2 minute read
Process with Configure-Price-Quotation
HOW TO IMPROVE SALES TO MANUFACTURING PROCESS WITH CONFIGURE-PRICE-QUOTATION
Product customisation is generating more demand for fabrication work. B2B customers are increasingly expecting customisation – material options, delivery schedule, iterations, endless what-ifs. All this impacts your projected price.
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This means higher product variations for manufacturers. It also means the need for faster and more accurate quotations, sometimes multiple in a day. Combine that with an expanding product range with multiple complex pricing models, and you have a recipe for confusion and inefficiency among manufacturing and sales teams.
When manufacturers offer hundreds, thousands, even millions, of product options, things can get complicated. This is where Configure-Price-Quote, abbreviated as CPQ, can be a game changer.
CPQ software helps companies quickly and accurately generate quotes for orders. It reduces inefficiencies in the sales to manufacturing process and gets every employee—from the top floor to the shop floor—working on the same page. The configuration process is guided by your product rules set up in the backend rules engine. These rules codify the knowledge and expertise of your manufacturing and operations teams, making them instantly available to your salespeople in real-time. When product and manufacturing knowledge is built in the system, sales can be confident with generating quotes, knowing what is sold is optimised and free from error.
Once configured, CPQ software calculates prices based on advanced pricing rules. Considerations are given automatically for volume and bundle pricing, promotional and tiered discounts. Additionally, with CPQ software, quotes can be instantly generated, formatted according to unique brand guidelines, and sent to customers with little, if any, additional modifications.
Another significant advancement in this field is visual CPQ. With visual CPQ, customers, salespeople, and engineers can see lifelike visualisations of custom products as they are being configured. Bypassing technical jargon or indecipherable hand-drawn sketches, visual CPQ reduces miscommunications and misunderstandings due to translation. Remember, errors in the sales to manufacturing handoff process can cost you time and money.
Instead of filling out forms and making sketches, salespeople can simply point and click to change dimensions, colors, materials, parts, and more, watching as their product evolves on screen.
CPQ automates all the formatting and number-crunching, saving vast amounts of precious selling time while eliminating the errors inherent in manual processes. It is impossible for salespeople to configure technically or financially nonviable products. They are guided through a series of calibrated questions and prompts (via upsells and cross-sells) that ensure every configuration is perfectly optimised.
Integrating CPQ solution with the production system allows the synchronisation of complex data that influences supply, demand, and fulfillment. This information can be gathered from the supply chain, eCommerce store, plant floor, and warehouse to get sales and manufacturing working together. Apart from saving time and improving accuracies, the other big benefits of CPQ include scalability, and enhancing the overall customer buying experience.
Sales and manufacturing are more complex than ever before. B2B customers want product customisation and a frictionless path to purchase. With CPQ software, you can provide both.
This article was supplied as part of a paid advertising package.
