When you’re researching a CPQ system or most any business technology, it’s easy to get bogged down in the features: feature 1 processes A, feature 2 streamlines B, and feature 3 delivers C to D, E, F, and G.
But if you’re in sales, you know that while line-listing and @@detailing the features is important, but it never connects with prospects the way benefits do.@@ Granted, in B2B the benefits of any business technology have been the same since inception: lower overhead costs, increased productivity.
But @@your CPQ system should go granular, with every feature supporting a specific business benefit.@@ Here’s how.
Proposal automation? Try “increased throughput.”
The benefit of a Roomba is not that it’s a robot: that’s a feature. The benefit is that it cleans your house (sort of… scares your cats, anyway). A CPQ system is built on a feature, proposal automation technology, that enables faster delivery of more accurate proposals (i.e., the benefit of increased throughput).
This benefit means that you can expect more from each rep on your team and they—if they’re using the configure, price, quote system to its fullest—can enjoy more sales that close and the commissions that come with. So, in effect, the benefit of increased throughput is increased revenue.
Cloud catalog? Try “easier upsells.”
You could put it this way: “We’re going to remotely host product and pricing data, dynamically configuring and serving combinations of the two to further attachment rates of upgrades and thereby raising AOV.”
Or you could put it this way: “We’re gonna make upselling easier.”
A CPQ system has the ability to do the math on the fly—storing information on winning pricing/product configurations and making it available across the enterprise. In effect, a dynamic product catalog allows you to optimize your offer in real-time and present a better one in real-time.
And the benefit is typically larger and more high-value orders, which means (and there may be a trend here) increased revenue.
Sales analytics? Try “faster closing times.”
Sales analytics, business metrics, reporting, dashboards—whatever you want to call them—are typically how managers and execs get an overview of what’s happening. I.e., these kinds of numbers are not something that help you make adjustments to a sale in progress, but are more for Monday-morning quarterbacking.
But that doesn’t have to be true as most CPQ solutions enable both macro and micro metrics. Macro allows the birds-eye view favored by C-level executives; but micro analytics let you take a closer look at individual pipelines, and see where the bottleneck may be so that you can keep not one, not some, but ALL proposals moving forward, closing more sales faster.
And this CPQ system benefit also has something in common with the others we discussed, because faster closing times means more sales closing, which means (drum roll….) increased revenue.
If you'd like to learn more about this topic or see IQX for yourself with a free demo, contact us.
