Solve five common quoting process issues with CPQ

Beyond wasting time and causing frustration to both your staff and customers, issues in your company’s quoting process can do real damage to your bottom line. In an ideal world, there would be a smooth and seamless turnaround between a customer requesting a quote from your company and receiving it.

Introduction

Issues in your quoting process—from pricing errors to lengthy approvals—can prevent your team from meeting customer expectations, and contribute to a lack of morale among your staff.

In our experience helping businesses improve their quote-to-cash system, we’ve seen these roadblocks countless times. In our well-established Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) practice at Rackspace, we’ve been able to help guide businesses in implementing the right tools and processes to tackle these common pain points and prevent them from reappearing down the line.

One of the best tools you can invest in to alleviate this is the Salesforce® CPQ application. Salesforce CPQ acts as a guardrail for your sales process, helping your team quickly provide accurate pricing across a range of scenarios. It facilitates your quoting process from the first interaction with a client right up to the final calculations—and it doesn’t end there, thanks to streamlined review and follow-up capabilities.

This post covers five of the most rampant quoting process issues we’ve seen, some solutions, and a look at how CPQ can help mitigate these problems.

1. Outdated information

Keeping your organization’s information up-to-date can be difficult, especially if you’re in the midst of restructuring or (have many systems to keep track of)[https://martechseries.com/mts-insights/guest-authors/dont-let-data-silos-downfall/] across the company.

If you’re using spreadsheets and documents to manage your terms and conditions, price lists, and other important information, the chances are high that older versions of these documents are being circulated and used by both team members and clients.

Salesforce and linked cloud-based applications such as CPQ can help centralize and maintain data. CPQ also acts as your company’s universal access point for that data. This centralization ensures that every team member has access to the most current documents and information.

2. Pricing (and other) errors

One of the major side effects of having decentralized data across multiple systems is errors such as price discrepancies, data entry mistakes, and other blunders that make your quoting process feel more like a hurdle and less like a bridge to bringing on new customers.

Common issues might be caused by human errors, such as forgetting to update an information field (like the company’s new name) that causes confusion for the customer, or miscalculations, such as not realizing a customer is eligible for free shipping on a particular order.

These errors can result in over or under-charging your customers, filing inaccurate information, or extra time spent redoing a large quote. Ultimately, quoting errors cause your team and company to appear disjointed or, worse, unprofessional.

While it might not be possible to eliminate errors completely, you can take steps to make these mistakes less likely. Doing so goes a long way towards helping you to reach your targets and keep your customers happy.

3. Lengthy review process

Tired of endless emails and long games of phone tag to get your quote approved? You are not alone—going through the necessary reviews and approvals is one of the most frequently identified pain points of the quoting process. For companies that still rely on email for communications, this is especially true.

Salesforce CPQ enables you to generate documents, track changes, and integrate revisions into the quote system so that the final review process is more efficient and easier to follow up on. This process empowers your team and the customer to obtain the information and changes they need in a timely manner.

4. Missed upsells

While your sales representatives are busy following up on approvals or correcting errors in a miscalculated quote, they are losing time they could have spent maximizing the impact of their sales. When sales representatives are spread too thin or required to spend too much time on manual tasks, they miss out on opportunities to upsell your current customer base.

Salesforce CPQ helps manage repetitive tasks and removes some of the manual processes, freeing up time for salespeople to focus on searching for ideal opportunities to upsell and cross-sell existing customers. CPQ also manages your quotes and contracts in one centralized system, helping to further highlight compatibilities and upsell opportunities along the path to generating a quote.

5. Excessive discounting

Discounts can be an effective way to motivate and reward customers that use and bundle your products. However, when you give too many customers overly generous markdowns or inaccurate discounts, your profits take a hit.

Excessive discounting is common when a sales team doesn’t have an automated system to perform calculations based on the customer’s profile, or when they don’t have clearly enforced rules in place to cap discounts.

By using CPQ to set limits on your discount policy and to require different degrees of approval for discounts, you help ensure that your customers get a fair price while your company continues to make money.

Let’s remodel your quoting process

Ready to smooth out your quoting process with CPQ? As certified CPQ specialists, the team at Rackspace is uniquely equipped to help you navigate common quoting process issues and get the most out of your Salesforce platform. Partnering with an implementation expert like Rackspace ensures that your journey is smooth, and adoption across your company is high.

We’ve worked with a wide range of clients with diverse configurations and needs. So we’ve got a library of solutions to apply to just about any quoting process issues you encounter.

Optimize your environment with expert administration, management, and configuration

Rackspace's Application services (RAS) experts provide the following professional and managed services across a broad portfolio of applications:

• eCommerce and Digital Experience platforms
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
• Business Intelligence
• Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Databases
• Email Hosting and Productivity

We deliver:

• Unbiased expertise: We simplify and guide your modernization journey, focusing on the capabilities that deliver immediate value.
• Fanatical Experience™: We combine a Process first. Technology second.® approach with dedicated technical support to provide comprehensive solutions.
• Unrivaled portfolio: We apply extensive cloud experience to help you choose and deploy the right technology on the right cloud.
• Agile delivery: We meet you where you are in your journey and align our success with yours.

Chat now to get started.