How CPQ can help you as a salesperson

What is CPQ and how does it help you as a salesperson?

Being a successful salesperson has many advantages, but a major disadvantage is that you have to spend extra time on administration. In order for you to win a customer, you first need to create a quote. How long it takes to create the quote varies based on the products you sell and the systems you use. The customer expects to receive a clear quote quickly with all the necessary information to choose your company as their new supplier, if you fail to deliver this then the business goes to your competitor instead.

Being able to quickly get back to the customer with a customised and saleable quote is an important reason why you as a salesperson should use a CPQ system. It's a category of system previously often associated with large manufacturing industrial companies. Nowadays, it is much easier and cheaper to get started for all sizes of companies and in all types of industries.

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CPQ helps you choose the right products

If you sell customised products, you need to be able to easily make changes to your quote with a configurator that has access to your entire product database. When getting started with your CPQ solution, it's important that all the rules and logic are in place so that you as a salesperson know that you can deliver what you're selling.

Often this involves changing certain parts of a product such as or being able to combine different products together through the configurator.

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Set the right price with CPQ instead of Excel

Actually knowing that you are creating a quote with the right price is not as obvious as it sounds. A product can have several different prices based on, among other things, whether the customer is a contract customer or not. In addition, keeping track of any discounts or package prices is practically impossible if you sell multiple products.

Many sales organisations try to help sellers quote the right price by either creating endless product lines in their Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) system or creating large Excel sheets where the seller has to calculate the price himself using endless formulas that can be deleted by the seller by mistake.

Instead, a CPQ system allows you to determine rules and logic that price uniformly for all salespeople, regardless of how many discounts and package prices may be involved.

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Create the quote faster with CPQ

Once the right products have been selected and the price has been calculated, it is time to create a quote to send to the potential customer. Easier said than done in many organisations as there are rules on how the quote should look (graphic profile) and what attachments should be sent (terms and conditions, product sheets etc.).

By linking the CPQ to the product database in your ERP system and also creating a library of quotation templates that follow the graphic profile, you can create a quotation with all the necessary documentation at the click of a mouse to ensure that the potential customer receives a sales quotation that she wants to accept.

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As a salesperson, you should use CPQ to quickly create customized quotes in less time.

As an example of this, you can read more about how Elon explains how their sales people create quotes in 10 minutes instead of the 2 hours it used to take to create a quote.

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