How configure-price-quote software can help you grow your business
Advance your CPQ
selling process
Step up to product-focused
CPQ
Innovative configure-price-quote (CPQ) systems
address the challenges of customization demand in
industries including equipment, machinery, high-tech,
medical devices, specialty vehicles, boats, doors,
windows, and more. CPQ software helps discrete
manufacturers and distributors to:
At its core, a sales configuration software system
ensures that your sales reps correctly specify all of
your customer’s product needs. It determines the
price for this customized product and prepares a
customer quote. A sales configuration system may
generate proposals and commit orders to be sent
directly to an ERP system, CRM system, or
e-commerce system. Industry analysts have referred
to this core software as a configure-price-quote
application, or CPQ.
¦
Increase sales
¦
Reduce costs
¦
Differentiate their brands
Leading manufacturers, like Infor CPQ customer
Great Plains Manufacturing, have been able to
handle a 5x increase in sales volumes, with no
additional resources. The Kansas-based manufacturer
of farm and landscaping equipment has also reduced
its quote to order time by 50% since implementing the
Infor solution.1
CMYK Color Palette
As CPQ became more widely adopted, it outgrew the
technology expanded to the complex product space,
helping manufacturers tackle their unique needs by:
Ruby
CMYK: 10, 100, 100, 2
Light: 10, 100, 10
Dark: 10, 100, 10
¦
Extending the quoting experience into their dealer
and distributor network with a sales portal
¦
Manufacturing the customized products by
producing bills of materials and instructions
CMYK: 25, 18, 12, 55
dynamically and sending them to the ERP system
Strategic actions like these increase the accuracy of
your orders and help drive organizational efficiency.
¦
Customer Experience Suite
Ruby
Graphite
Creating 2D and 3D product models to allow sales
reps, customers, and the shop floor to see the
customized product
Graphite
Light: 25, 18, 12
Dark: 25, 18, 12,
Coral
Coral
CMYK: 0, 65, 100, 0
Light: 0, 65, 100
Dark: 0, 65, 100
Amber
Amber
CMYK: 0, 38, 100, 0
Light: 0, 38, 100
Dark: 0, 65, 100
Citrine
Citrine
CMYK: 2, 10, 100, 0
Light: 2, 10, 100
Dark: 0, 38, 100
Jade
Jade
CMYK: 42, 0, 100, 0
Light: 42, 0, 100
Dark: 60, 0, 95,
Emerald
Emerald
CMYK: 60, 0, 95, 0
Light: 60, 0, 95,
Dark: 65, 0, 100
3
In its early days, CPQ was a sales tool and did not
offer much help to manufacturers of complex
products. Hundreds of thousands of potential bills of
materials (BOMs) and routings were set up in advance
in the ERP system. When the CPQ software captured
an order with a unique combination of specifications,
the system would search for the BOM that exactly
matched the quote so manufacturing could begin. It
required a tremendous amount of manual effort to set
up the BOMs and to process a simple engineering
innovation across thousands of these pre-setup
structures. To solve this, Infor CPQ dynamically
creates bills of materials and manufacturing
instructions, as quotes are sent into the ERP system.
This one capability has created the potential for
greater speed and more accurate manufacturing.
According to Gartner: “CPQ supports active customer
engagement by helping sales, sales operations,
channels, pricing and finance teams create accurate,
timely, relevant and personalized solutions for
customers. CPQ helps sales organizations to achieve
efficiency by reducing response time to customers,
reducing quoting errors thereby avoiding rework,
maintaining consistency across the sales cycle and
actively engaging with customers. CPQ on mobile
helps sales to work with customers to provide a
solution to customer requirements in real time.”2
The upshot: configure-price-quote software helps
discrete manufacturers and distributors increase their
sales, reduce costs, and differentiate their brands.
Increase your sales
Increasing sales is all about bigger, better, and faster.
Bigger orders and quote-to-order rates. Better win
rates, better manufacturing, and better customer
satisfaction. Faster quote times, faster product
introductions, faster time to close sales.
Customer Experience Suite
Consider the differences:
Manufacturer without a CPQ software system:
¦
Sales reps can take days or weeks to gather
everything they need to create a quote for a
customer, extensively interacting with engineers
and product specialists.
¦
With a new quote in hand, engineers can spend
several more days manually creating 2D drawings,
3D product models, and comprehensive proposals
to the specification.
¦
Next, it’s time for the quality review process. Even
though it’s important to do, a lengthy quality review
process can often extend an already-long sales
cycle or result in an expensive process to re-work
orders because errors snuck in through the
quoting process.
Manufacturer with a CPQ system in place:
¦
Sales reps are guided through the quoting process
and the information and technical specifications
they need are presented to them as they need it.
¦
Reps and dealers have simultaneous access to
product and price changes, as they occur.
¦
As the quote is created, 2D drawing, 3D product
models, and comprehensive proposals are created
automatically.
CPQ software increases sales through a combination
of strategies. It gets quotes to customers faster, and
presents the quotes in a more compelling and
professional manner. An improved quoting process
make it obvious how your customer’s needs are being
addressed and inspires confidence that the products
will be manufactured accurately.
Aberdeen Group found that organizations with a CPQ
system in place out-perform other companies.3
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