The B2B sales process can be overwhelming for your buyers. They have to evaluate your offerings, compare them with others in the market, discuss them internally, and then make a purchase.
Throughout this process, a prospect may interact with your brand multiple times through various methods, such as emails and strategy calls. Each of these interactions allows you to tailor your sales process and start off the customer relationship on the right foot.
Mistakes and oversights, however, could lead your customers to seek out the wrong product or service that they might not need or even unknowingly overcharge them.
This is where Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solutions can help. This software helps B2B sales teams generate accurate and personalized quotations quickly, which speeds up your prospect’s decision-making process and ultimately streamlines the purchase experience.
In this article, let’s look at what CPQ solutions have in store for your B2B sales teams and how they can boost conversions.
1. Deliver tailored and accurate quotes quickly
As we briefly touched upon earlier, every business that purchases from you has unique needs and preferences. Whether it is product variants or service packages, everything needs to be tailored to address your customers’ requirements.
A personalized quote helps your prospects calculate (or estimate) the ROI of purchasing from you, which helps them make an informed decision. Moreover, customers feel understood and valued when they are charged only for what they are getting, increasing trust.
The manual process of extracting customers’ needs from past interactions and calculating to cost can get hectic. This can lead to delays and mistakes resulting from oversights and biases, slowing down your sales pipeline.
Fortunately, CPQ solutions can be embedded into your existing CRM systems to streamline this process and reduce the manual workload. Businesses that use Microsoft Dynamics 365, for example, can leverage the Dynamics 365 CPQ to send personalized quotes without changing their workflow.
2. Streamline complex sales process
When a prospect looks at your business’s offerings, they might struggle to pick the one that suits them best. In those situations, they might reach out to you with questions to learn more about your products and services.
B2B CPQ solutions provide tangible answers to these questions by putting a number in front of them. This data and additional information about your offerings enhance the decision-making process.
Moreover, rather than explaining all the details about their specific problems and expectations, they can simply enter their requirements and get a straightforward answer within minutes. This makes the overall B2B sales process leaner for you and user-friendly for your buyers.
B2B CPQ solutions can streamline the sales process and increase pipeline velocity by providing your customers with a more guided and tailored interaction while saving time.
3. Align sales and customer success teams
In B2B transactions, customer relationships begin after a prospect converts. Strong customer relationships ensure your buyers remain happy with their purchase, continue to engage with your brand, and return over and over again.
Moreover, well-maintained customer relationships in B2B can lead to organic word-of-mouth promotion that can earn you a few valuable referrals.
Sales teams must ensure that critical insights are transferred to the customer success team after each conversion to try to boost the odds of referrals. This can include information about customers’ usage preferences, personal motivations, and organizational goals.
CPQ solutions facilitate that by collating all the relevant data in one place (for all customers) and making it easily accessible. For example, software like HubSpot, which is used by both sales and customer success teams can utilize HubSpot CPQ to share insights about buyers.
The data democratization facilitated by enterprise CPQ tools plays a key role in aligning sales and customer success teams to boost retention and satisfaction.
4. Learn continuously about your target audience
The marketplace, industry regulations and standards, and your customers’ needs always evolve. This necessitates continuous learning about buyers to ensure your B2B sales strategies remain effective.
A major part of learning is collecting the right and reliable information. It is crucial for drawing accurate and practical conclusions and converting them into actionable insights. Incomplete or insufficient data can increase the chances of oversights and mistakes.
CPQ systems track prospects’ answers that reflect their needs and objectives. They are a reliable source of information that can deepen your sales team’s understanding of the target audience and market.
Furthermore, these tools make it easier to test optimizations quickly. Each time you make changes to your pricing or catalog, for example, you can see the results in real time on your CPQ software’s dashboards.
This is key for agility which keeps your B2B sales process effective and streamlined.
Wrapping up
Streamlining the B2B sales process helps your buyers find what they are looking for and increases your pipeline velocity. It also boosts the likelihood of conversion since the purchase process becomes smooth.
CPQ solutions facilitate that by providing an estimate of how much they need to pay for your products and services. This helps them calculate the purchase’s ROI, speeding up their overall decision-making process.
For businesses, using CPQ systems also aligns sales and customer success teams. Sales reps can share crucial insights about the preferences and needs of the prospects they convert to customer success executives.
This starts your relationship with your buyer on the right foot, which can lead to long-term retention and word-of-mouth promotion.
Fortunately, most modern CPQ solutions integrate seamlessly with popular CRM software such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 and HubSpot, enabling quicker adoption and effective implementation.
