The 5 main features of Salesforce CPQ
What is stands for: Configure, Price, Quote.
Who is it useful for? Salespeople
Why does it matter?
Salesforce CPQ is a tool within Salesforce that helps users to produce quotes for customers quickly and accurately. It's a waste of company time, your time, and your customers time, to customise the wrong product for a client and go back and forth with quotes that are missing information. Salesforce CPQ is designed to use the existing information in your CRM to make customising products and generating quotes faster than ever. How do they actually do that? Scroll on dear readers, to become enlightened.
The 5 main features of Salesforce CPQ:
1. Stops salespeople offering deals that don't make sense
There's nothing worse than a salesperson putting together, with care and effort, a product and quote that isn't even possible. Wait! There is something worse - selling that to a real customer and then not being able to deliver. Yuck, yuck, yuck. Avoid that in Salesforce CPQ by using the Product Rules feature. Product Rules makes sure nothing is left out on a quote by automatically including products that must go together. It even automatically includes relevant charges such as a shipping or warranties. Most importantly, these rules stop salespeople from offering configurations and options that the business can't realistically offer. To help salespeople narrow down which products are best for their clients, Salesforce CPQ offers Guided Selling - a scripted questionnaire that guides sales users and their customers to narrow in on the best possible product fit.
2. Increased efficiency of your salespeople
Don't waste time fumbling through pages of products, stressing about not finding that one product you remember that would be perfect to have on-screen, right at this very second. Stop. No more. The Product Search feature allows users to search the entire product database by product name, stock-keeping unit, description or category. This is significantly more accurate than the standard Salesforce product search. A big part of this increased search efficiency is Product Filters which allow users to quickly and accurately find products by product family, keywords, or availability. It's totally up to your business to customise these filters so there can be as many as you want for whatever niches you are after. This type of filtering is especially useful for sales reps who are still discovering what their client is after and are looking for a range of options.
3. Automation of pricing, discounts and configuration/quote approvals.
Sick of manually writing out quotes? Misspellings? Miscalculations? Forgetting things? Ugh, me too. Salesforce CPQ provides quote templates for a huge range of products and services. These templates includes different sections that can be configured such as header, footer, quote line items section and quote terms. They also include the ability to integrate with E-signature tools, making it as easy for your customers to sign as possible. Customise your quotes with your desired branding, product descriptions, pricing, terms, and visuals in a format that suits you (pdf, xls, word). No need to manually research and write each quote! The Configured Pricing feature displays the price of the product during the configuration process so that users can quickly see how configuration changes impact the price. Salesforce CPQ also comes with the ability to automatically manage discounts based on volume and customer agreements. The Approval Workflow feature allows users to submit quotes and contracts for approval and obtain appropriate approvals quickly using existing systems in their CRM.
4. Automated billing
The automated billing features of Salesforce CPQ give users the ability to create and send invoices automatically at predefined or custom frequencies. It also can automatically generate consolidated invoices so customers can make one payment for multiple bills. Reduce your collection time by easily viewing and chasing up payments for unpaid invoices. We all know that the requirements and needs of a customer can change, even when a bill is already sent out. A handy feature of Salesforce CPQ is the ability to accommodate for complex requirements by adjusting invoices to handle exceptions and correct errors.
5. Identify specialisations, add-ons, and options to increase the deal size through upselling.
Salesforce CPQ makes upselling easy through features like Bundled Products, which suggests other existing products that go with the product selected for a quote. Importantly, the Bundled Products feature will also issue an alert if users try to bundle products that can not go together.
Well, that's all for now folks! If Salesforce CPQ sounds like something up your alley, check out these links below to explore your little heart out. Happy researching.
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