When people investigate guided selling, they often ask, “What is CPQ software?” and wonder how it will impact their operations. The experts at RenaissanceTech are here to give you a better understanding of the platform and how it can help your manufacturing business reach its goals. Check out our full guide below.

What Does CPQ Mean? – Configure, Price, Quote

The abbreviation “CPQ” stands for “Configure, Price, Quote.” CPQ allows you to create a structured, scalable sales process through guided selling and configuration. This tool is used by manufacturers to quickly and accurately turn complex products into quotes and orders, streamlining their operations. In order to truly understand what CPQ is, however, each aspect needs to be examined.

Configure

Your complex products will be easier to design with a real-time product configurator. Perhaps there are a lot of moving pieces and parts on your product, or there are a million combinations, or your customers require customization and special pricing, or maybe all those things are true for your business!

With customized products like yours, your first step should be to configure your product by asking a series of logic-based questions. Because the configure price quote pricing tool uses logic, it will remove noncompatible options as you select answers. This eliminates the chance for errors and unsupported combinations

Pricing

Manufacturers and service businesses rarely stick to a rigid pricing structure. Perhaps you offer bundles and volume pricing, or any other type of special pricing. CPQ guided selling gives you the ability to keep pricing clearly defined for everyone inside and outside of your organization, while still having the ability to customize pricing for certain dealers and customers.

It’s important to your bottom line that discounts are applied correctly and consistently throughout your business. With a CPQ system, prices are automatically calculated while you are configuring the product. Any special deals, discounts, promotional codes, and product bundles can be added at any time.

Quote

Once you’ve configured your product and you have an accurate price for it, you can finally turn it into a formal document. The quote can be emailed immediately or created as a PDF document, and this document can include product specifications, warranty information, drawings, detailed pricing, and terms.

Sales representatives can generate a quote, send it in an email, and send a follow up, with just a few clicks. Configure price quote guided selling software streamlines the quoting process for both manufacturers and dealers.

Integration

Lastly, there’s one more key feature of CPQ that’s not in the acronym, but it is equally as important – integration with ERP and CRM.

The same CPQ solution that services your dealers and outside sales reps is also the same configurator that runs within your ERP and CRM. This alleviates having to maintain more than one CPQ pricing tool and your product changes will take place across the whole system.

After you create your quote it is quickly turned into an order when integrated with your ERP system. Starting with the quote, your order can be completely fulfilled by passing BOMs and routings to the shop floor. This is why it is important that ERP integration is an option with the CPQ system you choose.

So Why Is CPQ Important? Here Are Just 4 Examples

By incorporating CPQ guided selling into your processes, you will be able to accomplish the following:

• Efficiency – Help your sales reps and dealer network quote and close deals faster by eliminating disparate systems and removing siloed information. Automate approvals and create or maintain your workflows. Even the most complex quotes are easily managed with CPQ guided selling.
• Control – Use a guided sales CPQ pricing tool to control what’s being offered and what’s being sold, while eliminating pricing, costing, and inventory errors. Your sales reps can become product experts in minutes by capitalizing on guided selling tools that only allow for approved configurations.
• Innovation – Using our guided sales CPQ means that you can create product specs with a simple click. This allows your engineers, dealers, and sales teams to get creative and innovative, producing new product lines that differ from what is already available on the market. You can also use a configure price quote pricing tool to wow your customers with precisely customized deliverables, ensuring they are produced exactly as they were ordered.
• Competitive edge – Companies learning what CPQ is and how it will benefit them should know they can get to market faster than competitors while launching new revenue models and upsell opportunities quickly. Today’s customers demand more flexibility in what they buy and how they buy it. Enabling a scalable technology platform will support your company now and in the future with advanced guided sales CPQ platforms available via Infor CPQ.

Further Configure Price Quote Guided Selling Advantages

With an advanced CPQ guided selling platform, your dealers and sales network can configure the right product offerings and generate an appropriate pricing and discount structure to meet the goals of your company. You can also fully customize quotes quickly while seamlessly integrating with your existing enterprise software, resulting in more sales and satisfied customers.

Using a guided sales CPQ can also provide you with the following:

• Higher customer satisfaction
• A central data catalog
• Insights from reporting
• Lower costs and fewer errors
• Shorter sales cycles
• Brand consistency
• Better sales pipeline visibility

Best yet, the benefits don’t stop there. There is an abundance of featured add-ons that can be used to create an even better user experience. Below, you will find our most in-demand product extensions for CPQ products:

• Stitch images for CPQ configurator
• Requested ship date blocking for sales portal 
• Order status for sales portal
• Multi-line configuration for Infor sales portal/Infor CPQ

CPQ Designed for You

Your products and systems are unique and complex, so you need a provider who is willing to customize the software to fit the needs of your organization. That’s what our CPQ company stands for, a tailored solution designed for each client.

RenaissanceTech has over 200 successful CPQ implementations across a wide variety of industries, and the founders of RenaissanceTech worked on the initial development of the Infor CPQ solution. Let our CPQ team boost your operations with our expertise.

Want to Know More About Our Guided Sales CPQ?

Now that you understand what CPQ is, let us help to create a streamlined vision for your sales team, giving them the resources they need to secure more orders.

We can use our expertise to help your company grow with our customizable CPQ software that is tailored to your unique needs. Request more information today!

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