If you’re like most business leaders, you’re always looking for ways to shorten your sales cycle and speed up response times, all while delivering better service to your clients. Salesforce CPQ is one of the best ways to meet those goals. The feature saves time and boosts your bottom line, and it also helps build customer loyalty.
But what is CPQ in Salesforce?
If you don’t know much about Salesforce CPQ, this article is here to help. Briefly — CPQ stands for Configure, Price, and Quote. The tool helps your sales team give customers quick, accurate answers about pricing so that they can close deals more quickly.
Keep reading to learn more about CPQ Salesforce and how to implement it so that your business can take advantage of everything it has to offer.
Salesforce CPQ is a sales tool for customer-facing representatives. The tool figures out the price of anything the customer wants to buy in your product catalog, no matter how unusual the product configuration may be.
CPQ’s systems calculate the price based on whatever relevant discounts your company is currently offering. It also takes into account special pricing for package deals, customizations, or additional features.
Without CPQ, sales reps often struggle to figure out the pricing of customer purchases — especially when customers are buying items in an unusual configuration. CPQ speeds the sales process and ensures that customers follow through on their purchases.
Implementing CPQ is an achievable goal for any business. By following these steps, you can have your whole team using the sales tool in no time.
Each business has a unique set of needs and circumstances. Assess your sales pipeline, and then decide what you want to achieve by using CPQ. This will help in the process of implementation.
Setting clear, measurable goals also makes it easy to evaluate CPQ and determine whether it’s working well for your company.
Some typical goals for CPQ include:
Once you determine which goals are the most important to you, start capturing data. After an initial trial period, go back and assess to see whether CPQ is helping you meet your goals.
This step is an evergreen. Successful leaders are constantly tweaking their lead-to-cash business process. While you’re implementing CPQ, it’s a good time to adjust your lead-to-cash process as well.
This will help you to design a CPQ workflow that meshes with the existing workflow in your business. It will also help you to take a close look at your existing products, along with all of the add-ons, optional features, and services that you currently provide.
Ask yourself whether your current pricing, discounts, and terms are where you want them to be. Work closely with your sales teams to figure out what needs adjusting in your catalog, based on their knowledge of consumer trends and tendencies.
Once you’re confident about your pricing, you can input that information into your CPQ. You can also customize your CPQ so that it’s easier for your team to find the best deals for each customer, based on that customer’s buying interests.
Your team isn’t going to need every single feature available in Salesforce CPQ. There are simply too many features offered.
That’s why it’s a good idea to spend some time customizing CPQ to meet your company’s unique needs. Go through the features and decide on which ones you want to prioritize. There will probably be some features that are low priorities to you, others that are crucial, and the rest somewhere in the middle.
You should also consider some of the less common features and some of the advanced features. Many businesses find it useful to consult with an expert for advice on the best features available for their teams.
Congratulations! You’ve set up your products and pricing. Now it’s time to make sure you have the right data pipeline so that your CPQ has all the information it needs.
For the CPQ system to work, it needs data on your latest discounts and deals. It also helps when the system can access customer data, so that it can create quotes and recommendations based on the customer’s interests.
You’ll also need to give the CPQ access to tax rates, along with any other relevant details about your company’s bundling deals.
Make sure your team keeps this information up-to-date and accurate. You’ll also need to make sure your data is clean so that the system can easily “read” and analyze it.
It’s a good idea to put one person on your team in charge of maintaining the data. It’s also a best practice to run tests before you start using the CPQ company-wide.
While you’re testing your CPQ, it’s a good idea to also look for ways to tweak your existing sales workflow.
You may find that the CPQ speeds up the sales cycle, or that it increases sales of certain items. You may also find that it increases customer loyalty so that you have more repeat business.
These are all great things. But these changes could require you to make some changes to your sales workflow.
This is probably a great mantra for any business: measure, track, and analyze. Keep checking back to see how the CPQ implementation is working for your teams and your customers.
Ask your sales reps whether it’s working for them: Is CPQ easy to use? Does it give them accurate information quickly? If not, where is the problem, and how can you fix it?
As you fix bugs and meet your goals, remember to keep checking back, measuring, tracking, and analyzing progress.
Salesforce CPQ has the potential to dramatically increase sales and boost your bottom line. But the tool isn’t easy to implement. That’s why many organizations are partnering with Astreca to get the expert advice they need.
No matter what stage of the process you’re in, Astreca can help. Get in touch today to start on your Salesforce journey.
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