Consider the following scenario: You are nearing the end of a transaction. Your contact is eager to sign on the dotted line and join your customer list. However, your CRM solution lacks a product inventory that includes a list of all updated prices. You cannot send what you anticipate the costs to be. What are you going to do?

You must go to your billing team and obtain the most recent price list. You'll most likely need to create a quote from scratch and send it to your contact. However, if they find errors, they will return the document, and you will have to repeat the process.

It will eventually take another day or two for you to complete the transaction. That's at least 48 hours of lost business!

Is there a way to simplify this process without starting from scratch? Absolutely.

Enter the Configure Price Quote (CPQ) software.

What exactly is CPQ?

CPQ is an abbreviation for Configure, Price, and Quote, and it is a piece of software designed to assist businesses that sell complex products and services.

A CPQ makes it simple to specify every possible configuration, price, discount, and scenario, making the quoting process quick and easy. Using CPQ, the company can quickly provide accurate and highly configured quotes while centralising, automating, and making all complex pricing, product, and business rules available in real-time. As businesses offer more products/services and variations, managing product pricing, identifying great upsell opportunities, and keeping track of competitors' deals becomes more difficult.

Aside from that, their sales representatives may not be up to date on their products' most recent pricing information, resulting in missed opportunities and a longer quoting time.

Using CPQ software is advantageous not only for your customers but also for your sales representatives. It assists younger, less-experienced sales representatives in coping with a complex selling process and experienced representatives in being more productive.

It can also be helpful when selecting additional configurations, extending service contracts, offering complementary products, or recommending appropriate add-ons. You can easily configure your standard pricing in the CPQ software, but you should leave the option open for your sales rep to calculate discounts, add line items, etc. A sales representative can sometimes even enter a client's budget, and the software will do the rest.

It will calculate various product discounts and select the one that best meets the requirements. Finally, CPQ generates a customer-ready quote. These documents may include your branding and formats, customised cover letters and cover pages, terms and conditions, marketing materials, and the quote itself. This process takes only a few minutes, giving reps more time and energy to focus on other tasks.

Continue reading to find out which four are the best:

Four Advantages of a CPQ Solution

1. A more rapid sales process

Let's go back to the previous example. There was a two-day delay in the ongoing sales cycle from when the customer was ready to buy. The standard spreadsheet discipline may have been the primary cause of the delay. A CPQ solution assists sales teams in dealing with this issue. It provides up-to-date prices and creates and sends accurate quotes, all from a single location.
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2. Reduce errors.

When you send your consumer a quotation, you’d have had to structure the pricing is based on:

• Offers or discounts
• Bundled plans
• Renewals on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis

Even with a calculator, keeping track of this manually can lead to confusion and errors. This can result in inaccurate quotes and a negative customer experience. CPQ functionality assists sales reps in automatically keeping track of these complex pricing structures and ensures that the quoting process is error-free. This means they will continue to send it back to you until it is correct.

Isn't that beneficial?

3. Include a personal touch

Most CPQ solutions include pre-built templates or allow you to create new ones as needed. Multiple email templates can be created and saved for quick access. You can also change the placeholders, add media, and even add signatures. Emails that are personalised stand out in your prospect's already crowded inbox. Personalised emails receive 14% more click-throughs, and personalised subject lines receive 26% more opens! This increases the likelihood that your prospects will click on your emails rather than someone else's.

4. More visibility across teams

CPQ ensures that key stakeholders, such as the finance or legal teams, access all of your sales quotes. This means that multiple teams can review your proposals before they are sent to customers to ensure that they are factually and legally correct.

As a result, your documents are up to date, and you can avoid frequent communications with various departments.

Here are four steps to quickly creating and sending a sales proposal with OneHash CRM:

Step 1 – Create a product inventory.

Create an inventory and add various products and their prices directly from Freshsales. Each product can have its name, a picture to go with it, a category, and a stock-keeping unit (SKU). Having this centralised location ensures that your documents always have accurate pricing when you send quotes, proposals, or invoices to your customers. Each product can have its name, a picture to go with it, a category, and a stock-keeping unit (SKU). You can also link each product to the visual sales pipeline for easier recall.

Step 2 – Create templates for frequently shared data.

You can create a custom template for the quotes or proposals you want to send, whether they are MSAs or NDAs. This eliminates the need to create a new document each time.

You can make multiple templates by combining the following elements:

• Images and videos are examples of media.
• Adaptable tables (including pricing information)
• Footer with details about your company
• Data placeholders that automatically populate your emails

Step 3 – Sync is concerned with documents.

The next step is to sync your documents. This ensures that the correct price is reflected on your documents. You can choose to sync documents with deals automatically, and you're done.

This saves you the trouble of manually updating records and ensures you don't miss out on important information about the transaction. Furthermore, syncing deals with your document provides no gaps in pricing information and allows you to identify deals and their owners in your pipeline quickly.

Step 4: Send documents and monitor their progress.

You can now send the document to your customers. Save the document you've created and then click Send.

You can choose to edit the document with necessary elements just before sending it, or you can select another template from the list of ones you've saved. You can also easily track the status of your documents once they've been sent. When you send a document, its status changes to "Sent."

You can now see the following data in a single location:

• When they open the file
• If they return it,
• The most recent version of the document, as well as additional information

It's as simple as that. With a comprehensive CPQ solution, OneHash CRM allows you to create and send propositions in minutes. You are not required to take our term for it.

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