Introduction to Salesforce CPQ
In today’s world, the face of Sales is changing. Customers are more connected and informed. They look for trusted, responsive, fast, and productive channels. All this while, sales reps struggle to keep up with the demands. In addition to this, disconnected data, processes and systems hurt the efficiency.
- Generating accurate quotes is a biggest challenge for many Companies even today. Some of the key reasons are:
- Product/Pricing catalogs maintained in offline files (Excel, Word, PDF)
- Outdated information floating around
- Large product catalogs governed by complex business and technical rules
- Unorganized offline or email approval processes
- Inability of sales reps to self-service
- Documents generated manually with no consistency in branding or content
In addition to lengthy turnaround times slowing down the sales cycle, a poor quoting process can negatively affect closure rates, leave a bad customer experience, and allow the money to leak out in the following ways:
- Missed opportunities to increase deal size
- No common (one-stop) place to store and report on data
- Leading to poor visibility and control
- Lack of visibility/ accuracy in the sales pipeline (New Business or Renewals)
- Financial impact of making things right when a quoting error is made
CPQ to the Rescue
This is where CPQ products come in. CPQ stands for Configure-Price-Quote
CPQ solutions generally address the selling and quoting challenges by:
- Capturing the tribal knowledge and using it to enable the users with less training or experience to prepare accurate quotes
- Guiding users through a consistent process of selecting the best products for the customer
- Enforcing business and technical rules to ensure complete and valid configurations
- Ensuring the latest product and pricing data is always available and used to prepare quotes
- Managing discounting and approvals
- Generating dynamic proposal documents with consistent branding, content, and structures
Salesforce CPQ
Salesforce CPQ, formally known as a Steelbrick is a Configure-Price-Quote CRM platform which streamlines quote to cash process, enabling Sales Reps to quote and price efficiently and accurately.
With its amazing out of the box features for Product Configuration, easy to configure bundles and Options, advanced Pricing and discounting for different needs, CPQ offers outstanding capabilities to provide professional and accurate quotes to prospects quickly.
The Salesforce CPQ process is very robust and is the fastest path to optimize Quote to Cash. It leverages entire customer sales cycle on a single platform.
And, here is a quick look at what Salesforce CPQ has to offer:
We have made understanding CPQ a piece of cake through our video here. Do take a look:
Relevant Links:
- Sign up for a free Developer Edition org with Salesforce CPQ here
- Salesforce Help Article
- Trailhead module