Every business wants to get bigger. It’s essential to pick the right tools to help that growth. If you don’t, you could miss out on chances, make customers unhappy, and waste time and money. A sound CPQ system can improve sales and give sales teams more control over the customer experience. It can also make selling more accessible, increase output, and even open up new money-making methods. Even though CPQ could be a great tech tool, it must be used to be helpful. A lot is at stake because it takes a long time to find and use cross-organizational answers. CPQ adoption failure is a common scenario. To avoid possible problems, it can be easier to adopt CPQ.
Here are the three main reasons why CPQ projects fail, along with tips on how to avoid them.
Price More Than Product
Most of the time, businesses choose the option with the lowest licensing cost. The CPQ budget should be considered when choosing, but it shouldn’t be more important than how well the business will work. Since “what’s cheap is expensive,” it can be costly to choose the cheapest option.
How easy it is to use sets a sound CPQ system apart from a great one. Price alone shouldn’t be the only thing that guides organizations; otherwise, they might buy and use the wrong option. The issue with failing to adopt is that it is done after the fact. Looking back, it might be easy to see why adoption didn’t work. The hard part is noticing it before it happens.
The goal is to have a 100% usage rate, or as close to it as possible. This process of looking for, researching, and getting an answer takes time, effort, and resources. If the tool bought at the end of this long process isn’t used, it wastes money.
Your CPQ and any other tech solutions should be tailored to your needs. It should also be simple to learn and keep up with, making it easier for people to use.
Pick a vendor with a lot of knowledge and a good track record to lead you through the CPQ process and help you succeed by providing excellent support before, during, and after implementation.
Steps Before the Product
- CPQ can be an excellent way for a business to streamline its sales processes. However, during the implementation, it could also make it hard to do business as usual.
- You will want to keep the handling of change that comes with putting in new software to a minimum.
- Remember that technology can’t fix all issues but can make things better and more accessible. Anything new won’t likely make those processes better if they aren’t good to begin with. Things might get worse.
- Before implementing CPQ, take a broad look at the company’s internal structures and think about how processes might need to be remade or even taken out to get rid of steps that aren’t needed or add value.
- This is true for things like improving the sales and bidding processes or making the contract management processes more accessible.
- Putting in place a new tech answer isn’t always easy. You spend a lot of time and energy ensuring your methods work for those who use them.
Decisions that affect everyone
When looking for tech tools that can be used across the company, ensure that people from different departments are involved in the conversation. Not recognizing how important it is for teams to talk to each other can result in useless tools and extra costs.
Find the essential people to help lead each team through the implementation phase and get them involved. This includes people with a stake in the matter, such as the sales, legal, and finance teams, DevOps, and IT teams.
By letting partners talk to each other and work together, you can ensure that business needs are met, problems are solved, and teams are on the same page, leading to fair and reasonable decisions.
Agile is the way of the future.
CPQ can have a significant effect on how much money a business makes. Thinking about essential integrations when setting up a CPQ system is very important.
The most important thing is that a CPQ must work with the company’s CRM system. For the merger process to go smoothly, you need to know precisely how your company’s software solutions work with each other.
If they don’t, businesses could end up with a sales stack that doesn’t work together, outdated solutions, or data that isn’t full across systems. This slows the process by making it harder to get accurate quotes, handle contracts, and provide good customer service. It has a direct effect on the bottom line as well.
It’s essential to look at how much your whole sales stack costs and how well it works. If you have a lot of tools that don’t work together and leave gaps in your sales process, you might want to combine them into one sales stack that covers all the stages of the sales process.
Make a list of all the major systems the CPQ solution needs to be able to talk to. When you fix bugs after the fact, you may solve one problem but make a lot of new ones.
An agile CPQ can offer a complete answer that works with current systems and combines different tech stacks.
To get the most out of your Agile CPQ, think about these features:
Flexibility: It can work with any pricing system and be scaled up or down at any time.
Efficiency: automated cross-team workflows to run fast, lean processes that keep everyone in the loop and ensure teams work toward the same goal.
Agility: easy to manage and quick to put into action. You already know this if you’ve read this far. Control: Seeing what’s going on and ensuring that rules are followed and predictions are correct; keeping data clean; connecting to a single source of truth; and working with CRMs and other solutions.
