The ultimate CPQ FAQ guide

What is CPQ?

CPQ stands for Configure, Price, Quote. It is a software solution that helps businesses of all sizes streamline their sales process by automating the configuration of customized products and services, determining accurate pricing, and generating quotes.

Why is CPQ important for businesses?

Efficiency: CPQ reduces the time it takes to create quotes, enabling sales teams to respond to customer inquiries quickly and accurately.

Accuracy: By automating configuration and pricing, CPQ minimizes errors, ensuring that quotes and pricing are consistent and compliant with business rules.

Profitability: CPQ helps businesses optimize pricing strategies, ensuring that quotes align with the company’s profitability goals.

Does CPQ integrate with other business systems?

CPQ solutions are designed to integrate with other business systems to streamline and enhance different processes across your business. Here are some common types of integrations that CPQ systems often have:

CRM (Customer Relationship Management): CPQ often integrates seamlessly with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to access customer data and streamline the sales process.

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning): Integration with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems ensures that product and pricing data is up-to-date and consistent across the business.

E-commerce Platforms: CPQ systems can integrate with e-commerce platforms to provide a seamless experience for customers who want to configure, price, and quote products online. This integration helps in maintaining consistency between online and offline sales channels.

Billing and Invoicing Systems: Integration with billing and invoicing systems ensures accurate invoicing based on the configured products and pricing. This helps in reducing errors and improving the speed of the billing process.

Analytics and Business Intelligence: Integrating with analytics and business information tools provides insights into CPQ performance, customer behavior, and sales trends. This integration allows for data-driven decision-making.

How does CPQ help sales teams?

CPQ reduces the time spent on manual configuration and pricing tasks, allowing sales teams to focus on building relationships and closing deals. CPQ solutions provide consistent and accurate quotes ensuring a frictionless customer buying experience. CPQ can also be used as part of a wider sales strategy to provide digital guided-selling solutions to external users, such as a dealer network.

Studies show that CPQ reduces sales cycles by 28% and companies with CPQ software see a 17% higher lead conversion rate.

Is CPQ scalable for small businesses?

CPQ solutions come in various sizes, and many are scalable to meet the needs of small businesses as well as bigger companies. The scalability of CPQ software allows businesses of any size in any industry to easily integrate CPQ into their operations.

My products are highly customizable, can CPQ cope with this?

CPQ solutions are designed to handle highly customized products and services and can be used by all industry sectors. CPQ is a great way to cost-effectively deliver configurable products and services, regardless of their complexity of customization. CPQ provides guided-selling solutions that provide user-friendly customer interfaces for highly customized products.

Which teams use CPQ?

The teams that commonly use CPQ solutions include:

Sales: Sales teams are the primary users of CPQ tools. They help sales representatives quickly and accurately configure products or services based on customer needs, determine pricing, and generate quotes. CPQ systems can also provide guidance on upselling or cross-selling opportunities.

Finance: The finance department may use CPQ tools to ensure that the pricing and quotes generated align with the organization’s financial goals and policies. CPQ systems can help in tracking and managing discounts, ensuring accurate invoicing, and supporting revenue recognition processes.

Product Management: Product managers can use CPQ to configure and manage product catalogs, ensuring that sales teams have accurate and up-to-date information about products, pricing, and configurations.

Engineering: In organizations with complex products or solutions, engineering teams can use CPQ to ensure that the configurations proposed by sales are technically feasible and align with manufacturing capabilities.

Customer Service: Customer service teams may use CPQ information to understand the details of a customer’s purchase and ensure that the post-sales support fits with the product or service configuration.

Legal and Compliance: Legal and compliance teams may use CPQ to ensure that quotes and contracts generated by the sales team comply with legal requirements and organizational policies.