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CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) – A Powerful Tool to Automate Your Sales Process

If your primary objective is to increase sales performance and support business growth, CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) delivers measurable outcomes that precisely improve your operations. Several businesses are achieving rapid growth using CRM solutions like CPQ tools for simplifying and streamlining complex sales processes. These tools automate the generation of quotes and invoices, manage subscriptions, support payment collection, report generation, and more. It delivers significant benefits to your business, regardless of its size or type, and offers seamless automation throughout the quote-to-price lifecycle.

In this blog, we will provide a helpful guide about CPQ, CPQ tools & benefits, Salesforce CPQ, and a complete guide to automating quotes & pricing with expert Salesforce CPQ implementation services in the UK.

All About CPQ – Configure, Price, Quote

The sales team’s performance has a direct impact on your business growth, and equipping them with a technology-driven solution like CPQ enables them to accomplish your sales and revenue goals efficiently.

CPQ means Configure, Price, Quote. CPQ is the most popularly used sales tool that helps companies to create customised sales quotes for orders seamlessly. 

CPQ

Configure – Select the most precise features, services, or products from given options.

Price – Apply perfect pricing based on predefined variables such as location, volume, rules, discounts, customisations, etc.

Quote – Create an error-free, professional proposal or quote for review or approval by the customer.

CPQ tools are most beneficial for sales teams, business networks, account managers, and other executives who need to manage custom deals, multi-step approvals, and high-pressure services.

About CPQ Tools

CPQ is considered a highly effective tool for businesses, which helps them automate the quote generation process as follows:

Product Configuration – Prevents the sales team from quoting inappropriate services or products. 

Price Automation – Ensures accurate pricing by considering special pricing, quantities, customisations, discounts, multiple revenue types, and more. 

Workflow Approval – Simplifies routing quotes to different managers based on legal or financial criteria. 

Generate Accurate Quote – Generates ready-to-approve digital quotes or professional documents for customers. 

Reports – Enable your sales team to track performance, quote-to-close rates, average discount, and other essential analyses. 

An advanced CPQ system allows companies to synchronise quotes into their existing Order or ERP systems.

In this guide, we focus on Salesforce CPQ, one of the successfully adopted CPQ solutions among UK Businesses.

Know More About Salesforce CPQ and How it Benefits Your Business

Salesforce CPQ is an effective sales tool that helps organisations create orders quickly, accurately, and efficiently. 

It automates sales processes based on a customised set of rules and ensures correct pricing by considering essential criteria. It can be customised for any business type or size.

Salesforce CPQ delivers value to organisations of all sizes, from small enterprises to large conglomerates.

• Simplifying and streamlining their complex sales processes
• Boost productivity and proficiency of sales teams
• Enhance Customer Experiences
• Reduce overall cost and time
• Support for multi-currency

Hiring Salesforce CPQ consultants in the UK ensures trouble-free implementation of this cloud-based and mobile-compatible solution, which optimises your sales processes and accelerates your revenue growth.

How Salesforce CPQ Helps Manufacturing Companies in the UK

Salesforce CPQ benefits manufacturing companies in the UK by streamlining their complex sales processes, such as

• Managing product price & quantity
• Use of a discount offer for customers
• Reduce manual efforts, improve business processes.
• Enhance standardisation of the product setup & quotation process.
• Automate quote-to-pricing process

It provides a shift to scale service hyperautomation applies across three pillars, such as customer automation, service team automation, and process automation. 

Custom automation includes an easy and fast product registration process, a guided claim submission process, and self-serve troubleshooting. 

Service team automation eases the agents to create accurate shipping estimates with real-time inventory data that gives an accurate assessment of available parts. Consolidated real-time order data helps resolve issues quickly. Automated pre-work estimates that boost the productivity of service technicians, reduce the requirements of multiple visits, and enhance customer satisfaction. 

Process automation streamlines complex processes, including successful cross-selling/upselling, auto-create warranty claims, and others. 

Thus, Salesforce CPQ enables manufacturers to overcome key challenges such as complex product configurations, slow sales cycles, and pricing issues. Integrating Salesforce CPQ with products like CRM analytics, Manufacturing Cloud, AgentForce, Field Service, Data Cloud, and others give manufacturers advanced capabilities. This supports accurate and quick decision-making, enhances overall operational efficiency, and forecasting. Thus, Salesforce CPQ implementation alongside other tools helps manufacturers navigate recent market challenges, gaining long-term success and business growth, and unlock opportunities for global expansion.

Common Salesforce CPQ Errors & How to Fix Them

Experienced Salesforce CPQ consultants help you successfully implement the sales process, prevent the most common Salesforce CPQ errors, and guide you in fixing them.

Error 1 – Inadequate understanding of your business needs at the initial stage 

Gathering precise business requirements from the sales teams, finance teams, product managers, and other professionals is essential. Avoiding this step can result in significant challenges during implementation. 

Fix 1 – Prepare a complete set of documents and validate requirements with all key members of the organisation involved in the process. This ensures that the project architecture precisely supports the implementation process.

Error 2 – Complex Product Configuration

Excessively complex product configurations can confuse end users and lead to inefficiencies and errors.

Fix 2 – Ensure a simple and user-friendly product configuration process. Conduct systematic testing of the configuration process to deliver a seamless user experience.

Error 3 – Incomplete or Faulty Data Clean-up

Data clean-up is vital before migrating data into Salesforce CPQ, and imperfect data can lead to errors, duplication, or inaccurate results in quotes, pricing, and product catalogues.

Fix 3 – Plan data clean-up accurately, including removing duplicate data, mapping fields, and performing validations to prevent issues and errors during the configuration process.

The other common errors include underestimating user experience (UX), which causes reduced adoption rates, increased training costs & errors in quotes, and others. Ignoring amendments & renewals, price change updates, and lack of testing, monitoring, planning, documentation & reporting, as well as limited flexibility & scalability, are some common errors that are essential to consider when implementing Salesforce CPQ in the UK.

7 Ways to Improve Your Salesforce Quoting Time

Salesforce CPQ is designed to overcome the challenges of traditional quoting and pricing systems by enabling faster turnover, improving accuracy, and automating the entire sales process. Find these seven effective ways to quickly automate quotes using Salesforce.

1. Use Lookup Queries and Condition Logic to streamline price rules, which minimises processing time.  This requires attention to process-level and technical optimisation.
2. Utilising dynamic templates for quotes reduces formatting time and automates the inclusion of information.
3. Advanced approval methods manage margins and multi-tier discounts dynamically, and the use of Declarative Conditions prevents excessive delays.
4. To improve usability and enable quick iterations, reduce dependencies on custom code by using Salesforce flows and declarative tools.
5. Adopt clean, high-quality data models by archiving inactive SKUs and unwanted quotes regularly. This improves cache utilisation and reduces load time in the QLE (Quote Line Editor).
6. Find excessive rule evaluations or slow-running queries using the Salesforce CPQ Performance Analyzer. Upgrade data models and remove blocks based on the insights.
7. Enhance your team’s quote turnaround time using Salesforce’s guided selling and product configuration tools. It helps them take full advantage of Salesforce CPQ’s automation features.

Why Hire a Salesforce CPQ Consultant in London

The key purpose of Salesforce CPQ is to enhance the efficiency of the sales team by saving their time on other activities, from quote to pricing. Hiring a certified Salesforce CPQ consultant in London from PinkSamurais, a leading Salesforce consulting company in the UK, ensures seamless Salesforce implementation, support, and consultation. Services include accurate configuration, error fixes, managed services, development, and billing and revenue setup solutions. This helps enterprises to automate complex sales processes, such as quoting, approval processes, pricing, billing, renewal, amendments, and more.

Contact our Certified Salesforce Expert Consultant in the UK for efficient sales automation.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)