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A Fast and Simple Way of Generating Proposals and Contracts Using Salesforce CPQ

By Darren Starr
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If your team isn’t using Salesforce CPQ (configure price quote) to generate quotes and contracts, you’re missing out on a serious productivity booster. It helps you close deals FAST.

Ready to close more deals and kick your sales cycle into high gear? Here are some tips from StarrData to get the most out of Salesforce CPQ.

BUILD QUOTE TEMPLATES

Your team’s time-to-quote could be faster, right? Think about all the time your salespeople spend creating each customer quote. In many industries, creating quotes gobbles up 25 percent of the total workday. That time could be spent selling instead.

Seize the power of Salesforce CPQ’s ability to create a wide variety of quote templates. The templates don’t have to sound canned or repetitive. Create lots of them. Give salespeople options for first-time customers, loyalty renewals, specialty products, and more.

The templates are all stored in the central brain of Salesforce CPQ, so your staff can access them anywhere out in the field. No need to go back to the office to generate a quote.

UTILIZE GUIDED SELLING

Embrace a shift in thinking toward guided selling. Traditionally, each salesperson creates customer quotes using their own individual process. This leads to inconsistencies and errors further down the line.

Salesforce CPQ provides a guided selling process that collects information in an organized and consistent way. When you configure your CPQ setup, you can create questions that prompt reps to enter complete, correct information needed to fulfill orders.

Reps are guided to provide customer information like billing terms, delivery deadlines, and special requests. This is combined with archived information from the Salesforce database, like previous order preferences, to ensure each client is receiving the right pricing and packages.

Getting sales staff resistance to guided selling? Remind your skeptics of this fact: There’s a reason Amazon.com is the world’s biggest retailer. They invented online cart checkout and one-click ordering. That’s what Salesforce CPQ does for your team. It provides the power to process orders quickly and accurately, every time.

BREEZE THROUGH PROPOSAL REVIEW

Here’s a simple feature in Salesforce CPQ that eliminates headaches for sales managers across the world: price quote review. As a best practice, we recommend that your team review each customer quote before it reaches the client.

The good news? The software itself catches many errors. Reviewing the proposal will significantly simpler than it would be without Salesforce CPQ. While it’s smart to scan it before passing it along, the software will ensure that any mistakes— glaring or miniscule— are cleared up before you’re embarrassed in front of a client.

Price quote review is crucial for training new staff members and ensuring incorrect quotes never reach clients. It’s also valuable for pinpointing who needs additional training on the CPQ process.

And like the rest of Salesforce CPQ, it happens fast. Proposals pop up for manager review and can be approved and sent out with just a few clicks.

Salesforce CPQ makes it easier for your reps – and your company – to consistently reach the “last mile” of selling, where proposals hit the cold, hard reality of contracts. Now negotiations can quickly become contracts in a smooth, hassle-free process.

FEED THE SPEED

Emphasize the importance of speed to your salespeople. Sometimes the client simply goes with whoever provides a quote first. Be that company. Here’s how.

Create time-based workflow rules that create benchmarks for speed to closing deals. If your employees fall behind, the system triggers reminders. As a manager, you can see who consistently has slow time-to-close and use it as an opportunity for coaching.

You can also set up rules for certain customer types that should close deals more quickly, like long-time clients. These customers may be valuable, but probably don’t need as much face time or hand-holding. Closing them more quickly frees up time for new business.

COLLECT IMMEDIATELY

Salesforce CPQ incorporates payment collection as a seamless part of the process using Automated Payment Processing. Immediately after the generation of an invoice, payment can be collected and allocated to the proper place.

This fast accounts receivable (AR) turnaround significantly shortens your sales cycle. Customers can pay quickly and salespeople can focus on closing new deals rather than handling nagging billing details on previous deals.

ENABLE ADVANCED AR

Make sure your Advanced AR settings are enabled in Salesforce. This small setting makes a big difference in managing billing features. When it’s disabled, you won’t be able to handle partial payments, credits, and other features that keep receivables flowing.

Advanced AR enables Salesforce features like payment terms, purchase orders, refunds, credit and debit notes, late fees, re-allocations, collections, and write-offs.

RENEW AND UPSELL

Many companies miss opportunities to reconnect with existing customers purely because their CPQ process focuses on single deals. This limits your long-term customer lifetime value (CLV).

Salesforce CPQ overcomes this issue: It manages complex customer lifecycles to ensure that current deals don’t serve as roadblocks to new deals and renewals. Extend your CLV by setting up your CPQ process to support ongoing renewals and upsells.

Here’s how this works in real life. Your salesman, Alex, closes a $10,000 deal with client Barb. Your company begins to fulfill the terms and invoices Barb at $10,000. In the meantime, Alex follows up with Barb and upsells a $5,000 add-on to the original deal.

In this situation, your company doesn’t need to stop the process and rewrite the contract. Salesforce CPQ can handle the add-on as a seamless part of the transaction. The change is made to her account instantly and Barb is invoiced at $15,000.

PRODUCTIVITY: MAXIMIZED

As you can see, Salesforce CPQ allows your company to generate rapid-fire contracts and proposals. A swift process sets you up for productive customer relationships: repeat buys, easy upsells, fast collections, and increased long-term value.

Ready to reshape your proposals and contracts with Salesforce CPQ? Contact StarrData, an innovator in Salesforce implementation and optimization.

Posted in Common Salesforce Challenges, Salesforce CPQ

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