6 Reasons to Make Salesforce CPQ an Ally of Your Sales Team

According to research, sales teams spend approximately 66%^[i] of their time generating quotes, proposals, and acquiring approvals rather than actually selling.

Surprising, isn’t it?

In today’s fast-forward world, if sales reps are still spending almost two-thirds of their time working on non-selling activities, it will certainly hamper business growth along with lost opportunities.

The importance of seamless business processes and faster closure of sales, especially when you are selling a service or a product, is secret to none.

Therefore, what we’ve observed is that organizations are on the hunt for best-in-class technology that gives an extra booster in closing deals is what most sales teams wish for. That’s where Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) can take your sales process capabilities a notch higher and give you an edge over your competitors.

According to recent research, organizations that use CPQ solutions experience approximately 49% higher proposal volume^[ii]. And it’s even better if it’s the G2 acclaimed Salesforce CPQ that scored higher than any of the 44 other CPQ providers^[iii] on the list.

With the Spring ’21 release, Salesforce added some amazing features to Salesforce CPQ. It brought in significant advancements in the beloved Salesforce CPQ to help you and your team skate through the sales process effortlessly.

Let’s take a look at what those features are and how they’ll benefit your business.

4 Salesforce Spring ’21 Features That Will Amplify CPQ’s Capabilities

1. Continue Working While Amending Contracts

Previously, during the contract amendment process, users had to wait for the process to be complete before they could work on the Salesforce environment. With this new option, you can continue working in your Salesforce environment, even if the contract amendment phase is in progress whenever a new option is selected. This will save time and improve the efficiency of the sales team.

2. Shift to Large-Scale Amendment and Renewal Services

Until now, you couldn’t switch back from the Legacy Renew/Amend Service to the Salesforce CPQ Large-Scale Amendment and Renewal Service if the contract field names were too lengthy. You can now easily complete your renewal and amendment transactions, irrespective of the renewal and amendment service that you use.

3. Contract Larger Orders in Less Time

Your sales reps can now easily create contract orders with 2X line items as before. The quantity of line items in the contract is subject to your company’s configuration.

4. Addition of ‘Permission Set Requirement’ for Amendment of Contract and Renewal

Necessary permission should be provided to the user who authorizes the Salesforce CPQ calculator when they deselect the ‘Use Legacy Amend/Renew Service’ respectively. Otherwise, users won’t be able to amend or renew contracts. However, this change is limited to the Lightning Experience (LEX) in all Salesforce CPQ editions.

Additionally, you can highlight the long-term value of lifecycle managed assets.

Since the advanced approval users can effectively manage their approvals, the product creation logic and order activation processes get streamlined.

6 Reasons Why Your Sales Team Needs Salesforce CPQ

Salesforce CPQ is feature-rich and customizable and empowers sales reps to automate approvals, track prices, and close deals faster.

Here are six reasons that make Salesforce CPQ a powerful solution:

1. Easier Product Search:

Salesforce CPQ’s robust search function thoroughly examines all values in a product, this includes details like product name, SKU, and category. Its auto-complete feature suggests items to match users’ queries as they type. Beyond the powerful search, you can even customize what users see on the results page. Pretty cool, isn’t it?

2. Advanced Approvals:

With advanced approvals, you can automate and customize your complex approval paths by setting up pre-defined approval paths thus, saving valuable time. This frees your sales team from waiting for lengthy approval times so that they can focus on doing what they do best – close deals.

3. Multi-Dimensional Quoting (MDQ):

With MDQ, you can build customized subscription packages for different segments of time, especially if you have a product that is sold in yearly segments thus eliminating the need to add multiple quote lines for each segment. It allows sales reps to be more flexible when offering different subscriptions for a particular service and your customers happier with a wider range of options.

4. Guided Selling:

Guided selling enables a proactive approach to assist sales reps in finding the right products and quote them quickly. You can create a set of pre-determined targeted questions that enable your sales teams to navigate the product catalog. Not just that, the questions are fully customizable but they can also be dynamic. This makes it easier for sales reps to quickly answer important questions about product requirements, quantities, and other customer needs.

5. Bundled Products:

With bundled products in your corner, it becomes simpler for sales reps to identify the right product pairings and what additional offers can be added to grow revenue. So, when a user selects a product for a quote, the bundled products feature suggests different products that can (or should) go with it. Additionally, you get an alert if you try to bundle products that don’t really fit together.

6. Subscription Management:

If your products run on subscription models, you know it can be difficult to manage ongoing subscriptions and renewals. Salesforce CPQ lets you add subscription terms to your products, which enables CPQ to track post-sale subscriptions on your accounts automatically. From that point, amending contracts becomes easy because CPQ can dynamically allocate product prices and terms so that new subscriptions co-terminate with the customer’s existing subscriptions.

Furthermore, CPQ is mobile accessible which enables quicker sales decisions and automation of time-consuming manual tasks.

It’s not all talk, here are a few facts that highlight the capabilities of Salesforce CPQ.

Apart from these, Salesforce CPQ has many other features when it comes to making your sales processes a breeze. So, if empowering sales teams, creating impressive customer experiences, and brand loyalty are on your mind, Salesforce CPQ can be just the right ace up your sleeve.

Do you want to know how to make Salesforce CPQ work for your organization? Talk to us!

References:

^[i] Salesforce
^[ii] Superoffice
^[iii] G2
^{[iv] [v] [vi]} Ksolves