Did you ever lose a deal because you couldn’t turn a quote around quickly enough? I personally find nothing more frustrating than getting to the point in a sale where you’re asked for a quote but the turnaround time causes you to lose the deal or motivates the prospect to look at other competitors.
The simple answer is usually that we have too many processes, someone doesn’t have the right level of focus, or that we are analyzing the opportunity to death. That can be the case but often we just have complex solutions. If it was easy everyone would be in our space.
But even if we conclude that quotes take a lot of time and effort it does limit our ability to grow sales. If a salesperson is spending time creating a quote then they are not selling. And more often than not, we find that salespeople also spend a lot of time expediting quotes to get a deal closed.
CPQ (configure, price, quote) tools can go a long way toward speeding up quote generation. They include rules to ensure that configurations are complete and accurate, to apply the right discounting (based on product, customer, volume, program, etc.) and generate professional proposals. By adding this level of automation for your sales team you not only get better turn around but you also free up estimators so that they can focus on non-standard or highly customized solutions. Additionally, there is less of a burden on management, since less approvals are required. CPQ enforces the rules that may have previously required review.
But is it really worth the effort to add CPQ? In all likelihood you have business processes in place that support the sales team and even though it has issues it works. As a starting point I would suggest some back of the napkin estimates.
Number of sales reps
x number of quotes/year
x (amount of time saved from configuring the solution + generating the quote + generating the proposal + obtaining approvals)
/ 2,000 hours in a man year
This gives you the number of virtual reps you gain through efficiency. Multiply that by the expected sales from a rep and you have your upside sales achievement from CPQ. If you had 50 reps that generated 20 quotes per month that saved 15 minutes per quote you would essentially add back 1.5 salespeople to your team. Small savings can have big impacts.
There are other benefits from CPQ like reductions in mistakes, consistency in proposal generation, additional visibility and better responsiveness to prospects. Some of these benefits are harder to quantify but still have significant benefit.
One way to improve the overall quoting process is to use tools like CPQ to automate the known processes and free up the sellers to do what they do best, work with the prospects and customers on new solutions.
