A Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) solution that connects with a company’s critical business platforms is one of the best ways to optimize the sales cycle and make it easier to draw insights from sales and product performance data. Using legacy systems, the data necessary for a CPQ solution to do its job could come from any number of sources; spreadsheets, the ERP, the CRM or other solutions that don’t communicate easily with other software.
A seamlessly integrated system ensures that your product and sales teams have the right data at the right time, providing several key benefits:
Benefits of Integrated CPQ Solutions
- Automated tasks and processes encourage collaboration. A good example is an automated workflow for reviews and approvals. When accomplished via email, approval workflows often get bogged down with items awaiting review that languished in someone’s inbox. With an integrated CPQ solution, all the information transmission and notifications are handled electronically as part of an intuitive workflow.
- Connected software can furnish companies with real-time analytics. Managers can make better decisions based on current information. Automated production process monitoring, for instance, can constantly measure production progress against service-level agreements. Alerts about impending production shortfalls allow organizations to readjust the workload, change sales strategies or engage more production lines to avoid missed deadlines.
- Companies store customer relationship data in multiple software systems. Connecting them allows organizations to make more informed decisions about meeting and exceeding customers’ expectations, as well as craft more relevant communications and generate personalized documents. Personalized communications boost the customer experience, resulting in more sales, referrals, increased loyalty and a more positive lasting impression of your brand.
- Connecting software platforms reduces manual work, saving time and ensuring consistency. Instead of entering the same information in multiple systems, data is shared automatically and can then be used to generate orders or save back to a CRM or ERP system to streamline reporting. Incidents of errors and omissions decrease, as do delays caused by workflows that stop, waiting for manual input.
- The response time when handling customer requests for proposals is vitally important in a competitive environment. A manual quoting process relies on supplying field sales representatives with up-to-date pricing, materials, and availability data they must access and incorporate into their proposals, and any quote revisions must often go through layers of approval. The longer it takes to produce an accurate quote that meets your customer’s expectations, the higher risk there is of losing that customer to the competition. Integrated CPQ solutions make it faster not just to generate quotes, but to revise them to make any needed adjustments, ensuring that you can more readily match the customer’s needs at any point in the quoting process.
CPQ systems need information about customers, inventory, pricing, work-in-progress, legal and regulatory restrictions, production capacity, design, and more to produce correct and complete quotes or proposals. The information necessary to create these orders often resides in a myriad of databases, people’s heads, and software systems throughout the enterprise. However, leveraging CPQ can help you bring together that information, elevate the customer experience and make data-driven decisions to empower your sales and production teams.
The bottom line? Make sure you select a CPQ solution that integrates with your key business systems to maximize ROI. Experlogix CPQ includes built-in connections to Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle NetSuite, Salesforce CRM, and Experlogix Document Automation. Additional integrations are also made possible via an API, allowing organizations to use their CPQ software in conjunction with the rest of their technology stack.
