Can you optimize a hammer? Can a band-saw learn from previous band-saw projects? Not really, and no.
But the nature of business technology — from marketing automation platforms to enterprise resource planning applications to configure price quote (CPQ) tools — is that it gets (or you can make it) better, faster, and even “smarter” over time.
It’s not the software that benefits from getting sharper though: it’s your business. As you optimize how you use your tools, you optimize how you run your business.
Here are the top 4 ways automating sales proposals with CPQ improves speed and efficiency in the quoting process while sharpening your overall approach to driving sales.
Targeted templates
Unless you’re in the commodities business, chances are you have some target markets for your products/services.
A professionally-designed, vertically-targeted sales proposal template not only makes it faster to create a proposal (with “canned” text, infographics, references, and other appealing content), but it makes for fewer errors.
Pro-tip: want to sharpen your CPQ tools? Each time you close a deal, check out the winning proposal. What made it different? Apply those winning changes to your templates to give yourself a leg up for the next deal.
Preconfigured products & pricing
When you use CPQ to create — and, perhaps more importantly, control — the product and pricing configurations that go into every sales quote, you make it faster and easier for reps to populate proposals with winning combinations for every prospect.
Not only does it enable a “drag and drop” means of adding products/services to sales quotes (great for reps), it also allows centralized administration of products and pricing (great for managers).
Without CPQ, reps typically work off spreadsheets or other distributed documentation, which can often mean different prices for the same products, depending on what “version” of your pricing sheet they have. CPQ fixes that.
Pro-tip: Want to sharpen your CPQ tools? Present the same configurations to all of your reps. See what pulls ahead in terms of closing deals. Make those your baseline configurations and begin the process again.
Sales reporting & analytics
Propose, close, analyze, optimize, repeat. Sharpening up your overall proposal process is pretty simple… if you know where to find the data required to truly analyze the closing process.
If you’re using your CRM to send/track sales proposals, you’re missing out on the granular tracking data required to truly improve the closing process. Most CRMs (and ERPs, for that matter) only offer sent/won/lost metrics.
CPQ tools, on the other hand, deliver data from deep in the closing process. These data allow you to optimize after each closed deal, and even make changes on the fly. You’ll be able to more easily spot bottlenecks in the pipeline and other issues.
Pro-tip: Use a CPQ integrated with CRM so you can merge your proposal data with your prospecting data to create an ever-sharper image of what makes a lead into a customer, from start to finish.
Increased closing rates: on-point!
Some studies say 17%. Some say more than 25%. But every study we have seen on whether using CPQ tools impacts closing rates shows that it always does — and for the better, and by a lot!
So while it does require some brainpower and level-setting done by and for your sales team, CPQ can indeed get sharper over time.
