Using Configure Price Quote Software to Save Time and Money

Featured Article by SteelBrick

The role of IT professionals has expanded significantly over the past several years. It’s not enough anymore to provide support; today’s IT teams must add value to their organizations, identifying new ways to help employees operate more efficiently and reduce costs. Among their many other responsibilities, IT professionals are expected to provide the tools their colleagues need to drive sales.

One of the best ways to add value is to identify new tools that can help salespeople streamline the process of generating revenue. Technology can help sales teams operate more efficiently and effectively, which is why so many companies have embraced platforms like Salesforce, which automates many aspects of customer relationship management.

Another automation tool companies have adopted to improve responsiveness and efficiency is Configure Price Quote (CPQ) software, a solution that helps sales professionals quickly create accurate quotes and proposals – and close more deals. With the right CPQ software, salespeople can generate customer-friendly quotes using standard Salesforce price books, easily selecting components, integrating volume discounts and pre-negotiated contracts as well as channel and partner pricing to rapidly generate winning quotes.

Sales professionals can generate proposals and contracts using a desktop, laptop or mobile device, creating branded documents with fully customizable templates and include relevant collateral to support the proposal. Advanced CPQ software solutions give salespeople the ability to deliver quotes with just one click in Word or PDF format and automatically save documents in Salesforce for tracking, auditing and compliance purposes.

In addition to professional-looking proposals and contracts, CPQ software can also give salespeople a way to easily handle orders and renewals, ensuring consistent pricing and discounting across customer groups. Sales professionals can set automatic renewal reminders in Salesforce and apply existing contract terms and prices to handle add-on orders, automatically generating renewal quotes and enabling accurate reporting on contract values.

From an IT standpoint, it’s important to find a CPQ software solution that integrates seamlessly with current business processes and platforms, such as Salesforce. The right solution has to enable users to configure products and services based on the business rules and logic that make sense for their companies, such as features that allow the use of standard Salesforce product catalogs and custom options and bundles as well as special promotions.

It’s also helpful to deploy a solution that is intuitive so that users can hit the ground running without extensive IT support. A CPQ solution with a guided selling feature that enables sales reps to select the right products and services to match customer needs improves efficiency and supercharges productivity. And to maximize revenue production, deploying a tool that identifies cross-sell and up-sell opportunities can also help each sales rep close more deals.

Companies succeed when they create happy customers, and in today’s business environment, time is of the essence. Proactive IT professionals who identify new tools that help sales teams succeed by saving time and money in the pricing and quote production process are adding real value to their companies, enhancing the perception of IT as a true business partner.

CPQ software can be an important part of the sales toolkit, accelerating sales by enabling creation of customer quotes with a single click. By exploring CPQ solutions, IT professionals can give their sales teams – and their companies – an unbeatable competitive edge.