When the world was struck by the COVID-19 pandemic, it sent businesses into a period of upheaval from which they’re slowly recovering. While economic momentum is bouncing back, organizations are encountering cross-currents in supply chains, inflation, and revenue growth.
The pandemic has changed the very nature of buying and selling, forcing organizations to find their footing again. While the pressure to speed up growth and accelerate revenue has put businesses in a tight spot, decision-makers have become more trusting of what technology can do, and they are pushing ahead with process automation. According to a report, 67% of organizations are implementing business process automation solutions to achieve end-to-end visibility across varied systems, driving the process automation market growth to a whopping $23.9 bn by 2030.
The question business leaders are asking is: Can process automation really help fast track stalled revenue growth?
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 to 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 CRM/ERP or other business tools to ensure integrated and accurate data. In short, it enables businesses to make the buying process quicker and easier, accelerate new revenue streams, and improve revenue efficiency by several notches.
As a result of its strong functionality and potential for an excellent return on investment (ROI), a report states, CPQ enables businesses to:
- Generate a quote 10 times faster
- Reduce the approval time by 95%
- Move two times faster from Quote-to-Cash
- Ramp up new reps by 30% faster
Which CPQ
Speaking from our experience and expertise in helping global enterprises optimize their mission-critical processes across the entire revenue lifecycle and working with multiple CPQ platforms in the past 5 years, Salesforce CPQ users have witnessed faster sales processes.
Its ability to optimize and automate the entire Lead-to-Revenue 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 5 years in a row.
Salesforce CPQ is the best fit for organizations, from service, finance, high-tech, manufacturing and healthcare industries, 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 and Cross Sell
- Connect the front and back offices
Here are a few key standout features of Salesforce CPQ that help businesses accelerate their revenue growth:
- Configurations
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 more services and cross-selling new product lines by launching more products in 2020 compared to the past 2 years to accelerate their revenue growth.
Here are the three features that help upsell and cross-sell:
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- Product Bundles: It allows optional features or components that may be required to be included in a single quote line.
- Product Rules: It takes bundling one step ahead by automatically including products that should go together or by including necessary charges, including shipping fees, warranties, etc.
- Custom Filters: It allows for a certain level of “pre-filtering” before users can search for or apply any filters of their own.
- Dynamic Pricing
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.
- Discounts
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.
- Advanced Approvals
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:
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- 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.
- Forecast monthly/annual recurring revenue
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, allowing for coterminating subscriptions on contracts and renewals; and it tracks all expansions, contractions, add-ons, churns, and renewals.
- Integration with ERP
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.
- CPQ B2B Commerce Cloud Connector
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 different organizations across industry verticals leveraged Salesforce CPQ to grow and thrive during the pandemic, read the blog.
About Forsys
Forsys is a full-solution systems integration partner for Salesforce, specializing in revenue operations.
Consult our team of dedicated Salesforce experts to find out and understand what Salesforce CPQ can do for your business and how we can help you get started.