It’s that time of year again. The experts are weighing in on what the big sales, CRM, and business technology trends will be in 2022. And we’re getting in on it and making some predictions of our own!
Typically, people turn to iQuoteXpress for learning more about configure, price, quote “stuff” (what CPQ means, how it’s best put to use, how much it costs, etc.) or for more technical sales tips — we usually focus on how to best use the feature sets built into CPQ and CRM solutions to automate most of the closing process.
But it’s time for us to expand our vision, to see past CPQ alone, and take a hard look at the future and predict what’s coming next in business tech in 2022…
Sales Automation on Steroids
We’re about to move past automated workflows and contact management into a brave new world of automated prospecting and lead qualification. Automated nurture campaigns, automated audience segmentation, and automated form capture are fairly self-evident. And the data they provide helps any rep create a more targeted proposal more quickly.
But the real future is RPA: robotic process automation. Technical sales tools now exist that enable a rep to build lists using data from 3rd party websites — even from behind logins and within intranets! This is not old-school, gray-hat scraping: this is simply doing what an API does (getting two apps to communicate: e.g., your marketing automation platform, their website), but without an API.
Want to kick your list-building efforts into overdrive? Here’s a tip: RPA.
Value-based selling: value is more than a number
In far too many sales proposals, value is confused with “cost.” But in 2022, every sales quote you send has to deliver more than just a dollar amount — it has to deliver real, lasting value to your prospect. The value isn’t always in additional services and add-ons (though those help); it’s in providing a solution that does more than solve a problem, and creating a partnership that can help your clients feel connected, feel valued.
Case in point: we had a prospect that needed a sales quoting tool to help it close more deals more quickly (naturally). The prospect’s market was modular housing.
Rather than simply commoditize what we do and what they do, we discussed current industry issues with a professional association in the space — the Modular Home Builders Association — so that we could better understand the prospect’s context and deliver a solution that provided greater value than just a faster way to close sales.
When we connected with the prospect, we had a value-based proposal for them, one that showed we understood not just their needs, but their customers’ needs as well. I.e., by taking a value-based selling approach, we demonstrated that we cared about more than just our prospect’s challenge: we cared about the value they deliver to their clients. A done deal, and in the best way.
Self service in B2B
B2B sales are most often about relationships. It’s the rare +six-figure deal that closes without the sales rep getting to know the client, and well. HOWEVER… ecommerce tools and technologies are becoming ever more prevalent in the B2B world.
Currently, we have clients using our technology in two ways: they’re using standard CPQ functionality to quickly generate, populate, and disseminate professional sales proposals, thereby getting a compelling quote to a given prospect in record-time.
But they’re also using the product pricing configuration engine — which we’ve often called the beating heart of CPQ — to create self-service portals and similar tools that empower their customers to restock/replenish certain products.
For example, after they land a new customer (with a sales proposal made in IQX, of course) a manufacturing client of ours uses the product and pricing configuration engine, in conjunction with an ecommerce platform, to let its customers reorder hardware and lighting products. While the manufacturing client required a sales rep to close an initial deal with Client A, all following purchases made by Client A were made via a portal, with no manual labor.
It’s this merging of B2B sales tools and tactics with B2C/ecommerce technologies and methodologies that we think will be the biggest trend to look out for in 2022. (Learn more about ecommerce for B2B.) What do you think? Let us know.
