You’re a marketer making a quote for the biggest deal you’ve ever done. One of the best leads on your list of target accounts is the one you’re getting ready for. They’ve been a good customer for months, and now they want to make a big, complicated purchase that will help you beat your goal.

But they also said they were looking into other options. Time is significant. It would help if you worked quickly and well to get the price ahead of your competitors. There are, however, many things that will work against you if you use manual sales methods. CPQ can help with that.

“Configure-Price-Quote” is what CPQ stands for. It has been shown that the best CPQ systems make sales teams more productive in several ways:

We will look at what makes CPQ better than manual methods below. However, not every CPQ option is the same. We’ll also talk about what makes today’s advanced CPQs different from older ones and why this new type of CPQ is so much better at helping sales teams make more money.

Why using CPQ to quote is better than doing things by hand

The Customer Preference Questionnaire (CPQ) is a powerful sales tool that helps sales reps set correct prices and get quotes faster.

First, let’s take a closer look at why this is better than the old-fashioned way of quoting by hand:

You are setting up. First, you’ll need to figure out how the product is equipped. That means you need to look over your product papers. It’s easy to figure out what your boss wants. You will also need to check product requirements to ensure you send them everything they need to make the order work.

It takes a long time, and it is easy to make mistakes when you do this by hand. On the other hand, CPQ is a powerful sales tool that will show you which products are essential and which need to be bundled together. This is faster, more exact, and less likely to mean that something will be missed. Oracle found that automating the processes for quoting and approval can boost order accuracy by almost 100%.

The price. Once the mix of goods is correct, you’ll need to set a price. It would help if you also thought about whether or not you wanted to offer discounts.

You’ll have to look at the different price list documents, which might or might not be correct if you do this by hand. Before you apply your deal, you’ll also need to look at any price changes from bundling. With a CPQ, on the other hand, pricing strategies are updated immediately, and all the math is done right away.

Say something. It’s time to send your price to your lead now that you have all the necessary information. That means you have to put everything on one page and organize it.

When you do this by hand, you’ll have to send the price to the customer. With a CPQ, the quote will be made immediately, so you can send it to be approved. After that, you will need to put all the data into a PDF or Word file that you make yourself, whether using a CPQ or doing things by hand.

And this is where a big difference between the old, simple CPQ and the new, advanced CPQ software starts to show.

Five features that the best CPQ software sales teams use to make more money

You need a CPQ to make accurate quotes quickly, but you still need to organize conversations and get feedback from the procurement and sales managers before sending your quote off for approval. That costs time, makes things more confusing, and increases the chance of making mistakes as your prospects move through the sales process more slowly.

This is needed because many CPQ systems only do pricing and setting up products. However, CPQ technology does not only gain from new ideas when making documents. Many CPQ systems will work better if they get new features in several ways.

Here are the five best CPQ software tools that sales teams are using right now to make more money:

Set up pricing and rules

Companies can enter their prices and product catalogs into a simple CPQ. So, sales reps won’t have to spend time going through Excel sheets and product listings by hand. But it doesn’t change how salespeople talk to each other or how they use the data to make quotes.

Good software’s powerful CPQ technology lets leadership teams set rules for how products should be configured and how much they cost. This means that sales strategies for how goods work together can be automated, which ensures accuracy and cuts down on the time and work needed to do the same thing by hand.

For instance, you can be flexible with your prices to account for the different places where you sell. You can also ensure that goods that must be sold together are always sold together. The CPQ makes all the changes instantly based on the rules that leadership types into the CPQ.

Companies benefit from these features because they change what they expect from quotes beyond being accurate about price and goods. Instead, they can change their catalog and find the best mix of goods and prices to make the most money from quotes.

Sales Playbooks for Guided Selling

All CPQs can sort price and product lists to make quote combinations. But this feature can only be used with the correct price and product pairs. Customizing quotes for each deal in the pipeline won’t help salespeople make the most money possible.

This is precisely what an advanced guided selling plan does. It can use a decision tree set up by leadership to ask representatives several questions about their deal. CPQ can be a recommendation engine that can set up the most relevant products and give sales reps several different ways to put together a quote by filtering the choices in this way.

This lets the company’s leaders use the company’s overall sales strategy to guide every quote. This is impossible for simple CPQ systems because sales reps don’t always know what product and price combinations work best for different types of buyers. With the new CPQ technology, sales reps can stay focused on their deal while automatically getting a quote that considers information about the whole business. This is the best way to increase the size of each deal and make the most money from each lead.

Workflows for Approval of Quotes

You can get a price from a basic CPQ, but it doesn’t help with getting discounts approved. Even for small changes, sales reps must ask for and wait for approval by hand, which takes time. Lack of workflow technology adds to administrative work and slows the sales process.

New CPQ technology, on the other hand, has approval processes that are fully integrated. This means sales team leaders can set rules for maximum discounting and margins that can be applied automatically. That way, quotes that don’t follow set product strategies and prices will only need to be reviewed and approved. If a discount is given often, the price doesn’t need to be held up for days.

This has three main advantages. First, it saves time because leaders don’t have to review quotes that already fit the sales strategy. This saves time that could be used for other tasks. Second, it gives sales reps more freedom because they don’t feel like management always watches them when they do something they think will help a deal. Third, it speeds up the quote approval process so reps can get back to prospects faster, which studies have shown is one of the most important ways to increase the number of closes.

Change Control

It’s tough to change words with a basic CPQ. Every time someone with a stake in the text changes, a new version is made. All the quote’s different forms must be combined to make it official.

Often, these versions are spread out on different computer screens, so they need to be asked for via email. No matter how it’s done, manually reconciling versions is a process that can lead to mistakes and slow down response times by a lot. It could even lead to trouble if something important is copied wrong or not noticed.

A great CPQ eliminates all these issues by keeping track of different versions of papers as different people change them. This keeps a single source of truth that accurately shows how all changes made by stakeholders have been added up, so no time-consuming human work is needed. Quotes can be changed as quickly as possible, which cuts down on the time it takes to price and gives stakeholders more time to do things that bring in money.

CPQ Co-terming and Subscription Management

CPQ needs to change all the time. Companies may need to add more licenses throughout the year to keep up with their rapid growth. If they buy in bulk, they may also need to change the terms and conditions of their licenses. When there are changes to co-terming, basic CPQs make it hard for sales contract management to handle them because they can’t figure out how to change bills so that all licenses are managed and renewed simultaneously.

This is one reason you should have contract management tools in your sales stack.

This isn’t a “feature” of CPQ, but it’s a significant problem with how the whole company uses it, which causes a lot of pain. Figuring out where prices change by hand takes time, and getting a lot of bills throughout the year can be confusing and lead to extra transaction fees and papers.

More advanced CPQs can do these calculations for you immediately. Companies can improve their finances and records by making administrative tasks more accessible and giving their customers a better experience after the quote has been turned into a sale.

Today’s most successful sales teams use cutting-edge CPQ technology to make more deals.

For any sales leader, choosing sales methods is a significant strategic choice. A sales method done by hand can’t compete in today’s markets. Without CPQ technology, inefficiencies would be gone, and quotes would be made instantly faster than even the most experienced sales rep. But CPQ is also changing, and sales teams that want to stay ahead must change as new technologies emerge.

It took salespeople about 90 minutes on average to make quotes by hand. Consider how your sales cycles would change if the quote process took too long. A good algorithm can do it in just 8 seconds, thanks to its powerful CPQ technology. We’ve seen usage rates as high as 100% because it’s so simple and helpful.

These quotes are not only faster, but they are also more correct. The sales teams that make the most money today use evolved CPQ to help them find the price and product configurations that give them the best chance to make the most money.

This creates a sales process that makes sales quotes bring in the most money for every deal your sales team works on, no matter how complicated they are.