Configure Price Quote Solutions How to Smash Your Sales Quota

1. Configure Price Quote Solutions: How to Smash Your Sales Quota ======================================================================= If you’ve been in business for a while, you know selling is hard. Giving sales reps a target ensures they’re aiming for a tangible goal. However, the 2021 Mental Health in Sales Report reveals that unachievable sales targets frequently harm sales performance. Company goals are essential, but you should also ensure your sales team’s morale remains high. Instead of scaling back sales targets, you might consider a different approach where you eliminate the barriers that make achieving targets harder for the sales team. Various factors can hold sales reps back as they try to get past the finish line month after month. Sometimes it’s the rep’s fault. But usually, the blame lies with the employer and their failure to provide sufficient tools to help employees excel and achieve their potential. Here are examples of factors that stand in the way of your sales reps achieving their sales target: •Manual tasks like generating quotes •Lack of clarity about potential upsell opportunities •Pricing errors •Lack of tools that focus on customer-centric sales processes You can tackle these problems head-on with configure price quote solutions. Read on to find out how. What are CPQ Software Solutions? CPQ (short for configure, price, quote) is software that makes the sales process more efficient and insightful. It helps sales reps with three things: Configure: Sales reps that sell complex products spend a good portion of their time developing viable configurations for buyers. CPQ streamlines this process by allowing sales reps to show buyers a real- time 3D rendering of a design. This enables sales reps to help buyers identify a configuration that best matches their needs much faster. Price: Pricing is the next leg in the selling process after selecting a configuration, but no less tedious. Sales reps must ensure they deliver accurate prices or risk undercutting margins—rushing through the process leaves room for errors. On the other hand, buyers want speed. CPQ solutions help you price products faster with zero pricing errors guaranteed. Quote: Generating quotes is another drain on time. When a customer requests quotes for multiple configurations, sales reps have to spend a significant portion of their day working in Excel. Configurator solutions can help generate quotes on the go—no manual effort necessary. Collectively, these features can help your sales team achieve its potential. 4 Ways CPQ Solutions Help Achieve Sales Quota There are four ways CPQ influences sales productivity: •Faster sales cycles •Upsell recommendations

2. •No pricing errors •Improved customer experience Faster Sales Cycles Sales reps only spend 34% of their time selling. Almost two-thirds of their time is spent on other parts of the sales process, which includes non-value-adding activities like generating quotes. Configurator solutions can help sales reps earn a lot of that time back. With CPQ, sales reps can automate the process of determining a suitable configuration for the client, pricing it, and sending a quote. The time saved helps sales reps sell more in the same number of hours and achieve their sales quota consistently. Reps have more opportunities to spend time addressing buyers’ objections and analyzing wins and losses, allowing them to optimize their sales strategy for better future performance. Upsell Recommendations Reps need to upsell effectively to increase average deal size. This requires thinking on your feet when a customer is sitting right in front of you and memorizing configuration options, pricing, and critical engineering rules. All this while keeping in mind sales principles like the 25% rule (which says you should never upsell items priced more than 25% of the original purchase.) Today, roughly 1-30% of a company’s revenue comes from upsells, and we have software to thank for it. CPQ software solutions simplify upselling by making intelligent recommendations based on product choices, customer profiles, and order history. No Pricing Errors It’s a perennial sales problem: price products too low and–while you might make a sale–you’re not maximizing margins. On the other hand, price a product too high, and you risk losing the deal altogether. In industries where the price of products is high and the number of units sold is low, losing out on just one deal can be the difference between missing and meeting quota. Configure, price, quote solutions use a rules-based engine to calculate prices automatically. Crucially, these rules ensure every price quoted is error-free. But just as importantly, they leverage algorithms that intelligently estimate the maximum amount a customer is likely to pay on any given deal. With CPQ, sales reps don’t have to sift through documents and spreadsheets, seek approvals, and spend hours coming up with the best, most accurate prices; they simply have to click a button. This automation frees reps to spend more time strategizing their sales efforts and nurturing customer relationships. Improved Customer Experience The consumerization of industry means B2B buyers want fast, B2C-like experiences. They don’t want to wait hours to assess configurations and get a quote. And they expect short lead times and fast delivery.

3. CPQ can make a huge difference here, supercharging responsiveness and shrinking sales cycles from weeks to seconds, enhancing customer experiences. In addition to configure, price, quote, the best CPQ software automates a significant portion of the pre- production/engineering process. Once a product has been configured, the CPQ solution auto-generates CAD drawings, BOMs, CNC cut sheets, and other documentation required to kickstart production. Since the process is automated, there’s little room for cross-functional miscommunication and mistakes. Collectively, these factors put products in buyers’ hands faster than the competition. Over time, this customer-centricity helps build long-term relationships. Loyal customers come back to you for future purchases, helping sales reps achieve their quota again in the future. Final Thoughts: Achieve Sales Quota With a Configurator Solution Meeting sales quota can be tricky when sales reps are spinning multiple plates. Administrative load and manual processes reduce a rep’s productive time, leading to missed sales targets. This slows down company growth and takes its toll on sales team morale. If your sales team has been experiencing difficulty achieving their sales quota, why not try CPQ? Manufacturers that use Epicor CPQ, for example, achieve a 26% increase in reps that meet their quota (in addition to a 38% faster sales cycle.) Start automating the most time-consuming, mundane, error-prone sales tasks and eliminate the barriers preventing reps from surpassing expectations.