Salesforce CPQ, or CPQ in general, is a term that many people have likely heard before on numerous occasions when searching for ways to improve their company’s sales process. All companies that offer any service, especially in the B2B context, typically have sales teams working very hard to find new leads and onboard them as customers. Salesforce CPQ, Oracle CPQ, and other CPQ software are designed to improve the sales process and speed up this cycle. Companies have seen quote to cash times split in half by using Salesforce CPQ.
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Configure, Price, Quote
CPQ stands for Configure Price Quote. This naming refers to the quoting part of the sales process. CPQ Software is a sales tool for generating accurate configurable quotes by considering all the complex product combinations, pricing, and business rules. By providing sales representatives with a tool that allows them to generate quotes quickly and effortlessly, companies significantly speed up their sales. Utilizing CPQ software, such as Salesforce CPQ, or SAP CPQ, can speed up the quote to cash process up to two times, especially when combined with capable billing and financial solutions.
Companies may doubt that they require any CPQ software tools, especially if their pricing and business rules are not too complicated. As different industries grow, however, and as the markets become more and more saturated with competitive offers, they will likely start looking for a way to adjust what they are offering. As part of this process, they will develop new innovative ways to reconfigure their services and pricing rules to fit their consumers’ needs. These changes will increase sales, but they will also end up with a vastly more complex product catalog than it once was. Their sales representatives will likely begin to have trouble with manually combining all the compatible products and applying the pricing rules, resulting in a bottleneck in the quote to cash process. At this point, incorporating a CPQ tool will make a lot more sense.
Advantages of Using Salesforce CPQ
Generally speaking, the most significant advantage of using Salesforce CPQ, Apttus CPQ, or another similar tool is saving valuable time. Reducing the time sales representatives spend generating new quotes, and gaining approvals increases their output and time to sell. Studies have shown that sales representatives only spend about a third of their time on actual sales. The rest of the time is used to communicate with potential leads, prepare the quotes, and get approvals from their superiors. Many companies up to this day still use Microsoft Word or Excell to generate quotes and keep track of the quote to cash process. As powerful as they are, these tools are not the ideal solution since they still require manual labor from the sales representative.
Imagine a sales representative working in a company that offers several different products from different categories and has strict business rules on which products are compatible. On top of that, the prices for products are different based on the purchased volume. When we add discounting into the mix, we can understand that the process to configure and calculate a quote manually means a lot of work. Additionally, as the offer complexity increases, so does the number of errors due to the human factor. These errors can stall the quote approvals and heavily impair the quote to cash process. With CPQ tools, all the pricing and discounting rules are already accounted for as the sales rep is preparing the quote, minimizing any margin of error and delays. This can result in up to 10 times faster quote preparation times. Combining this advantage with other solutions like Salesforce billing or Tridens Monetization takes the quote to cash process to another level.
Applying CPQ to your Sales Process
Naturally, Salesforce CPQ and other CPQ tools are only one of the clogs in a big machine, which is the end to end sales process. For CPQ Software to be fully efficient, it usually works in integration with Billing platforms, CRM solutions, ERP solutions, and Payment solutions, where each part is responsible for its task. When seamlessly integrated, such systems provide automation of the whole process, from finding leads, converting them to clients, and keeping track of their balances, invoices, and payments. With all of these solutions working hand in hand, all company departments can work together without unnecessary errors or delays. Simultaneously, all the processes are organized and tracked, from issuing a quote to fulfilling orders, receiving payments, and recognizing revenue.
Tridens Monetization CPQ via Salesforce
At Tridens, we developed Tridens Monetization, a SaaS billing platform with support for real-time convergent charging. Additionally, Tridens Monetization also offers revenue management, generating financial reports, and managing your customer base. Our clients can use an innovative offer design, which brings a whole new perspective to common use-cases like recurring billing, metered usage charging, subscription billing, volume-based and tiered pricing, etc. Tridens Monetization also supports collecting payments through integrations with payment service providers like Stripe, Braintree, Authorize.Net, and others. There are integrations in place for ERP solutions such as Netsuite or SAP and CRM solutions such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. Our clients can also use third-party tax-calculation providers such as Avalara or Suretax. Tridens Monetization is cloud-based and serves as an all-around solution for our clients’ monetization requirements.
Of course, Tridens Monetization also offers the Configure Price Quote solution for our clients, similar to Salesforce CPQ. We achieved CPQ support through integration with Salesforce CRM. The integration is bi-directional and allows Tridens Monetization to synchronize its catalog configuration with Salesforce, and vice versa. This enables our clients to use our offer design and assign rules either through Tridens Monetization or through Salesforce pricing. Our clients then use the Salesforce UI to create new leads and generate quotes by configuring different product combinations, request approvals, and maintain a relationship with a potential client(lead). Once the Salesforce quoting is confirmed, that lead is converted to an actual customer, both on Salesforce and Tridens Monetization. The integration is seamless so our clients can view invoices, service usage history, and perform customer management operations both in Tridens Monetization or via the Salesforce UI.
Conclusion
CPQ in Salesforce, or with any other provider, is a beneficial tool that provides numerous advantages to your sales process. Are you looking for ways to speed up your quote to cash times, remove quoting errors, or to allow your sales representatives to focus on finding new leads and configure quotes effortlessly? If that’s the case, then incorporating a CPQ tool in your business is the way to go. And if along the way, you find yourself in need of an all-around monetization solution, maybe it’s time you give Tridens Monetization a go. Feel free to contact us with your use-case description and questions, and our team will be happy to help you out. We can provide technical feedback, schedule a demo, and determine the optimal way to set you up with Tridens Monetization.
