Managing sales processes across large organizations is complex. From coordinating teams to configuring quotes, enterprise companies face immense challenges when keeping sales operations running smoothly. Fortunately, Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) software provides specialized solutions purpose-built for streamlining sales in enterprise environments.
With advanced guided selling, deal management, and configuration capabilities, CPQ enables enterprises to scale sales operations, increase efficiency, and improve customer relationships. As the pioneer of CPQ technology, Cincom offers industry-leading solutions that enhance sales capabilities while solving common pain points.
Related: What Is Configure Price Quote Software?
Sales Challenges Facing Enterprise Businesses
Enterprise organizations operate on a massive scale, with distributed teams, lengthy sales cycles, and complex product catalogs. This leads to a variety of sales challenges:
- Difficulty Generating Quotes at Scale: Large sales teams working across multiple regions and product lines often struggle with coordinating quoting efforts. When a company relies on tribal knowledge and disjointed systems, efficiently producing accurate quotes is extremely difficult. This frustrates customers and limits sales capacity.
- Inefficient Business Processes: Complex approval chains, inconsistent data, and convoluted system workflows slow down sales. Reps waste time tracking down information instead of selling. A lack of visibility into performance further hampers optimizing operations.
- Managing Intricate Sales Processes: Long sales cycles, intricate configuration requirements, and cross-department collaboration complicate the management of enterprise deals. These intricacies strain resources and cause deals to stall out.
- Onboarding Challenges: Getting new reps trained and ramped up to full productivity is time-intensive and expensive. Plus, complicated processes and products mean hands-on guidance is required before allowing reps to operate independently.
- Distributed Teams & Information: Regional and global teams struggle to access consistent, up-to-date information. Sales data gets scattered across systems. Different processes and data formats make consolidation difficult.
- Building Strong Customer Relationships: Inconsistent experiences and quotes generated from fragmented systems and dated product info hinder customer trust and loyalty. Businesses need to quickly adapt offerings to suit customer needs.
- Lack of Renewal/Upsell Opportunities: Limited visibility into customer purchase history and usage makes identifying renewal and upsell opportunities extremely difficult. Relying solely on sales reps to monitor customer needs risks letting opportunities slip away.
What Is CPQ Software?
Configure, Price, Quote software brings together guided selling, pricing rules, proposal generation, and contract management in an integrated platform tailored for sales organizations. CPQ solutions enhance sales effectiveness by simplifying quoting, centralizing product data, recommending optimal deals, and automating repetitive administrative workflows.
Core CPQ features include:
- Guided Selling Tools: CPQ applies configuration requirements and logic when building customized quotes. Recommendations help customers choose compatible options. Workflows prevent errors by limiting invalid selections.
- Centralized Pricing Management: Pricing data gets consolidated within CPQ. Rules ensure appropriate pricing levels. Integration checks for discounts, promotions, and other conditions that impact pricing.
- Automated Document Generation: CPQ software produces professional quote documentation tailored to the products selected. Finalized quotes can include graphics, descriptions, terms, pricing breakdowns, signatures, and other customizable elements.
- Integration with Existing Systems: APIs facilitate data sharing between CPQ and other core platforms like CRM, ERP, accounting, e-commerce, and more. This eliminates rekeying data while improving access to essential information.
- Omnichannel Support: Consistent pricing, promotions, and product availability across channels prevent inconsistencies when working with direct sales, partners, and e-commerce. Customers engage in whichever way they prefer.
Related: What Is CPQ Cloud?
The Benefits of CPQ for Enterprises
CPQ software offers immense value for enterprise organizations that struggle with scaling complex sales processes. Cincom’s CPQ solution can help improve sales operations, productivity, revenue opportunities, and customer experiences.
Scale Quote Generation and Deal Management
Centralized product and pricing databases paired with guided selling rules allow large enterprise sales teams with global footprints to quickly build accurate, consistent quotes without repetitive information gathering or relying on tribal knowledge. Integration eliminates toggling between systems to access required data. Workflow automation manages optimal deal construction, including automated approvals, version histories, and progress tracking to ensure smooth transitions through each milestone. Cincom CPQ™ provides the guided selling pathways, centralized repositories, and process automation essential for efficiently scaling complex quote generation.
Optimize Business Processes
Integrated product, pricing, and customer data, as well as codified approval rules and systematized workflows, eliminate sales reps wasting time to track down up-to-date information needed to progress deals. Automating these manual administrative efforts further optimizes operations by reducing unproductive hours spent on non-selling tasks. Real-time data synchronization persistently pipes the latest updates directly into selling scenarios. Configurable rules encode compliance requirements and best practices to guide users and skip unnecessary steps. Cincom CPQ promotes optimization by enforcing consistency, embedding intelligence, and automating repetitive manual efforts.
Manage Complex Sales Processes and Lengthy Sales Cycles
Multidimensional configuration requirements that define intricate product customization options get encoded into flexible business logic powering guided-selling pathways. Constraints dynamically control available features and component compatibility as configuration selections develop throughout lengthy sales cycles. This prevents stalled deals from invalid configurations created through buyer self-service channels.
Cincom CPQ™ handles infinite complexity through flexible constraint rules and attribute models. These Configure, Price, Quote engines can encode deeply technical manufacturing specifications required for specialized equipment. Complex configuration capability enables the precise customization needed for specialized sales with prolonged evaluative cycles.
Help Sales Reps Adapt to New Processes
Guided selling pathways within Cincom CPQ encode established best practices for enterprise sales scenarios, making onboarding new reps simpler and faster. Reps can produce accurate quotes without oversight much faster with immediate access to up-to-date pricing, product details, customer information, and other essential resources through deep integration with existing systems. Reduced tribal knowledge shortens the learning curve. Cincom CPQ’s embedded intelligence guides usage to instill optimal workflows.
Unify Distributed Sales Operations Teams
Cincom CPQ consolidates all relevant pricing, product data, customer details, and analytics into a central platform, giving globally distributed teams access to unified data sources. Standardized guided-selling processes configured with flexible business rules ensure consistency across regions, business units, and channels. Integration eliminates conflicting data while automation provides transparent operations. Together, this enables the coordination of the dispersed teams necessary for serving massive multinational accounts.
Improve Customer Relationships
Highly accurate, consistent omnichannel experiences demonstrate a commitment and reliability that builds customer satisfaction and trust. Quick quote turnaround made possible through automation paired with seamless order fulfillment and service increases perceived value.
Consolidated data grants a comprehensive view of customer history and lifecycle, facilitating personalized cross-sell offers anticipating evolving needs to drive loyalty. Cincom CPQ empowers providers to know their customers and respond appropriately.
Expand Deal Opportunities
Consolidated usage metrics and customer purchase history within Cincom CPQ provide valuable insights for identifying timely upsell options to maximize deal size. Configured guided-selling suggestions encourage bundling compatible accessory products or complementary service additions, increasing order value. Multi-channel order history furnishes a holistic view of each account’s potential.
Embedded analytics quantify account growth rates and surface cross-sell targets. Unified data understanding across current customers produces the answers sales teams need for developing key relationships, building loyalty, and protecting revenue streams from competitors. Cincom CPQ insights expand deals today and safeguard accounts for tomorrow by empowering reps to proactively present relevant offers tailored to existing clients’ unique needs.
Why Businesses Should Consider Cincom CPQ Solutions
As an established CPQ pioneer serving complex enterprise clients for over 55 years, Cincom offers extremely robust solutions tailored for the world’s most sophisticated organizations. Cincom CPQ enhances any digital transformation initiative by bridging front- and back-office systems to create a truly unified sales environment.
What Makes Cincom’s CPQ Solutions Stand Out?
- Powerful Configuration Engines: Cincom handles both constraint and attribute-based configuration requirements capable of immensely intricate product definitions with deep integration of engineering specifications and design characteristics.
- Flexible Integration Framework: Cincom provides an extensive library of APIs and adapters, facilitating connections with major CRM, ERP, and other back-office systems, allowing bidirectional data flows with key supporting platforms.
- Omnichannel Selling Focus: Supports direct, channel partner, e-commerce, and embedded selling scenarios, consistently applying pricing rules, product configurations, restrictions, and data across environments.
- Specialized Industry Solutions: While delivering general CPQ capabilities, Cincom also produces solutions with specific features for particular verticals and specialized use cases within manufacturing and professional services.
Related: Learn about CPQ software for manufacturing
Using Cincom’s CPQ to Enhance Your Organization’s Capabilities
Cincom CPQ integrates into an enterprise’s existing digital ecosystem to greatly enhance sales and broader organizational capabilities:
- Unify Product Data: Consolidates pricing, technical specifications, options, graphics, and all product details into a centralized database feeding all selling channels.
- Remove Knowledge Silos: Capture intricate configuration logic and codify complex workflows into business rules that drive process automation.
- Shorten Quote Approval Cycles: Enable one-click quote approvals with automatic routing to appropriate signatories based on deal specifics for faster turnarounds.
- Expand Channel Partner Enablement: Open self-service portals that provide everything needed for partners to quickly build compliant quotes to drive greater channel sales.
- Boost Engineering Productivity: Reduce wasted engineering time spent evaluating the feasibility of non-standard configurations by selling only validated options.
- Gain Enterprise-Wide Pipeline Visibility: Roll up quote metrics from all systems and channels that support accurate forecasting, capacity planning, and performance management.
Accelerate Your Sales Process with Cincom CPQ Software
Cincom CPQ Software empowers enterprises to accelerate sales velocity and boost profitability by tackling obstacles that hamper productivity. From centralized pricing rules with guardrails that maintain accuracy and profitability to deep integrations that consolidate systems into a unified hub for seamless information sharing, our CPQ drives the productivity gains necessary for meeting revenue goals in competitive markets. Why struggle when Cincom CPQ enables selling faster, smarter, and more profitably? Transform sales operations today and realize the benefits of industry-leading technology that propels enterprises forward.
CTA: Schedule a demo
FAQs
What does CPQ software do?
CPQ software streamlines and automates quoting and sales configuration processes for companies selling complex products and services, especially those with large sales teams and long sales cycles.
What features should an enterprise CPQ solution have?
Enterprise CPQ solutions should include omnichannel sales support, robust integration with existing platforms like CRM and ERP, guided selling for complex configurable products, customizable approval chains for deal management, and analytics for enterprise-wide visibility.
Does CPQ software replace CRM?
No. CPQ software works alongside CRM to optimize sales quoting, while CRM focuses more broadly on managing overall customer relationships across the entire customer lifecycle. Integration enables the synchronization of relevant data between platforms.
How can CPQ support digital transformation initiatives?
CPQ facilitates digital transformation by bridging front and back-office systems, codifying complex business processes and logic, enforcing enterprise-wide data consistency, and enabling critical capabilities like omnichannel sales engagement.