Boost Your Sales Cycle with CPQ: A Step-by-Step Guide

Sales cycles for custom products can be lengthy and complex, often involving multiple stakeholders and detailed customization and pricing structures. Workflows between sales and design teams can be complicated, with lots of back-and-forth dialogue. This complexity means it can take longer to provide customized quotes, resulting in the loss of potential sales, especially if your competitors have quicker turnaround times.

Finding ways to boost the sales cycle is a key priority for manufacturers of custom products. This is where CPQ is an effective tool for developing a streamlined B2B sales process. CPQ solutions often integrate with CRM and ERP systems to provide a seamless flow of information throughout the sales cycle. It guides sales representatives through product configuration, applies pricing rules, and automatically generates accurate quotes.

In this blog, we’ll share our step-by-step guide on how to boost your sales cycle and stay ahead of the competition with CPQ.

Step 1: Assess your current sales process

Start with a thorough review of your existing sales process to identify bottlenecks and pain points. Think about some of the questions below to understand what is slowing down your sales cycle:

• How easy is it for sales teams to configure products?
• How long does it take to generate custom quotes?
• How quicky can your design team produce custom designs
• What level of accuracy and rework do you typically see?
• How long does it take to train new sales people?
• What’s your approval process for discounts

Step 2: Define your goals and requirements

Once you’ve completed your sales process review, you’ll have a clear picture of which tasks are slowing down your sales cycle.

Analyze each task and set out a set of measurable goals for improvement. For example, if your biggest challenge is the amount of time it takes to turn around quotes, define you ideal quote turnaround time. This exercise will ensure that you have a clear vision of what you want to achieve from your CPQ implementation.

To produce a robust set of requirements, think about these questions:

• Who will use it – sales teams, distributors etc.?
• How will it be used?
• Which products will be part of your CPQ solution?
• Which of your existing business systems should it integrate with?
• How much training will be required?
• Do you need your CPQ solution to be scalable?

Step 3: Choose the right CPQ solution for your business

There are a wide range of different CPQ solutions available on the market, but not all of them will suit the needs of your business. You know your business best, and having determined your goals and requirements you will have a clear view of what type of solution you’re looking for. Your considerations are likely to include:

• Integration capabilities
• Ability to handle complex configuration
• 3D visualization capabilities
• Automatic creation of sales & manufacturing documents & data

Step 4: Customize and configure workflows

Different businesses have different workflows and sales strategies, and the true value of a CPQ solution is in its ability to be customized to meet the specific needs of your business. Custom workflows and permissions play a critical role in this, enhancing the flexibility of your CPQ solution and boosting sales cycles.

With custom workflows, you can adapt to the unique processes used by your business. Whether it’s your engineering design process, order enquiry or product configuration, you can design bespoke workflows that fit your requirements.

Benefits of custom workflows include:

• Flexibility
• Improved efficiency
• Faster approvals
• Fewer errors

Step 5: Train your sales team

CPQ technology enables sales teams to be more efficient and more effective, helping you to boost your sales cycle.

Effective training ensures that sales reps are skilled in using CPQ tools to their full potential, and deliver several sales benefits:

• Guided selling makes it easy to configure complex custom products
• Configurations are accurate and manufacturable
• Easier for sales teams to identify cross-sell and upgrade opportunities
• Quicker onboarding for new sales employees

Step 6: Test & gather feedback

Involving different teams in CPQ testing is a good way of ensuring the solution works for all business stakeholders. Encouraging participation and feedback from colleagues involved in different parts of your workflow enables you to see the full impact of the CPQ solution. Testing and gathering feedback will also:

• Help with the approval and adoption of the new technology
• Provide insights for future training and onboarding requirements
• Identify any issues compromising performance, reliability, or maintainability

Step 7: Roll out & monitor

Roll out the CPQ solution to users across your business, maintaining a continuous improvement mindset. Areas to consider at this stage include:

• Review performance against original goals
• Review of pricing strategies
• Integration development
• Continual feedback
• Additional training requirements

Boost your sales cycle with DriveWorks CPQ for Manufacturing solution

DriveWorks CPQ solution provides manufacturers of custom products with the tools to build a complete configure, price, quote solution that automatically creates documents and data for manufacturing.

Manufacturers using DriveWorks CPQ for Manufacturing solution have achieved:

• 50% faster sales onboarding
• 95% faster quoting
• 64% business growth

Book a CPQ demo with a DriveWorks expert

A CPQ demo with a TPM DriveWorks expert will help you to get under the hood of DriveWorks and get answers to your specific questions. They can guide you through practical applications and explain advanced features in a way that enables you to see how the technology could enable you to implement your own DriveWorks CPQ for Manufacturing solution.

Blog Courtesy of DriveWorks