Configure Price Quote Solutions to Simplify Sales Process

What Does Configure Price Quote (CPQ) Software Mean?

Software systems known as configure price quote (CPQ) assist sales teams and end customers in creating reliable estimates for highly customizable products. They contain product rules that constrain and automate the configuration process, ensuring every product design is viable from an engineering perspective.

Visual CPQ solutions are even more practical. They provide a visual interface that allows users to interact with 3D product visuals as they configure their products. This makes the process of getting a quote much more user-friendly, interesting, and clear for people who want to find out more about your products or configure to order.

Integrating visual CPQ solutions into a website enables users to set up and quote items online from any location at any time. Customers can self-serve by configuring products independently and generating a quote, giving them the autonomy they crave whether they work remotely or in-office.

Configure price quotes solutions can assist businesses in streamlining their complete sales operations and enhancing the client experience. Automation helps reduce errors, improve accuracy and consistency, and enhance collaboration within the sales team, leading to more efficient and effective sales processes.

How to Simplify Your Sales Process Using Price Quotation Solutions

Sales benefits of configure product quote (CPQ) software implementation include:

1. Cut back on time spent manually quoting.

It takes a lot of effort to configure complicated products, determine the best price for that product and customer, and then create a quote in Word, Excel, or a comparable program.

It could take days if the configuration process is flawless the first time, which is too long. But it can take weeks when there’s back and forth between the sales and engineering departments, or the customer changes their minds at the last minute due to confusion over a technical issue. 

Is the buyer dissatisfied with the cost? Then it’s back to the drawing board, wasting even more time.

Configure price quotes solutions might make your sales procedure less strenuous. They automate configuration, slashing sales cycles from weeks to minutes. While consumers customize items, they compute pricing and produce enticing and convincing bids, proposals, and estimations.

Configure product quotes solutions save a substantial amount of time and effort, freeing up sales teams to work on other projects and enabling customers to resume their regular activities. The more responsive to your customer’s needs and the more time you save them, the more likely they are to want to deal with your company. It is a significant competitive advantage in a society where everyone aspires to be more productive.

2. Enhance Precision and Consistency

The consequences of inaccurate product configuration can be catastrophic. At best, they make life harder for engineers who have to clean up non-viable configurations created by sales reps who don’t fully understand technical requirements. In the worst-case scenario, expensive products could be put into production only to be discarded when flaws are exposed in the open.

Configuring price quotes solutions assures that each configuration is optimized and evaluated before use. The configurator stores all of your company’s engineering logic and reuses it every time a product is configured. Let's say the user tries to mate two pieces that shouldn't be combined or increase a dimension to a size that endangers the final assembly's structural integrity. In that case, the configurator will flag the issue. Not only that, it will guide the user to a better alternative.

Increased precision and consistency during the configuration process lessen the customization burden on the engineering department and preserve consistency to promote customer satisfaction and shop floor productivity.

3. Accessible and immediate pricing 

Your CPQ system serves as the one source of truth for all of your pricing and product information. It ensures users access up-to-date information, helping sales teams be more responsive to customer inquiries, enabling buyers to self-serve, and ensuring quotes are fair and competitive.

Management has more clarity, transparency, and control over the entire configure price quote process thanks to automated pricing. They can set clear guidelines and rules and ensure salespeople adhere to them, reducing the need for approvals. In case, they must adjust the price of a product option, they need not send out an email, they enter the new price into the system, and it’s updated automatically company-wide. 

4. Improve Cross-Business Collaboration With Automation

CPQ solutions serve as a centralized platform that enables information sharing and real-time collaboration for sales teams to collaborate on quotes and proposals. This can improve communication and coordination within the sales team, leading to more efficient and effective sales processes.

The collaboration between sales, engineering, and the shop floor is also fostered by CPQ. Sales representatives can act more independently because they don't need to consult engineering whenever they configure a product. They know the designs they create and sell will be feasible to manufacture and have a healthy profit margin.

The best CPQ solutions, like Epicor CPQ, reduce the burden of customer engineering by automating CAD files, BOMs, CNC cut sheets, assembly guidance, and more. They connect the entire end-to-end engineer-to-order process with a seamless flow of data that unifies all departments.

5. Better Customer Experience 

Building customer loyalty and enhancing satisfaction and retention are made possible by the quick configuration and quotation of customized products.

Adding 3D visual product configuration makes an even bigger difference, giving customers and sales reps a better understanding of the features and options available, so they can make more informed decisions about the products they want to purchase. Visual configurators convey information about the product more effectively than text or generic images, No matter how complex your product is. 

Furthermore, visual product configuration can be a powerful marketing tool, enabling companies to showcase their products in an interactive, engaging, and immersive way. It is a perfect solution for a brand to stand out, build value, and attract more leads and partners.

6. Increase Win Rate And Sale Forecast Accuracy  

For a better forecast of the sales team, CPQ solutions can provide detailed data and analytics on quotes, proposals, and sales trends, which also trends better ROI. Sales teams can plan and allocate resources more effectively, improving business performance. 

Most businesses take a scattergun approach to sales. Each rep has their own “style”–some more successful than others–and there are limited means of distributing learnings and knowledge to their colleagues. It is one perfect solution for configuration, pricing, and quote solutions to standardize the sales process and allow sales teams to modify and continually improve e-commerce deal size, win rates, and conversion rates. 

 

Wrapping Up: 

Entrepreneurs who sell complex and configurable products can greatly streamline their sales processes by using configure price quote (CPQ) solutions. These solutions can reduce the time spent on manual quoting, improve accuracy and consistency, provide real-time pricing and availability information, enhance collaboration and transparency, and make the customer experience highly enjoyable and engaging.

A visual CPQ solution that offers a visual interface for interacting with and designing 3D product visuals can greatly enhance the customer experience. Embed a visual configurator into your website, and you can showcase your products to the world, increasing reach and revenue.