There are are many reasons why companies implement a CPQ-solution. The most common are usually the need for decreased quoting time and need for sales support while ensuring the quotes are still valid. Those are usually key factors in order to be more profitable, sell more in each deal and avoid costly order errors. This is also something you expect when you purchase a CPQ-system, and I feel quite confident that this is what we at Tacton deliver to our customers as well.
The interesting part though are those unexpected benefits you encounter when you implement a CPQ-solution. That is, those “Wow, that’s interesting!”-points you may experience but did not really bargain for!
For me, this is like when I bought my first smart phone with a camera. My main goal was to use the camera to take “normal” photos but I have ended up using it in 100 other ways as well: I photograph wine etiquettes to remember a great wine, I photograph my fridge to remember what (not) to buy in the grocery store, I use it as a mirror and I use it to look at what’s on that inaccessible top shelf in my wardrobe. I still use it mainly as a “normal” camera but the extended, and unexpected, benefits are amazing!
So, what will be the unexpected benefits you may experience when you invest in a CPQ-solution?
Below you will find a few examples of unexpected benefits our customers have experienced:
1.
We expected the time to create a quote to be faster but we did not really foresee how much easier that would make negotiations about price and value. For example, when the customer requested a discount or wanted to remove a product they did not want to pay for.
Before CPQ, it was a tedious and costly process to create a new quote, get back to the customer and continue the negotiation. We had to re-schedule new meetings all the time! With the CPQ-solution we could have that negotiation and re-creation of the quote in real-time, during the meeting with the customer!
The result was that if the customer requested a lower price, we could have a value-based discussion instead. The discussions went from offering a profit-cutting last-minute discount (to avoid another time consuming quote-process) to discussions like: “If you want to cut the price any further, we could remove product X from the quote that you may not need anyway”.
2.
Remarkable reduction in the range of standard products. Previously, each sales person often included parts of his or her favorite products into a deal, including rarely used products that had to be kept in the product range. This caused different customers to use slightly different solutions when there was not any real need for it. With the implementation of CPQ this was completely changed!
3.
The amount of quotes we could offer was drastically increased. The renewed ease of creating an offer made it possible for us to have multiple different quotes in a deal when the competitors only had one.
4.
We started seeing that our partner channels (and we have many!) started selecting new product features and new products to an extent that was beyond our expectations. Before CPQ, we had to constantly inform our partner channels about updates, new features and changes – which was a communication nightmare. For them to, in turn, actually discover these changes and implement them was a very slow process as well. After CPQ, the same partner channels would benefit AND use our new features automatically on the very first day! We did not even have to instruct them, it just came naturally.
5.
The roll-out of new products and phase-out of outdated products could be done faster and more reliable. There was no risk that an obsolete product would be used in quotes which was very important especially when a product was replaced with another when they did not use the same interface.
These are all examples of benefits our customers experienced that they did not expect. Since you are now aware of them, you may probably include them as ”expected” benefits. This is, however, not the end of it. Your unique business (or industry) will most likely have other unexpected benefits. If you are curious and want to get a glimpse of those unexpected benefits feel free to contact us
here
and we will share our knowledge.