Drive Customer Engagement with Automated Quoting
Sales professionals spend a lot of time on administrative tasks. Not only does this keep them from selling, but it also has negative knock-on effects on the customer experience. Every moment a prospect needs to wait for a response causes immense damage to the possibility of closing a deal. Eliminating inefficient sales processes is one of the most important things leadership can do to achieve higher revenue.
Research shows that the first company to deliver a quote wins the deal 50% of the time. Giving your salespeople a CPQ empowers them to respond as quickly as possible, preventing the competition from swooping in to steal their deal.
One of the ways CPQ does this is by streamlining quote generation workflows. Instead of manually going through price/product lists, salespeople can have the work of matching everything up for them automatically.
By eliminating almost all of the manual work that’s needed to create a quote, your entire team can generate more complex quotes in a much shorter time frame. That increases customer engagement by minimizing the number of times prospects need to wait for you to respond.
100% Accurate Quotes
Generating quotes quickly is not enough. CPQs also improve customer experience and engagement by ensuring quote accuracy.
DealHub’s Agile CPQ is the best example. Our next-generation guided selling playbooks allow leadership to input their strategy into a rules-based engine. Sales professionals then answer a series of questions about any deal they are working on. DealHub CPQ analyzes its answers using the pre-defined strategy in order to generate a quote.
Because quotes combine current price/product lists, leadership strategy, and deal characteristics, they are 100% accurate. There is no risk that salespeople will work off of old information, or mismatch/forget the correct product/accessory pairings.
By providing customers with correct quotes upfront, salespeople both minimize the need for corrections later on in the sales process and also meet expectations after the deal is closed.
Streamline Discounting Approval Workflows in CPQ
Delivering a finalized quote is not the end of the deal. Prospects often want to negotiate with the salesperson on certain points–especially price. Discounting is a common tactic used by sales professionals at this point in the sales cycle, and they will often try to lure leads in with the promise of reductions off the original price.
In practice, this creates two challenges. First, management and leadership must worry about ‘rogue’ discounting, where salespeople try to close a deal by offering discounts that undercut expected margins. Second, management tries to prevent this by requiring manual discounting approvals–something that can significantly slow down negotiations.
DealHub’s Agile CPQ eliminates these problems with automated approval workflows that allow management to set maximum approval thresholds. Any discount a salesperson offers that is below the threshold will be automatically approved; discounts above the threshold are routed for manual review.
This empowers salespeople to keep up the momentum with the prospects and decreases the amount of routine administrative approvals management must handle. At the same time, leadership has peace of mind knowing that margins are protected and the possibility of a rogue sales person is minimized.
Keep Sales Professionals Focused on Customer Experience and Engagement
Quicker turnaround times, automated approvals workflow, and accurate quoting add up to another huge benefit: Keeping your salespeople focused on the customer experience and engagement they provide leads and prospects.
The customer experience is about the holistic way a sales person treats leads. There are huge benefits to freeing sales professionals from the mundane, repetitive tasks that they hate.
First, CPQ frees them up to focus on the core of their function, which is to sell. The time they spend creating quotes gets freed up to be spent communicating more frequently with their leads. Second, reducing the administrative load decreases burnout. Salespeople like to be out in the field engaging with other human beings. When they are stuck on time consuming administrative tasks, their outlook and enthusiasm can suffer. That leaks into the experience they provide when they do interact with leads.
DealHub’s Agile CPQ eliminates or streamlines the things salespeople hate to do, and empowers them to remain focused on selling. They can devote more time to prospects and leads, be energized by what they do, and remain focused on providing the best customer experience and engagement possible.
Subscription Management
CPQ improves customer experience and management beyond single contracts. Subscription management creates a number of problems for sales teams, including the scope of services, payment terms, and long/co-term discounting.
DealHub’s advanced guided selling playbooks, automate workflows, and protects margins, giving sales leaders everything they need to manage subscriptions properly. DealHub’s Agile CPQ ensures that long-term deals are standardized for similar pricing and buyer personas, to create product bundles that maximize the revenue opportunity, while controlling discounting so that everything lines up with a strategy.
Customer experience and engagement are easy to provide when you can manage even the most complex deal quickly, efficiently, and accurately.
Ease of Adoption
No technology solution implemented by management will achieve actual revenue impact if adoption fails. In most sales teams, adoption is a huge problem. It’s not unheard of for sales professionals to have to work across ten or more technologies to do their job. Against that backdrop, any CPQ placed into that already full sales tech stack must earn its place.
Salespeople don’t like adopting technology when it is difficult to use. DealHub CPQ’s next-generation technology creates an excellent user experience that sales professionals love. Our GUI has been completely reimagined from the traditional CPQ model in order to graph the way salespeople like to sell. Instead of forcing people to work for the technology, DealHub CPQ puts technology to work for the people that use it.
The results speak for themselves, with leaders reporting back to us that 100% adoption was achieved within just a few weeks of onboarding.
DealHub has innovated the next generation of CPQ, empowering organizations to connect their tech and their teams, enabling them to accelerate revenue, drive efficiency, provide control, and transform customer experience.
