A tool that both speeds up and streamlines the sales process, increases companies’ competitiveness, provides more satisfied customers and increased sales. Does it really exist? Yes, very much so. It may sound too good to be true, but the fact is that more and more companies are using CPQ today and it has been shown that they are quickly gaining a competitive advantage in the market. Businesses in all sectors that want to increase their competitiveness should therefore put the CPQ in mind.
What does CPQ mean?
CPQ stands for Configure Price Quote and is an umbrella term for solutions that enable companies to quickly generate quotes when selling complex and configurable products. CPQ can also be used by companies that offer tools that allow customers to customize their product, known as configuration. The price and quotation will then vary depending on the options and adaptations made by the customer.
Using a CPQ tool has many advantages. It facilitates the entire sales process and saves companies a huge amount of time and resources. In addition, order errors, which can easily occur, are minimized and returns are reduced. Moreover, leaving much of the preparatory work to the customer increases engagement and the buying experience, which in turn leads to more satisfied customers and increased sales.
Before these tools were available, buying a house, for example, could be a very cumbersome process, especially for the seller. Once all the choices were made and the quote was ready, the customer might change his mind and want a different type of wood for the living room. The seller then had to change and update the quote manually. If the salesperson had a hundred customers who all wanted to make small, small changes all the time, the salesperson would be stuck all day doing work that a machine could easily do. So efficiency is one of the biggest reasons why a CPQ tool is worth its weight in gold for companies. In short, a CPQ tool improves and streamlines the entire buying process.
How can B2B companies benefit from the CPQ?
As for B2B companies, their customers usually want to make informed decisions and discuss with each other internally before making a purchase. For B2B companies, a CPQ tool is therefore worth its weight in gold, not least when it comes to moving knowledge closer to the buyer and automating the sales process.
In many cases, it may also involve reducing a bottleneck. A company may have a certain number of salespeople and strive to increase its sales targets. Instead of hiring more salespeople, much of the work can be transferred to the customer. So the customer does the preparatory work himself and the seller comes in at a later stage of the buying process.
So investing in a CPQ tool benefits both the company and its customers. Allowing customers to configure their product themselves also increases their understanding of the product and the chances of making the right purchase. This leads to fewer returns and more satisfied customers. In addition, the CPQ tool generates a quote immediately, so the customer does not have to wait for the price information and the salesperson can spend time on other things. Investing in a CPQ tool thus benefits businesses in several ways:
- Customers become more engaged in the buying process and have a much better understanding of what they are actually buying.
- Salespeople will have much more time to work on qualified sales instead of the time-consuming task of making small, small updates and price adjustments to quotes.
- Companies using CPQ systems create a competitive advantage in the market.
With a CPQ tool, companies can streamline sales by letting customers do more of the sales work themselves. This allows a salesperson to handle more customers, which in turn means more business. Because CPQ automates the quote flow, the company avoids the resource and time-consuming process of making advanced calculations, simplifying and speeding up the entire sales cycle. For a detailed look at how CPQ streamlines the sales process, read our article on streamlining sales with CPQ. It also reduces the risk of order errors and reduces returns.
It is also very much about creating a competitive advantage in the market. When a competitor has a CPQ solution, you have to get one yourself. There is a desire in the market, customers want to do more themselves and a CPQ solution helps with that. Today, you may also not meet your customers in the same way as before and then there is also a greater need for digital tools to manage sales.
Another big reason why companies should use CPQ tools is about customer satisfaction. If the company offers a CPQ tool where the customer can configure their own product, the customer will be more engaged and much closer to the purchase than if the customer goes to a salesperson who first tries to interpret what the customer wants and then produces a product that may not be optimal for the customer. Since dissatisfied customers “sound” more than satisfied customers, it is good from a marketing perspective to be able to eliminate dissatisfied customers. If you manage to do that, you are in a very good position and have a fantastic reputation.
If the customer can configure, click around and compare different choices until it is perfect, customer satisfaction increases enormously. This in turn can lead to the customer buying something more expensive and better than originally intended. The chances of the customer buying a more expensive product increase if the customer feels satisfied and the company can sell at a higher order value – win-win. Moreover, the company does not have to spend money on a salesperson to manage everything, the CPQ tool takes care of that.
Who can benefit from the CPQ?
CPQ has long been used by larger companies in the manufacturing industry but is now becoming more common in smaller companies. There is no industry that cannot benefit from CPQ.
If you walk out the door and look around, pretty much everything around you is configurable. Your house is configurable, your carport is configurable, your car, your bicycle. Even your garden is configurable. What is not configurable? Any static product such as a liter of milk or a piece of meat.
The extent to which you can benefit from a CPQ system depends on the type of product you sell rather than the industry in which you operate. There needs to be some kind of complexity. Complexity can either be that the product itself is complex or that the combination of several products forms a whole that is complex.
If you’re buying a bed, the bed itself may not be configurable, but the purchase still involves some choices such as choosing a headboard, mattress and legs. These are fairly simple configurations that you may not need a configurator for, but when it comes to a whole room and the position of the bed in the room, things suddenly become more complex. What does it look like when the bed is along this wall? How does it look if you put a table next to the bed and hang a lamp above it? It can be difficult to imagine the whole of a room when it comes to the placement of multiple objects.
Say you are going to buy a liquid chromatography system. Then there are a lot of different options depending on what you want to use the system for. Do you want a flow meter? A PH meter? It can quickly become complex.
It can also include other products such as doors, shelves and drawers, which are basically quite simple in themselves but together form a complex whole. If you are building a storage system with rails and shelves, it can be difficult to get an overview of what it will look like and how do you know that the right number of screws will be included in the order? A classic scenario could be standing in a DIY store, counting in your head and wondering if you’ve got everything. Once home, you discover that a third of the accessories are missing. This is where the CPQ system comes in, keeping track of all the boring details of the purchase.
Vehicles and transport
When it comes to vehicles, the customer may have to make different types of choices. Choosing rims, for example. There may be a complexity in that “you chose this package and therefore you cannot choose those specific rims, etc.”. This is where a CPQ system helps a lot.
Life sciences (or MedTech)
In life sciences, it may be more about what your needs are. If you have to produce a certain amount of something each year and have certain parameters to consider, how should the product be designed and what accessories are necessary? Then CPQ and configuration can solve the problem based on the specific needs.
Manufacturer
Manufacturing companies may need to make precise drawings based on specific dimensions in order to produce a certain product. This is where the configurator comes in and calculates everything so the seller doesn’t have to.
So there are slightly different approaches depending on the sector and the needs of each sector.
Advantages of Animech’s CPQ
There are a few reasons why Animech stands out in the market. Animech is at the absolute forefront globally when it comes to building configurators with real-time 3D support. Below are some of the major benefits of Animech’s solution:
- The visual support: A big advantage of Animech’s CPQ is that we are very good at visualization and visualizing the products being configured in a very nice way. The graphic quality is extremely high. This is one of our main strengths.
- User experience: Animech’s CPQ solution focuses very much on the user experience. The fact that Animech can do very, very complex things and make it look simple is also one of our great strengths. Since Animech takes care of the complexity, the user does not need any engineering skills and can easily configure their product from their smartphone in their living room.
- We are super flexible: Animech works from its own platform where we have our stable base and then make adaptations to each unique customer so that they get a unique CPQ system that is unlike any other. So it is not a standardized product with standardized limitations, but if you want to push the boundaries and do something that no one else has ever done before, it is entirely possible. Animech’s platform is so flexible that we can really push the boundaries and do new and amazing things.
Another big advantage of Animech’s solution is that it can be used both by salespeople at customer meetings and by customers themselves, and another advantage is that it is not dependent on any large server-side system. If a customer changes a parameter on a greenhouse, for example, it doesn’t have to be calculated and sent back via a server, it’s all done directly in the browser. We also have the possibility to package it to run either on the web or stand-alone. Some customers need both.
We are really passionate about what we do and we want to show the industry that visual configuration is the goal. Everyone who works at Animech is so convinced of this and that makes us want to fight to show that if you don’t choose this, you have chosen wrong. The dedication of Animech employees is worth its weight in gold to our customers.
Multi-currency support
With e-commerce, you can have a huge global impact because you put something online that becomes available to customers all over the world. Animech’s CPQ tool handles everything from languages to currencies and even recognizes IP numbers and thus where the visitor comes from. If the visitor is from the UK, the system displays pounds and if the visitor is from Germany, the prices are displayed in euros and the system generates a quote in German from a German retailer.
Integrate with existing systems
Something that makes a CPQ system attractive to invest in is that you can automate processes from quote to order, perhaps all the way to production. Unless you integrate the CPQ system with an ERP or CRM system, you will be stuck with manual processes. If you have a quote from the configurator that goes into the order system, the quote must be overwritten. It is simply a huge efficiency improvement to have that entire flow automated and digitized.
So what can we conclude from this?
CPQ systems can work wonders for many different types of businesses across all industries. The benefits are far too numerous not to invest in CPQ, don’t you agree?
