June 22, 2021June 22, 2021
Cloud-based Configure Price-to-Quote (CPQ) solutions are a powerful tool to help organizations improve their competitive edge and profitability by helping them share highly configured sales quotes for their customers. This solution provides the sales teams with real-time information while accounting for the product, pricing, and business rules that are often too complex to be centralized.
As product portfolios and services become more expansive and complex, a CPQ solution employs a combination of process automation, guided selling, and quote management and helps organizations generate price quotes rapidly. Using a CPQ solution, sales teams can easily address the challenges at each stage of the sales cycle.
While a CPQ solution delivers these benefits, the growing competitiveness of the market demands organizations to supercharge their sales cycles. This demands that pricing data and pricing logic flow seamlessly to drive relevant, contextual, and better customer experiences.
Integrating CPQ with the billing process helps organizations navigate the complexities of today’s business environment. It emerges as an enabler of competitiveness by infusing the sales cycle with more efficiency and timely information.
Here is a look at some of the benefits that come from integrating CPQ with billing systems:
1. Eliminate silos to improve pricing knowledge
A CPQ solution integrated with a comprehensive and robust billing platform helps an organization gain the flexibility to create various products and pricing plans. Using this capability, organizations enable unique configurations that are tailored to meet the demands of the local market.
Integrating CPQ with billing eliminates the silos that prevent smooth information exchange and build chaos into the calculation by data duplication. It also helps organizations simplify the quoting and billing processes by allowing pricing data and logic to flow seamlessly from the CRM platform to the billing platform. This provides sales teams with the visibility and control over the data that they need to design the right revenue models.
2. Improve customer experience
The power of price personalization is a significant influencer of customer experience and customer advocacy. Organizations need to develop the capability to offer unique price bundling, personalized product offers, and set limited period discounts to attract and retain potential and existing customers.
Rising customer demands are compelling organizations to increase their product portfolios. Today, most organizations have to manage complex product portfolios with varying charge types. Customers not only want price personalization, but they want the charge types to be personalized as well.
Given that personalization is a driver of competitiveness, customer retention, and repeat business, organizations have to identify ways of correctly assigning the right charge types to these ever-growing product portfolios. s Sales teams also need the power to accurately create price variations on a product in a different currency and assign relevant tax codes to service the local market competitively.
Whether it is varying, metered, one-time or any other charge type, integrating CPQ with billing helps organizations not only drive price personalization but also accurate billing personalization. This translates into better customer experiences, happier customers, and more customer advocates.
3. Simplify contract management for information accuracy
Integrating CPQ with billing facilitates streamlined and easy contract management. With this feature, organizations and sales teams get transparent insights and greater clarity into contacts.
Valuable information such as contract term, price changes, renewal policy, contract rules, notification period available, etc. can be viewed appropriately. This information can then be leveraged to create and manage contracts with greater accuracy. This integration also facilitates easy contract amendments and ensures contract and information accuracy at all times.
4. Accelerate the quotes approval process
Integrating a customizable CPQ solution with a comprehensive billing platform can immensely enhance the quote process. With this, organizations get the capacity to develop customized quote templates with their company logo and preferred format. Along with helping organizations deliver individualized quotes from their product catalog directly to the prospects within minutes, it can also significantly drive-up brand value and recall.
A simplified order enablement process eliminates all offline flows needed to get approvals for quotes. The quote process can be further accelerated and enhanced using digital signatures. Organizations can also configure and streamline custom business process workflows to automate the quote and order approval process using CPQ integration.
In Conclusion
Today’s competitive business environment demands that organizations deliver optimized and engaging experiences every step of the way. To achieve this, they need to integrate systems and processes and eliminate silos. They need to deliver elevated customer experiences using a 360-degree view of the customer. Since pricing and billing are two functions that have a big influence on customer experience, retention, and advocacy, it makes sense to develop the capabilities to completely transform the lead-to-revenue generation experience and maximize revenue, reduce costs, and plug the holes that lead to revenue leakage.
