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...
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 4
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