detailed information of CPQ, reach us at Trikonic.