For manufacturers of custom products, the complexities and inefficiencies in pricing and quoting can be an obstacle to growth. Manual pricing and quoting processes can slow down sales cycles, introduce errors, and make it difficult for manufacturers to scale their production.
Implementing a CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) solution to optimize pricing and quoting enables businesses to manage increased demand and drive growth, without compromising accuracy, efficiency, or customer satisfaction.
Key features of CPQ for pricing and quoting
CPQ solutions enable companies to configure complex products, determine accurate pricing, and generate quotes quickly and efficiently.
Configure
Easily customize products based on customers’ individual needs.
Price
Automate complex pricing rules for custom configurations
Quote
Generate quick and accurate quotes, improving the sales process and customer experience.
The challenges of pricing and quoting for custom products
Complex pricing models
Managing a range of different pricing structures can be difficult for manufacturers of custom products. Pricing can vary not only according to configuration options but also depending on location, volume, distributor, etc.
Risk of error with manual processes
Manual processes, by their nature, involve a higher risk of error. They can lead to miscalculations, delays, rework, and potential lost sales. All of this can have a negative impact on revenue and customer confidence.
Lengthy quote and sales cycles
Sales teams can lose their momentum and become demotivated when custom products take too long to configure and quoting is complicated and slow. Sales opportunities can be lost if prospects receive quotes from your competitors ahead of a quote from your business.
Scaling limitations
Traditional pricing and quoting processes for custom products can struggle to keep up as demand grows. Communication between sales, design, and production teams can become complicated, resulting in bottlenecks.
How CPQ optimizes pricing and quoting for custom production
Automated pricing calculations
CPQ automates pricing for custom products, dynamically updating prices as different product options are configured. Even for the most experienced salespeople, calculating pricing as options are configured is complex and requires constant reference to pricing spreadsheets and recalculation. With automated pricing, the risk of errors is reduced and sales teams can easily handle complex pricing models.
Quicker quote generation
CPQ reduces the time it takes to prepare custom quotes by standardizing processes and automatically creating accurate quote documents. Providing accurate and comprehensive quotes to customers quickly can help with their approval processes and improve the likelihood of them placing an order.
Flexible, customizable pricing structures
CPQ easily manages different pricing models, such as tiered pricing, regional differences, distributor discounts, and customer-specific up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. This enables manufacturers to run multiple pricing strategies with the confidence that pricing rules are applied correctly.
Improved accuracy and consistency in quoting
CPQ uses configuration choices to automatically create quotes and sales documents, reducing the requirement for manual intervention and avoiding errors. CPQ solutions ensure that quotes are accurate, regardless of the volume of sales inquiries, making it easy for sales teams to handle increased demand. Centralized rules and data provide the control to meet increased sales volumes via a distributor or reseller network.
CPQ features drive pricing and quoting efficiency
Dynamic product configuration
Sales teams use guided selling tools to configure products at scale in real time, with pricing automatically updating to match the selected configuration. Onboarding for sales teams is also quicker with less training required. Additionally, custom product quotes generated via distributor and reseller networks are accurate and consistent.
Rules-based pricing models
Rules-based pricing functionality automatically applies the correct pricing, relevant discounts, or surcharges, no matter how complex the configuration. This enables manufacturers to easily change pricing strategies in response to factors such as materials availability, volume orders, or sales team incentives.
Real-time quoting
Quotes are automatically generated based on customers’ unique configurations, without the need for any manual input. This streamlined process frees up design engineers to focus on new product development and enables sales teams to provide higher volumes of accurate quotes.
Approval workflows
Built-in approval workflows streamline the approval process without impacting sales. Automated workflows reduce bottlenecks and speed up approvals by notifying users when tasks are assigned to them. This improves task completion rates and reduces quote and sales cycle times.
Integration with other company systems
Equipping sales with data-driven account planning, negotiation, relationship-building, and networking capabilities can result in 4-5x higher growth. An integrated CPQ solution gives sales teams a complete set of tools to accurately configure and sell custom product configurations. With access to up-to-date data product pricing, custom options, discounts, and up-sell/cross-sell opportunities, quote and sales cycle times are reduced and sales performance increases.
Smarter Quoting, Selling, and Manufacturing with DriveWorks CPQ for Manufacturing
DriveWorks CPQ for Manufacturing (CPQM) is a digital solution that enables manufacturers to manage complex product configurations, pricing strategies, and quoting processes. CPQM enables businesses to build and manage their own custom configure, price, and quote solution that automatically generates documents and data for sales and manufacturing.
Dealers, distributors, and internal sales teams configure the ideal solution every time with DriveWorks’ intelligent rules-based guided selling and validation, eliminating errors and expensive, time-consuming design changes. Real-time pricing updates ensure accurate quotes are generated.
DriveWorks integrates seamlessly with other company systems to reduce bottlenecks, cut costs, optimize processes, and ensure accuracy. Improving communication between departments and keeping everyone up to date and in the loop is key.
Introduction to creating a CPQ solution using DriveWorks
In this webinar on Tuesday 26th November, our product experts will share their knowledge of creating a CPQ solution using DriveWorks.
Learn how to build a CPQ solution with DriveWorks to stay ahead of your competition, reduce costs, and win more business.
Respond to customer enquiries faster, improve customer experience with guided selling and 3D visualization, and automatically generate all of the documents and data to sell and manufacture custom products.
Explore DriveWorks configurator examples
Explore how you could optimize your pricing and quoting processes with DriveWorks product configurator examples.
The DriveWorks live product configurator examples demonstrate how versatile and customizable DriveWorks is. They also highlight DriveWorks adaptability in real-world applications so that you can see what’s possible across a range of different scenarios and industries.
These examples are more than just demonstrations; they showcase DriveWorks flexibility and customization options. They are designed for you to see what you can achieve with DriveWorks in your own business.