Reducing Friction in the B2B Sales Process with CPQ
Sales teams are a critical revenue driver for B2B organizations—they match customers with the right offerings and then engage them with smart deals, and they’re the outward facing touch-point for engagement, enrollment and overall experience. To align sales organizations as closely as possible with customer expectations, it’s important that sales leaders not only identify customer needs, but also work to solve inefficient sales cycle friction points.
The three most common inefficiencies of the B2B sales cycle include:
Inaccurate mapping of customer needs to the right offering
Customers are more comfortable when they feel like they’re being heard and understood, and that a problem in their life will be fixed with the purchase—maybe a scarcity, or an aspiration will be resolved. But when something as small as a mis-targeted email can make or break a decision point in the sales cycle, it’s no wonder that disconnected data and systems can have devastating effects on your plans for top line growth.
Error-prone complex product configuration
Companies are selling products with increasing numbers of custom features, and ever more sophisticated options. Enterprises that are still using spreadsheets to configure complex products have learned the hard way how error-prone and time-consuming a manual sales cycle can be, and find themselves unable to scale or adapt to modern monetization strategies like the subscription economy. Additionally, complex products have complex pricing structures, which in turn introduce significant problems to a manual approval process. With so much effort spent on error resolution, the average time spent on a manual sales cycle is higher, and a common cause of low sales team morale.
Tedious approval processes and delayed quote generation
Pricing and discounting are often dynamic and thus require a strict approval process—but this must be done as quickly as possible. In the age of fast fulfillment, a good experience at this stage can dramatically improve an organization’s chances of securing further work from the customer.
CPQ to the rescue
CPQ technology, when implemented correctly, addresses all of these concerns with automation and rules-driven sales cycles, resulting in the improvement of critical sales KPIs. Here’s how it works:
Lead Conversion Rate
Intelligent, rules-based configuration means that questions asked during discovery are designed to quickly guide the customer to the correct products. Our experience shows that B2B businesses achieve significant improvements in lead conversion rates when they focus on resolving issues that impede customer experience.
Average Sales Cycle Time
The rules-driven pricing offered by CPQ solutions like Salesforce CPQ & Billing, Oracle CPQ, and other billing platforms gives companies the flexibility to offer prorated and subscription-based pricing. The automated aspect of this approach has tremendous impact on quote error reduction and sales team productivity—we’ve seen organizations that adopted automated quote generation and approvals experience 70% reductions in quote errors, leading to dramatic reductions in time and effort spent on sales cycles.
Total Company Revenue
According to recent research, thanks to automation, guided selling, and shortened sales cycles that result from best-in-class deployments, CPQ implementations result in 5x greater total company revenue growth year-over-year, and 82% higher total revenue over a 5-year span.
But this level of growth can only be achieved by process-centric and customer-aligned sales organizations who, when empowered with the right tools and partners, have the potential for significant impact on your bottom line.
Conclusion
Alignmnent between your sales organization and customer expectations is critical for modern marketplace success. CPQ technology, with automation and rules-driven sales processes, improves critical sales KPIs and is an important tool in the fight against sales process friction.
Keste implements scalable, modern monetization strategies and technologies that support complex B2B selling models. We believe that in the era of go digital or go home, a great idea isn’t enough — your sales process must be as frictionless as possible. From the front to the middle to the back office, our methodical, 360 degree approach to improving your top and bottom lines brings fast returns.
