Let’s face it: unpredictability is the new normal for businesses. From fast-changing market demands to global pandemics and supply chain chaos, businesses are consistently navigating uncertainties and fierce competition. While there’s a glimmer of hope with the World Bank predicting a steady global economic growth for 2024, challenges are far from over.
The cross-currents of the pandemic, conflicts, inflation, and monetary tightening have made thriving tough. Over the last few years, the very nature of buying and selling has undergone major upheaval and compelled organizations to find their footing again. The intense pressure to fast track growth and revenue has put the businesses in a tight spot, leading the decision makers to lean more on technology and digital capabilities. According to the EY CEO Outlook Survey January 2023, almost 74% of private business CEOs are planning to bolster their digital and technology competencies of their companies, and 63% of the non-private businesses plan to boost their technology spend.
This answers the question that technology innovation is here for the long haul and digital innovation such as business process automation will continue to progress ahead and dethrone manual processes.
But now, let’s address the elephant in the room – where to start?
Enter Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) Software
It is an advanced sales tool that allows organizations to fully automate multiple business-critical processes, including selecting and configuring products, pricing and discounting them, collecting approval (s) from different stakeholders when pricing falls outside of guardrails, and automatically generating a quote for the customer.
Additionally, it complements and works in tandem with other business tools to ensure integrated and accurate data. CPQ comes with robust functionality and offers ROI by enabling businesses to:
reduce the lead-to-quote cycle time by 40%
cut 50% of the manual processes
improve quote accuracy by 60%
boost revenue by 15%
enhance customer satisfaction scores by ~80%
Note: Above stats collated from Forsys customer success story
Curious how it’s more than just a sales platform? With Salesforce CPQ, you get an all-in-one solution that streamlines business process automation from start to finish.
Why is Salesforce CPQ Necessary?
Speaking from our experience as a CPQ solutioning expert by enabling enterprises of different sizes across industries to optimize their mission-critical processes across the entire revenue lifecycle, Forsys’ Salesforce CPQ customers have witnessed faster sales processes and achieved 90% process automation.
Its ability to optimize and automate the entire quote-to-cash lifecycle all on one platform, from configuring quotes to streamlining approvals, managing invoices to revenue recognition, and automating contracts to renewals, has added to its popularity among users and subsequent recognition by Gartner as the market leader for 7 years in a row. Considering that the sales team leverages 10 tools to close deals, the business case for CPQ is strong due to its all-around capabilities.
As a recognized & preferred Salesforce consulting partner, Forsys has empowered businesses from a broad spectrum of industry verticals – Hi-Tech, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Retail, BFSI, EdTech, Government, etc – facing issues to:
configure products
avail discounts
create contracts & renew quotes
derive insights from analytics
automate the E2E customer lifecycle
streamline complex approval processes
switch to subscription business model
upsell & cross sell
connect the front & back offices
Salesforce CPQ goes above & beyond sales. It streamlines operations, bolsters financial accuracy, and strengthens customer relationships, while optimizing the supply chain and supporting product management. Plus, it makes compliance easier, enables collaboration between teams, while maintaining business agility and driving growth.
What makes Salesforce CPQ stand out?
In Salesforce CPQ, the configuration functionality involves the selection and combination of options to build a customer-specified product.
With the probability of selling to an existing customer standing at 60-70%, more businesses are now shifting their focus to upselling services and cross-selling new product lines by launching more products to accelerate their revenue growth.
Here are the three features that help upsell and cross-sell:
- Product Bundles: They allow optional features or components that may be required to be included in a single quote line.
- Product Rules: They take bundling one step ahead by automatically including products that should go together or by including necessary charges, including shipping fees, warranties, etc.
- Custom Filters: They allow for a certain level of “pre-filtering” before users can search for or apply any filters of their own.
This functionality allows items/products to be automatically and optimally customized based on the sales trends for particular clients while ensuring that the customers receive pricing that appeals to them.
Salesforce CPQ offers automated volume-based discounts so that sales reps don’t have to search through out-of-date discounting data. It also keeps close track of different discount types, including partner or distributor discounts, to ensure that pricing details can be accessed later.
Managing an approval process with serial (sequential) and parallel (simultaneous) approvals is a headache. But with Advanced Approvals, businesses can set up complex approval paths while providing their sales reps with an easy approval management system. Also, they can choose:
- Parallel approvals to be routed to multiple departments at one time.
- Different criteria within a single approval process, as well as data summarization from any unrelated object(s) for the approval criteria.
- Use smart approval configuration to skip previous approvers, if not needed when the transaction is resubmitted.
Whenever a quote is configured with Salesforce CPQ, the information is automatically available at the line-item level. It provides granular visibility into every transaction that contributes to revenue, allowing for accurate forecasting and growth traction; it automates pricing and prorating, enabling coterminating subscriptions on contracts and renewals; and it tracks all expansions, contractions, add-ons, churns, and renewals.
Native to Salesforce, CPQ supports easy and quick integration with leading ERPs to enable users to manage the whole process in one place, without needing to open a separate program and perform duplicate data entry or cross-references.
This addition from Salesforce Labs allows customers of B2B Commerce and CPQ to configure functionality that will help sync products, pricing, quote requests, and order history across both clouds.
This is an excellent value add for B2B companies looking to customize digital storefronts for complex B2B selling and add tailored configurable pricing to digital carts for a self-service experience.
Find out more
To learn more about how organizations across industry verticals leveraged Salesforce CPQ to grow and thrive during the pandemic, read our blog.
Why Forsys for Salesforce
Forsys has proven its mettle as a trusted Salesforce partner with its track record of 200+ successful projects and a stellar 4.9/5 CSAT score for designing and implementing end-to-end transformative Salesforce solutions. Our industry-specific innovation is driven by our world-class global delivery team that drives industry-specific innovation yielding tangible results. Consult our team to explore how Salesforce CPQ can benefit your business and how we can help you get started.
Forsys has proven its mettle as a trusted Salesforce partner with a track record of executing 200+ Salesforce projects along with 4.9/5 CSAT score for designing, implementing, and leading transformative solutions using the Salesforce tech stack. Powered by our world-class global delivery team, we have spearheaded business transformation that delivers tangible results.
Consult our team to discuss your CPQ needs, understand what Salesforce CPQ can do for your business, and how we can help you get started.