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Busting CPQ Myths

In a competitive business environment, the winning proposal is not necessarily the best one. As the pace of business continues to increase, being first to respond to customer needs has taken on greater importance and is often the deciding factor.

There are legitimate reasons to justify why organizations don’t need a Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solution – the following elements are not among them.

Here are the top five misconceptions about CPQ, and why you need to disregard them.

1. My sales team will never adopt it

Myth

Adoption is the most important thing to consider when implementing a new sales solution. If your sales team won’t use it, there’s no chance you’ll gain any benefit from it.

There are many reasons salespeople might not adopt a new solution:

  • They’re tired of new tools being thrown at them.
  • They believe that these tools are designed to help management first and foremost.
  • Their sales tech stack is already overwhelming and disjointed as is. 

Truth

Fear of adoption failure is all too real. However, if you implement the right CPQ solution for your organization, your sales team will not only adopt the new approach but become its advocates. Avoid adoption failure with an agile CPQ solution that offers a vast depth of easy-to-use configuration capabilities to address any type of quoting or pre-quote activities. This reduces the amount of time your salespeople spend creating quotes and actually leads to less administrative work, in the long run, so your sales team can focus on what they do best – selling.

Implemented right, a good CPQ solution can boost sales performance and empower sales teams to better manage the overall customer experience. It can also remove friction from the selling process, enhance productivity, and even create new revenue streams.

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2. It will just add more work for my sales team

Myth

Who can blame salespeople for thinking that a new sales tool like a CPQ will add more work? And who can blame a sales manager – knowing what they know about their team – for assuming that notion? 

Truth

There’s a very good chance your sales team is already working hard to configure solutions and generate professional-looking sales quotes. They have some sort of tool for configuring the right products, (or they’re doing it manually) and another tool, like Word, to write up their proposals. After they’ve put everything together, they’ll still need to key everything into the CRM. 

With a good CPQ, approval workflows standardize and streamline sales processes, eliminate silos between stakeholders, all while enforcing accountability, timeliness, and improve internal communication. All this ensures that sales proposals receive the necessary commercial, legal, financial, and technical reviews in the shortest possible time, before being sent to customers.

This dramatically reduces, and even eliminates, order entry errors, which can be detrimental to any deal. And knowing how to optimize approval workflow efficiencies is critical to closing deals.

3. We don’t need a CPQ – our quotes and configurations are too simple

Myth

There are many solutions that make it easy for salespeople to create quotes – including Microsoft Word and Excel. Why waste money on a quoting solution when our organization doesn’t require that level of operational sophistication? 

Truth

You may not need the “C” (Configure) in CPQ and maybe you don’t need the “P” (Price) either, but what about the Q? Does putting out a consistent, professional Quote not hold value for your organization? When sales professionals create quotes, who’s reviewing them? Are they fully aware of pricing policies? Do they adhere to your corporate branding guidelines? Do they project the professionalism your organization is trying to convey? Have they received the necessary approvals before being sent to the customers – technical and/or commercial? 

Even if configuring your products is simple, you still need to price them correctly. You could have a proposal priced and generated automatically, or you can spend some time in Word, manually constructing your quote. Really, it’s an easy choice. Not only does automation reduce time costs, it also ensures that your team is sending out consistent, error-free and professional-looking proposals in a timely manner.

4. Our solutions are too complex for a CPQ

Myth

Many organizations have very complex pricing and configuration models. They may involve tiered pricing, multiple level discounting, numerous pricing factors, as well as intricate product and quantity dependencies that require intense calculation. It’s easy to understand why someone would think a CPQ could not model these configurations. 

Truth

Yes, there are a lot of complex configurations out there. Still, many organizations believe their configurations are more complex than they really are. Just because a solution requires many of the intricacies we just mentioned does not outright make them too complex to automate. Regardless of how complex your configurations are, there’s a reason why CPQ starts with a “C.” Configuring is what the technology is designed to do – whether it’s simple or complex. 

Ultimately, the answer to the question of whether CPQ is right for you, or if a specific CPQ vendor is the right one for you, comes down to the specific solution’s ability to model your products and pricing. There are some CPQ solutions, like DealHub, that can provide you with a proof of concept in just a day or two, so you can eliminate the uncertainties and risks and see clearly whether a CPQ solution would work for you. Don’t discount CPQ until you’ve had a look for yourself.

5. CPQ is great, but it’s too resource-intensive for us to implement and manage

Myth

CPQs have traditionally required a lot of resources to implement and manage. In fact, it was not uncommon – especially for very large organizations – to have a devoted team of CPQ administrators. There are still many of these legacy CPQ solutions that require a team to maintain.

Truth

A lot has changed since the early days of CPQ technology. Today, CPQ integration has become a B2B must with many of them providing very advanced functionality right out of the box. These solutions are cloud-based enterprise apps that you need only log into and configure (no hard coding required) according to your business logic, products, and pricing. Perhaps even more convenient – such agile CPQs can integrate with and operate as a module within your existing CRM platform in just minutes, eliminating the need for any technical know-how to set up and manage. 

CPQ solutions, like DealHub, have been designed for easy maintenance by Sales Operations rather than the techies from IT. They utilize simplified user interfaces with basic rule structures and tables that enable business users to instantly make changes. In short, the days of dedicated CPQ teams are numbered. 

Now you know

Built for business and used by business people, an agile CPQ solution is more than just a sales tool. It enables complex adaptive processes by bringing agility, speed, transparency, and collaboration to deal management so sales leaders can make effective decisions and powerful impact.

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