5 Reasons Sales and Marketing Teams Love CPQ

By Mitch Lee , Profit Evangelist at Vendavo
Best Practices,

5 Reasons Sales & Marketing Teams Love CPQ

As part of Solutions Review’s Contributed Content Series—a collection of articles written by industry thought leaders in maturing software categories—Mitch Lee, a profit evangelist at Vendavo, outlines five reasons that sales and marketing teams love configure, price, and quote (CPQ) software.

There’s no shortage of stats that offer insights into today’s B2B customer preferences, and nearly all of them point to the need for increasingly personalized, omnichannel experiences. But as your company expands and your customer base grows, catering to each unique (and evolving) need becomes more challenging by the day. Meeting customer expectations and delivering exceptional experiences right out of the gate—starting with the first quote—is one reason sales and marketing teams love configure, price, and quote (CPQ) solutions.

Let’s examine why CPQ is integral to the sales and marketing tech stack.

What is CPQ?

Configure, Price, Quote software simplifies the process of generating customer quotes and makes them more effective. According to the Forrester Wave Configure, Price, Quote Platforms, Q2 2023 report, it efficiently addresses the needs of small, medium, and enterprise companies. Breaking that down, the technology will:

Configure: Find the right products for your customer in the right combination. 
Price: Get the correct price for your customer for the configured products or combination of products. 
Quote: Generate a quote, including the configured products, at the correct price.

Good CPQ integrates with CRM, ERP, and e-commerce platforms to distill important customer needs/preferences during quoting. CPQ then collates these details and uses them to determine the best way to configure products for each customer, what the optimal price is for that customer, and automatically generates a professional-looking quote. This is done much faster and more accurately than the manual alternative.

5 Reasons to Love CPQ Software 

Even the savviest sales teams are challenged by efficiently accessing and using the information available across disparate systems and generating quotes that are both satisfactory to customers and profitable to the company. And let’s not forget the quicker this can be done, the better. By leveraging CPQ software, sales can access extensive databases capable of swiftly consolidating relevant data. This eliminates the potential for human error while significantly reducing the time required for information retrieval. 

CPQ software can also integrate with pricing optimization software, allowing businesses to create dynamic pricing models. (Also read: The Value in Optimized Pricing and How to Achieve It). This ensures sales teams have quick access to real-time pricing and other crucial variables, enabling them to generate optimal quotes tailored to individual client’s specific requirements, regardless of the moment in time.

Here are a few additional benefits of introducing a CPQ system into your organization: 

1) Reduced time-to-quote for more time selling.

Including a CPQ system in the sales process will increase efficiency within your teams. Referring to a single data source will limit unnecessary overhead and administrative tasks and provide clarity for rapid approvals—or the basis for clearly understood exception handling. Most of the time, the quickest quote wins, so reducing the time-to-quote can be of high value. Create an environment and process allowing your sales team to focus most of their time on what they are good at selling and adding value. 

2) Easily onboard new sales reps. 

Growing the sales team can be challenging when the products sold are complex. By using CPQ software, your sales reps can be onboarded more efficiently as less “by heart” knowledge is required, and the system will guide new users through making the best recommendations to their specific customers. 

3) Streamlined workflow with a single source of truth.

Gathering quotes from individual spreadsheets is difficult, time-consuming, and error-prone. When a single system pulls together the data from the suggested list price to the quoted price, you save time and reduce human error. CPQ provides a central location of this data, which can then be utilized to identify leakage in price and increase the accuracy of the quotes sent out.

4) Consistent execution of your pricing strategy. 

Better pricing guidance for the sales reps from the onset powers optimal profitability. Within CPQ, you can capture a clear structure on the discounts that may be used and a target price, including a floor and ceiling price. What use is setting an excellent pricing strategy if it is not executed consistently? 

5) Improve Customer Satisfaction

B2B customers are also B2C customers and, therefore, increasingly used to premier online shopping experiences. Those preferences are driving up expectations across B2B transactions as well. Making quoting more intuitive for users will increase efficiency and satisfaction. 

For maximum sales efficiency, profitability, and customer satisfaction, it’s essential to have the processes and systems that enable you to get the right price from your customers. Optimizing the quoting process with CPQ is critical to achieving this kind of success.

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Mitch Lee

Profit Evangelist at Vendavo

Mitch Lee is a pricing evangelist at Vendavo, a global provider of B2B price management and commercial excellence solutions. He focuses on providing thought leadership and helping teams develop engagement at all levels, identify hidden opportunities in challenging markets, and deliver value.