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Effectively managing sales processes in enterprise companies is extremely challenging. The negative effects of using outdated tech and manual processes compound over time as your sales organization grows.
This leads to unnecessary slowdowns like…
Enterprise sales teams need a specialized solution to bridge the gap between complex deal types and quote-to-cash efficiency.
This blog highlights why enterprises have particular CPQ requirements and how they can evaluate the right tools.
Enterprise companies operate on a massive scale with teams distributed across various regions. They have lengthy sales cycles that require more time and resources from the sales team, which leads to higher operational costs and losing out on lucrative deals. In fact, 28% of sales professionals admitted that lengthy sales processes are one of the reasons why customers opt out of deals.
Here are the top areas in sales cycles where enterprises struggle.
The slow and complex approval process is one of the most prominent challenges that most enterprise sales teams face. The quote generation process often goes through multiple levels of approvals before finalization. This includes getting a go-ahead signal from executives and managers from various departments. Unclear quote approval hierarchies, inconsistent approval criteria, missed approval notifications, and so on can potentially cause delays in the quote generation process.
Ensuring accuracy in sales quotes is another major challenge faced during enterprise sales. For instance, incorrect pricing information, complex discount structures, human mistakes, and more can lead to pricing errors in sales quotes resulting in reduced profit margins or loss in revenue. If you are dealing with complex products or services that require thorough configuration, a small error or ignorance can result in quotations that do not meet customer requirements.
Maintaining compliance and managing the documents is another challenge that most enterprises face. For instance, storing quotations, invoices, and other documents for future reference can be an administrative burden on your entire team. Further, they need to ensure that these documents adhere to the industry standards, legal requirements, and internal policies. In addition to this, these documents need to be regularly updated in accordance with the latest pricing, terms, and conditions.
Managing the sales processes manually can be highly time-consuming. The overall efficiency of your sales team is certainly affected if they have to create, review, and approve quotes all by themselves. Repetitive tasks such as data entry and document formatting, among others, not only require a lot of effort but also delay the process of quote generation. Data silos are also another roadblock to maintaining process efficiency that can increase the risk of errors in document generation.
To address challenges like these, enterprise businesses should invest in CPQ software that can manage, track, and automate their sales processes with better accuracy and efficiency.
Forrester Research suggests businesses that leverage CPQ solutions have observed an 18% reduction in average sales cycle length. Here is how CPQ software helps enterprises overcome sales-related challenges and improve the efficiency of their sales processes.
Enterprise companies often have complicated sales processes as they offer a multitude of products and loads of services with lots of customization options. These complexities of sales can be managed by using specialized CPQ software that comes with specialized toolkits for streamlining the product configuration process. It will ensure that all the pricing structures, such as the valid options and combinations, are correctly configured. This not only reduces errors but also enables the sales team to generate accurate quotes instantly, even when dealing with complex product offerings.
Enterprises often have to deal with large volumes of quotes as they grow. CPQ systems are designed to scale as your business grows and are capable of managing larger numbers of quotations efficiently. Besides, the automation features that CPQ software offers greatly decrease the manual workloads. Thus, allowing sales teams to generate more quotes without compromising accuracy or speed.
CPQ software enables the sales team to look into a wider range of deals they can present before prospects. For instance, upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Due to its pricing configurations and product simplification capabilities, CPQ tools make it easier for enterprises to personalize solutions to meet specific customers’ needs. This opens up new avenues for deals that may otherwise go unexplored due to limitations in manual quoting processes.
Successful sales result from consistent team collaboration among various departments such as sales, finance, and product management. CPQ for enterprises is built to provide a unified platform for all stakeholders, irrespective of their roles, to access and contribute to the quoting process. This leads to improved team communication and, thus, ensures everyone has up-to-date product information at all times. Thus, leading to cohesive and coordinated sales.
CPQ software is utilized to streamline various business processes related to sales. This includes automating repetitive tasks like generating quotes, pricing calculations, and approvals which in turn saves time for more important strategic activities that the sales team can look into. As CPQ software integrates with other systems, it allows seamless data flow between different systems thereby eliminating redundancies as well as improving the overall process efficiency.
One of the primary benefits of CPQ software is its guided selling feature which enables sales representatives to overcome new or complex sales processes. The software is designed to provide a step-by-step guide for representatives, encouraging them to adhere to the best practices and policies developed by the company. This is particularly useful in reducing the learning curve when starting new salespeople or introducing new products and services into the market. It also establishes consistency in the sales process.
Sharing accurate and timely quotes is crucial for maintaining strong customer relationships. CPQ software ensures that quotes are generated quickly and accurately, enhancing the customer experience. Additionally, it helps you create personalized quotes that address specific customers’ needs with great detail. This helps enterprises display a high level of concern and loyalty toward customers, fostering a sense of trust among them.
Here are some of the key features to consider when investing in CPQ for enterprise services.
The CPQ solution must offer customizable approval workflows to simplify the quote approval process. It must further allow sales teams to track the status of these approvals in real-time. It must also send automated notifications to the concerned stakeholders to avoid unnecessary bottlenecks or delays in the approval process.
The CPQ solution should be able to update pricing structures in real-time. This is mandatory as it will ensure that the generated quotes are always accurate and reflect the latest pricing information. Further, it must be able to refer to and access past quotes and deals as and when required.
The CPQ solution ought to offer a centralized platform to manage all quotes, pricing structures, approvals, and other aspects related to the enterprise sales process. It must also allow you to define user permissions to offer greater control over who can view, create, approve, or update the quotes.
The CPQ tool must produce professional quotes by including pricing information, graphics, product descriptions, and other customizable elements.
The CPQ solution should allow for the automation of repetitive tasks and save the team's time for other crucial strategic sales activities.
The CPQ software should be able to seamlessly integrate with external systems like ERP, CRM, inventory management tools, and so on to ensure there is a proper flow of information and fewer data-related errors.
Here is a short guide on choosing the right CPQ solution for your enterprise business.
Cacheflow offers a dynamic CPQ for enterprise SaaS companies, that assists reps in delivering custom, approved and on-brand pricing in a matter of minutes.
See why companies are choosing Cacheflow to power their enterprise CPQ sales on a 30 minute product demo.
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