CPQ software is central to sales operations at a huge number and range of B2B companies. Salesforce CPQ is among the leaders, but as buyer expectations change, does it have all the capabilities to keep pace?
According to research, sales teams spend 66% of their working hours on admin tasks. This leaves less than half of their time devoted to their main function – selling the product or service.
However, any sales team knows that it’s not usually as simple as picking a product out of a catalog and offering it to a customer. A large part of the sales cycle is configuring a product or service to meet client needs and coming up with a price that’s attractive to the customer while still being profitable for the seller. This process is an essential part of effective sales; it can’t be skipped. That said, it can be shortened if you apply the right technology to the job.
That’s where CPQ software comes in. Now, though, sellers are being faced with another challenge that some CPQ providers never anticipated.
What New Capabilities Must CPQ Software Deliver?
B2B buyers have developed new expectations about what they want out of the buying process. So even sales teams with a current CPQ software solution like Salesforce CPQ are now faced with quickly and accurately providing highly personalized offerings of the right products, at the right prices, in the right way.
As Alex Hoff, our Chief Product Officer, explained when we launched Vendavo® Deal Price Optimizer for Salesforce CPQ on Salesforce AppExchange:
Research shows that 82% of B2B buyers now expect a B2C-like buying experience and yet only 27% of B2B buyers say suppliers excel at meeting these expectations. To remain competitive, B2B sellers should provide highly personalized and accurate offerings of the right products, at the right prices, through a enhanced customer experience. In too many cases, companies simply don’t have the ability to easily identify the right price for sales to use in each unique selling situation. Now, Vendavo Deal Price Optimizer users can have optimized prices delivered to every quote.”
Vendavo Deal Price Guidance is an intelligent solution that delivers AI-enabled, deal-specific pricing guidance directly to Salesforce CPQ workflows. This means a sales team can continuously optimize for improved deal win rates, enterprise profitability targets, and an enhanced overall customer experience that will satisfy and engage B2B buyers.
Big Benefits for Salesforce CPQ
What are some of the key highlights of how Deal Price Optimizer benefits Salesforce CPQ users?
- Pricing guidance when and where sales teams need it most, delivered directly to their Salesforce quotation workflows, giving them the right prices to fuel productive negotiations with customers.
- Expert human intelligence powered by intelligent technology that helps the sales team optimize AI-driven pricing with real-world experience and market dynamics that leverage their practical business experience to fine-tune pricing models.
- Faster time-to-value empowered by a SaaS-based delivery with clicks-not-code configuration; this enable enables companies of all sizes to move from manual spreadsheet-based pricing to automated, AI-driven prices in as little as 24 hours.
Conquering Complexity
Adding Deal Price Optimizer to Salesforce CPQ especially helps sales teams at large enterprises master the configure-price-quote complexities of large and varied catalogs, channels, and selling situations.
This not only makes teams more efficient, it can also make the sales process more effective; by augmenting Salesforce CPQ with DPO, it becomes more of an “expert guide” to all available products/services, options, and discounts. So your sales team can focus on what they do best: closing deals.
Searching for a CPQ Software Solution?
If your organization hasn’t yet adopted a CPQ platform, we’d be remiss if we didn’t throw our hat into the ring.
Vendavo Intelligent CPQ empowers all stakeholders with real-time information and provides clear processes to quickly create accurate quotes. 2D/3D and augmented reality configuration visualizations are embedded in the quoting experience, all the way through to proposal documents. Its product/offering capabilities and pricing guidance take the guesswork out of quoting complicated product and service bundles.