The sales job is evolving, and organizations need to adapt. Sales leaders will reassess their hiring and training requirements as more functions are automated.
Visual product configurators accelerate sales cycles and reduce customer churn by giving buyers an accurate view of their configured products. They also enable sales teams to offer add-ons and upgrades previously considered value-added.
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Product Configuration
With codified rules and easy-to-understand screens, CPQ tools improve direct sales, partner sales, and self-service channels. They help customers quickly navigate the product catalog, sort through options, and provide relevant recommendations. They also enable cross-selling and up-selling by detecting complementary items or services offered with the customer’s chosen configuration, such as Tacton.com.
Visual product configurators allow sales teams to streamline their processes, minimizing errors by permitting only feasible configurations and automating pricing calculations. They also free up sales reps’ time to build relationships and focus on strategic selling. The centralized data and visualization capabilities of CPQ tools also help teams collaborate across channels and departments to eliminate siloes and inefficiencies that plague manufacturers.
CPQ solutions make quoting fast and easy, often reducing it from days or weeks to minutes or hours. They offer personalized quote templates that create a professional, consistent company message. They can also incorporate eSignature and contract management to complete the sales process and drive revenue.
CPQ tools make it simple to create new products, reducing time and costs for development, design, and testing. They can also collect and analyze data from individual product configurations to improve forecasts, optimize product offerings, and drive sales growth. These benefits keep companies agile and flexible, reacting quickly to market changes and customer feedback. They also enable sales and engineering teams to work together on a single platform, removing cross-functional inefficiencies that often plague manufacturing organizations.
Visual Product Configurator
Product configuration is a critical element of the revenue operations process. Using a visual product configurator allows sales teams to create and configure complex products while providing a fun, engaging consumer buying experience. As a result, companies can build customer loyalty and foster word-of-mouth referrals.
A CPQ system can improve the quoting process for all revenue operations stakeholders, from salespeople to legal, finance, and customer success teams. Streamlining the process reduces quoting times and minimizes errors to ensure that quotes are as accurate as possible. In addition, a best-in-class CPQ system will provide sales reps and channel partners personalized quote templates to maintain a consistent, professional company image and brand message.
One of the biggest challenges in the sales process is ensuring that pricing quotes are as accurate as possible. Inaccurate prices can cost a business dearly in the long run, mainly when discounts are offered without considering the impact on profit margins. A CPQ solution can help address this issue by applying advanced, rules-based pricing strategies that can factor in the impact of each configured product.
With the rise of ecommerce, customers expect to be able to purchase and configure products online. This challenge can be met by implementing a CPQ solution that offers a visual product configurator, allowing customers to easily and quickly configure a product and generate a quote in real-time.
Automation
CPQ solutions aren’t just for configuring products—they’re also capable of automating the entire sales process, from generating quotes to sending them to customers and then creating and submitting orders for fulfillment. This saves time for salespeople and allows companies to ensure that their quote process is scalable and error-free.
Adding to this automation, most CPQ solutions can integrate with other sales tools and business intelligence applications. This makes it easy for the back office and sales to collaborate, facilitating a smoother workflow and a better customer experience.
CPQ solutions also allow salespeople to see all the available product options without committing the entire catalog to memory. This helps them find the right products for a customer’s needs and may even bring up opportunities they didn’t consider. Then, once a sale is completed, the information can be sent automatically to other sales and manufacturing tools without any manual intervention. This reduces the time between when a quote is created and when it becomes an order, which can be a critical factor in customer satisfaction. Additionally, most CPQs can collect data on what options customers chose to include in their quotes and those they didn’t, which can be valuable insight for future marketing and sales activities.
Integrations
CPQ Configurators integrate with sales reps’ tech stack, giving them all the information they need in one place. This is critical for highly configurable products with several variations and pricing structures. It helps ensure that the correct configuration and bundle options are included in quotes, speeds up buying experiences with eSignature integration, and reduces the risk of human errors by automatically routing approval requests to the proper individuals when required.
A good CPQ solution will also have deep integrations into operational systems. These integrations help manage product availability so that orders aren’t placed for products that don’t have the appropriate parts in inventory and ensure that pricing is accurate and consistent across all quotes. CPQ also integrates into order management tools to seamlessly transmit sections from the sales team to procurement for processing once selections are approved.
Ultimately, using a CPQ solution allows sales teams to spend more time focusing on buyers and building relationships instead of managing tedious administrative tasks that don’t involve the customer in any way. This frees up more time for pursuing new opportunities and growing their business. Especially for growth-oriented companies, this is an essential factor for success. Using a configurator with visuals that offer high-quality, 3D, and AR product visualizations is one of the best ways to improve this buyer experience.
