It’s time to streamline your business using a CPQ-tool.

You’ve decided where to start. You know what product you want to get ready for.

You have decided who will provide the product info. Your product experts are at the ready.

Now what happens?

Sell by asking the right questions

You need to decide on the right questions to sell your product.

Perhaps you’d planned to ask as many questions as you can, because this will provide maximum flexibility.

Perhaps you’d thought to ask about all the available product features — and start from there?

Or maybe you’d planned to use that requirements document developed by old-school sales reps back in the decade of the telefax?

Now, I know I’m being provocative. But here’s the thing; asking the right questions is difficult. Even for experienced sales reps and configuration experts.

And it’s not just about rational logic. We all know that online user behaviour can be quite irrational at times.

To make it even more challenging – even if we can come up with the questions that will provide us with as much information as possible, how do we know what questions NOT to ask?

In a recent CPQ-implementation, we found that more than 50% of the questions in the CPQ-interface were answered in less than 0,1% of cases.

Ouch!

They wanted answers, so they asked the questions they felt they needed. But what about their customer? Apparently they didn’t share the same dedication to provide those answers.

So, how can you avoid this and jump straight to an optimized interface?

Learn and adapt. Constantly.

A good CPQ-tool is – and should be – non-sequential. So why not let your customer decide what questions are important to them? This is one sure-fire way to increase response rates.

But the hard truth is that you most likely won’t reach 100% anyway.

What you can do is to learn-and-adapt – constantly iterate.

By monitoring your CPQ-tool, you will have a better understanding of which questions are important to your customers. The beauty of this approach is that you can gain insight into your customer’s needs.
But that’s something I’ll leave for another post, so stay tuned!