5 sales pain points solved by CPQ automation

Every business has a process for configuring, pricing, and quoting products and services. However, many haven't yet considered the transformative potential of a configure, price, quote (CPQ) tool. CPQ could be the key to generating more revenue for your business. Here, we will discuss how Conga CPQ empowers organizations to revolutionize their revenue lifecycle.

What is a CPQ tool? 

Configure, price, quote (CPQ) software is a tool that can supercharge your sales process. A CPQ automates the processes required to sell offerings, from simple to complex, for organizations. It empowers sales to configure products correctly, optimally price each component, quickly obtain required approvals, offer upsell or cross-sell suggestions, and swiftly provide an offer for the customer within hours rather than days. In short, it's a tool that can significantly streamline your sales operations and give you back valuable time. 

A CPQ tool enhances the revenue lifecycle by significantly improving the efficiency and accuracy of sales processes. It reduces the time to quote, ensures order accuracy, and optimizes pricing strategies. This leads to increased customer satisfaction, higher conversion rates, and more predictable and sustainable revenue growth.

Sales pain points solved by CPQ  

A CPQ tool is designed to untangle the intricacies within your revenue lifecycles, especially those involving highly configurable products and complex pricing that require support during the configuration and quoting processes. It's a solution that can simplify your business operations by automating manual selling processes. 

Specific business challenges like these kinds of complexities can prevent scalability and necessitate a CPQ solution to scale. If you see any of these issues within your business, it’s time to consider a CPQ tool:

1. Revenue leakage due to inaccuracies 

    

   Manual sales processes often lead to inefficiencies and errors throughout the sales cycle, such as rogue discounting, incorrect pricing, and quoting errors. These issues can result in reduced margins, lost or small deals, and even the loss of market share. A CPQ provides guardrails for Sales with codified rules-based configuration and pricing that reduce inaccuracies. With a CPQ, you can also create automated approval workflows for quotes to ensure all necessary stakeholders review and approve deals when required. Workflow automation, such as generating standardized documents, sending notifications, and managing approval workflows ensures the approval process doesn’t slow down the deal.

    

2. Inability to efficiently identify and respond to revenue opportunities 

Complex offerings that involve products and services or are highly customizable can be difficult to sell without a CPQ system to automate the intricate configuration and pricing based on business rules. This can lead to missed opportunities for upselling and cross-selling, thus not fully capitalizing on their potential. A CPQ eliminates those pain points by guiding reps through the selling process, ensuring that all configurations and prices are accurate. A CPQ also suggests upsell and cross-sell opportunities throughout the process to maximize revenue generation.

3. Slow deal velocity and quoting speed 

Disparate systems, a lack of visibility into customer data, bottlenecks in approvals, and legal issues slow opportunities down. Yet customers want a response quicker than ever. If it takes Sales days or weeks to produce and send a quote, it’s time to pursue a CPQ. Sell more, faster, better by recommending the most relevant products and services based on the customer’s preferences. Sales reps can reuse successful sets of products and prices to quickly set up even the most complex quotes, saving time to close.

4. Customers can’t buy the way they want to buy 

If you lack self-service capabilities due to difficulty managing the exact pricing and configuration rules across systems, consider a CPQ. A CPQ system creates a seamless selling experience that can start in one channel and be completed in another, incorporating self-service, partners, and sales, providing a smooth flow of sales engagement. Centralized customer data repositories and business rules are integral to digital commerce systems.

5. Lack of agility to grow the business 

Enabling service revenue has been one of the biggest trends in B2B over the last few years. It’s an ample opportunity to capitalize on, but you need the infrastructure to sell products and services together–a CPQ solution. A CPQ automatically manages any changes to terms, order amounts, swap-outs, or cancellations of mixed orders without the need for lengthy manual processes to update orders, agreements, and billing. If utilizing new channels, markets, and offerings is difficult, you’re missing out on revenue opportunities.

Evaluating a CPQ solution 

The CPQ space is a broad market with a wide array of vendors supporting varying levels of sophistication. Solution capabilities vary from pricing to simple configuration rules/bundles or tools that pull product descriptions and pricing from a catalog listing to generate a proposal.  

Here are a few things to look for when evaluating tools and vendors:  

• Omnichannel support: With an API-first approach, configuration, pricing, or quoting capabilities can be embedded into Commerce, direct sales, and partner portals’ helping streamline configuration and pricing across the revenue lifecycle. 

• Renew and expand deals: Automate renewal quotes, recommend upsell/ cross-sell opportunities, and manage changes to existing subscriptions. 

• Enterprise-grade configuration: configure and price products and services with unlimited product intricacy and large carts with 5,000+ lines. 

• Product, pricing, and deal guidance: Based on the customer's preferences, get recommendations for the most relevant products and services. Sales reps can reuse successful sets of products and prices to quickly set up even the most complex quotes, saving time to close. 

• Standardize product and pricing information: Maintain a centralized repository of accurate product and pricing data. 

Check out our evaluation guide for more details on the CPQ evaluation process. 

Sometimes, a document automation tool can be a better fit for proposal and quote creation.  If you don’t need to calculate pricing dynamically, house a price book, or configure elements of an offering, then a document automation tool for proposal generation is the right solution.

The end-to-end CPQ solution 

Conga CPQ goes beyond quote-to-cash with efficient integrations, advanced analytics, and reporting. These robust features help our customers increase revenue and margins by delivering better price realization and increased volumes through recommended configurations, cross-sells, and upsells.  

Revolutionize your revenue-generating processes by creating compelling, personalized, and accurate quotes and proposals to improve sales, customer relationships, and productivity.

What sets Conga CPQ apart:

• Solution selling: Conga CPQ supports the sale of simple bundles to complex configured tangible goods, services, subscriptions, and usage-based offerings.  

• Pricing functionality: Conga CPQ’s out-of-the-box pricing functionality is among the best evaluated, with robust support for list pricing, cost-plus pricing, volume discounts, attribute-based pricing, sales agreements, promotions, and bundles.  

• A true enterprise CPQ solution: Full Revenue Lifecycle Management supports billing, subscriptions, and contracts—from quote to renewal and beyond—in a single repository and handles the diverse needs of various contract types.  

• Robust integrations: Conga CPQ seamlessly connects with popular CRM and ERP systems and other business applications with an API-first approach. This integration enhances data flow and ensures consistency in information across the organization.  

• Advanced analytics and reporting: Users can gain insights into their quoting and sales processes, enabling data-driven decision-making, tracking sales performance, and optimizing strategies.  

With over 100 billion quotes processed, Conga’s CPQ 2.3 million unique users have created 52 million cars, processed 616 million order lines, and applied 820 product rules. Conga CPQ is the go-to solution for transforming revenue lifecycle processes and providing a seamless buying experience for customers.

Gain a Revenue Advantage 

The transformative potential of CPQ tools in optimizing sales processes and revenue lifecycles for businesses is significant. Revenue leakage, slow deal velocity, and the inability to efficiently identify revenue opportunities are substantial challenges, but Conga CPQ addresses these issues in numerous ways. To learn more about Conga CPQ, check out our Ultimate guide to CPQ  or request a demo to speak with one of our CPQ experts and see the tool in action.