Microsoft has long known that CPQ (configure, price, quote) tools have a broader application than simply helping sales reps quickly crank out killer sales proposals.
But everywhere you look, it appears that most 3rd party vendors offering CPQ for Dynamics are still focused exclusively on adding it to D365 Sales. Not saying we don’t get that: after all, iQuoteXpress was designed by salespeople for salespeople, and in our early years, we were all about quotes, quotes, and quotes… sometimes, also about quotes.
What we’re seeing though is how the fundamental strengths of CPQ are being rolled out across enterprise systems.
Proposal data is BI
For example: the data collected by CPQ’s sales reporting and analytics feature (which empowers a business with granular reporting on every quote). This is being captured and codified and rolled into revenue forecasting dashboards.
Go back 10 years, even just five, and you’ll see that forecasting for sales proposals was limited to quotes sent and signed. Where they were in that process “didn’t matter.” But it does.
In fact, the data collected in Dynamics 365 on proposals “in process” is far more important than after the fact as it is actionable. A sales leader can quickly see roadblocks in the closing processes across all reps, spot trends, and respond at a departmental or even enterprise level.
Product configuration for ALL Dynamics solutions
Microsoft rightfully touts the use of product configuration as “becoming the rule rather than the exception, in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer relationships.” And the word “both” is the kicker.
As specialists in creating custom product and pricing configurations for a wide range of clients, we know the power of this feature. And it’s all about “self-service.” For most of our clients, we are empowering their sales teams with the means of quickly creating product and pricing configurations they can drag-and-drop into quotes. We give them the engine that lets them quickly serve these configs themselves.
But lately, we have had more and more clients wanting to take this functionality and hand it directly to their customers, creating self-service mechanisms for their customers that make those customers happy (by putting them in control) and save our clients money (by not having a rep walk customers through the configurations).
Example: a large manufacturing client of ours in the heavy equipment space has nearly 5,000 SKUs. In every initial sale with a new customer, our client uses IQX to create a custom quote with the exact configurations each customer requires.
However, every product they sell has a shelf-life (heavy equipment is guaranteed to wear down). When a customer comes back, needing replacement parts, they can simply use the product and pricing configuration tool (embedded in an ecommerce back-end) and serve themselves.
So while CPQ works great with D365 Sales, it’s now also being used to help create product and pricing configurations across the platform: D365 SCM, D365 Customer Service, D365 Commerce, and more.
Dynamics 365: built for sales enablement (with a little help from its friends)
The beauty of Dynamics is its modular nature. You add what you need, and nothing more. You can add modules for commerce, for human resources, for finance, for customer journeys, and more.
When you add CPQ to Dynamics, you add an application, yes, but you also extend Dynamics from being a supporting back-end system (for customer data, accounting, marketing, and operational tasks) into being a sales enablement solution that helps drive revenue:
on the B2B side (by empowering reps with the ability to make proposals quickly) and
on the B2C side (by giving customers the means of making the products of their dreams).
Not only that, but CPQ helps you uncover a new, more actionable data set that you can act on in real-time to drive sales. A level of reporting that further enables each individual sale, and furthers sales enablement across the enterprise.
