Introduction: What Is Configure Price Quote (CPQ) Software?
Configure price quote (CPQ) solutions are software tools that help users–sales teams and end customers–generate accurate and consistent quotes for complex, configurable products. They contain product rules that constrain and automate the configuration process, ensuring every product design is viable from an engineering perspective.
Visual CPQ solutions are even more effective. They provide a visual interface that allows users to interact with 3D product visuals as they configure their products. This makes the quoting process far more intuitive, engaging, and transparent for people that want to learn more about your products or configure to order.
Visual CPQ solutions can be integrated into a website, allowing visitors to configure and quote products online, anywhere, at any time. Customers can self-serve by configuring products independently and generating a quote, giving them the autonomy they crave whether they work remotely or in-office.
Configure price quote solutions can help companies streamline their end-to-end sales processes and improve the customer experience. Automation helps reduce errors, improve accuracy and consistency, and enhance collaboration within the sales team, leading to more efficient and effective sales processes.
How Configure Price Quote Solutions Streamline Your Sales Process
Implementing configure product quote CPQ software has the following sales advantages:
Reduce the time spent on manual quoting
Configuring complex products, calculating the optimal price for that product and customer, and producing a quote in Word, Excel, or similar is incredibly time-consuming.
If the configuration process goes right the first time, it can take days, which is too slow. But it can take weeks when there’s back and forth between the sales and engineering departments, or the customer changes their minds at the last minute due to confusion over a technical issue.
Is the customer not happy with the price? Then it’s back to the drawing board, wasting even more time.
Configure price quote solutions can take your sales process from painful to painless. They automate configuration, slashing sales cycles from weeks to minutes. They calculate prices and generate attractive and persuasive quotes, proposals, and estimates in real time while users configure products.
Configure product quote solutions save significant time and effort, allowing sales teams to focus on other tasks and letting customers get back to their day-to-day activities. The more responsive to your customer’s needs and the more time you save them, the more likely they are to want to deal with your company. It’s a substantial competitive advantage in a world where everyone strives for greater productivity.
Improve Accuracy and Consistency
Inaccuracies in the product configuration process can have disastrous downstream effects. At best, they make life harder for engineers who have to clean up non-viable configurations created by sales reps who don’t fully understand technical requirements. At worst, expensive products can go into production only to be scrapped when mistakes appear in the cold light of day.
Configure price quote solutions ensure every configuration is optimized and validated up-front. The configurator stores all of your company’s engineering logic and reuses it every time a product is configured. Suppose the user tries to marry two parts that shouldn’t go together or increase a dimension to a size that will compromise the structural integrity of the final assembly. In that case, the configurator will flag the issue. Not only that, it will guide the user to a better alternative.
Greater accuracy and consistency at the configuration stage reduce the burden of customization on the engineering department and maintains consistency to drive customer satisfaction and efficiency on the shop floor.
Make Pricing Instant and Accessible
A CPQ solution is your centralized repository (single source of truth) for all your product and pricing data. It ensures users have access to up-to-date information, helping sales teams be more responsive to customer inquiries, enabling buyers to self-serve, and ensuring quotes are fair and competitive.
Automated pricing gives management a clear and transparent view, and better control over the entire configure price quote process. They can set clear guidelines and rules and ensure salespeople adhere to them, reducing the need for approvals. If they need to change the price of a product option, they don’t have to send out an email, they enter the new price into the system, and it’s updated automatically company-wide.
Enhance Collaboration Through Automation
CPQ solutions provide a central platform for sales teams to collaborate on quotes and proposals, allowing them to share information and collaborate in real-time. This can improve communication and coordination within the sales team, leading to more efficient and effective sales processes.
CPQ also drives cross-domain collaboration between sales, engineering, and the shop floor. Instead of reaching out to engineering every time they configure products, sales reps can act with greater autonomy, confident that the products they design and sell will be manufacturable and generate a good margin.
The best CPQ solutions, like KBMax CPQ, , reduce the burden of customer engineering by automating CAD files, BOMs, CNC cut sheets, assembly guidance, and more. They connect the entire end-to-end engineer-to-order process with a seamless flow of data that unifies all departments.
Improve the Customer Experience
The ability to quickly and easily configure and quote customized products helps build customer loyalty and improves satisfaction and retention.
Adding 3D visual product configuration makes an even bigger difference, giving customers and sales reps a better understanding of the features and options available, so they can make more informed decisions about the products they want to purchase. Visual configurators convey product information far more effectively than text or generic images, which is particularly useful for complex, technical products.
Furthermore, visual product configuration can be a powerful marketing tool, enabling companies to showcase their products in an interactive, engaging, and immersive way. It helps companies stand out, build brand value, and attract more customers and partners.
Improve Forecasting and Win Rate
CPQ solutions can provide detailed data and analytics on quotes, proposals, and sales trends, which can help sales teams better forecast future sales and revenue. Sales teams can plan and allocate resources more effectively, improving business performance. Most businesses take a scattergun approach to sales. Each rep has their own “style”–some more successful than others–and there are limited means of distributing learnings and knowledge to their colleagues. Configure, price, quote solutions standardize the sales process, letting sales teams tinker and drive continuous improvement in deal size, win rates, and eCommerce conversion rates.In
Conclusion,
Configure price quote (CPQ) solutions can significantly streamline the sales process for companies that sell complex, configurable products. These solutions can reduce the time spent on manual quoting, improve accuracy and consistency, provide real-time pricing and availability information, enhance collaboration and transparency, and make the customer experience highly enjoyable and engaging.
Visual CPQ solutions, which provide a visual interface for interacting with and designing 3D product visuals, can be particularly effective in improving the customer experience. Embed a visual configurator into your website, and you can showcase your products to the world, increasing reach and revenue.