Configure Price Quote CPQ To Retain Highest-Paying Customers

What’s the most effective strategy for keeping your highest-spending clients around? Prove to your clients that they are worthy of the best treatment.

Sure, you can train sales reps to provide an excellent customer experience through efficient communication and personalized responses.

The difficulty? 44% of millennials would prefer to speak with your sales representative. That’s a challenging obstacle to go over.

You must streamline your systems and procedures, offer self-serve options, and train your sales staff to improve the customer experience. This is when a CPQ can be useful.

This article explains what CPQ is, how it impacts your customer’s experience, and how it helps you retain your highest-paying customers.

CPQ: What is it? 

The process of configuring complex items and creating a price and a quote is automated and sped up using CPQ, or configure, price, quote software.

77% of B2B customers said that their transactions were difficult or complicated, according to a Gartner survey. Simplifying and speeding up a B2B buyer’s journey improves customer experience by a broad margin, consequently driving up retention rates.

CPQ solutions have a lot of benefits, such as making internal processes more efficient, speeding up the sales cycle, and, most importantly, improving the customer experience.

Features of CPQ that help keep your best customers

Put yourself in the shoes of your customer and try to buy something: 

• You and a sales rep work together to set up a product. 
• Then, you wait for the sales rep to talk to the engineering team and give you a price and quote. 
• When the quote finally comes back, it’s too expensive. 
• So you make some changes and send the rep back to engineering to be checked. 
• Engineering says that the new design doesn’t meet safety standards because of its size. 
• So you talk to the sales rep again and make changes to the design. 
• Then they have to wait weeks to get a final quote, which may or may not be good enough for the boss.

Sounds like a hard thing to do. It’s true.

CPQ can reduce or even eliminate the role of sales reps in the buying process, along with all the back and forth that goes along with it. It can make the process more suitable to your target customer’s preference and speed up their buying journey.

What happened? Improved customer experience and better retention rates. Below, we discuss some of the CPQ features that help give customers great experiences.

E-commerce Integration

E-commerce is a great way for B2B buyers, especially millennials who like to interact with sales reps as little as possible, to buy products. 

Self-service can be tricky when it comes to offering complex configurations, but it can also be a way to get rid of sales reps. 

The best CPQ solutions work well with your eCommerce website, whether you use a cloud solution like Shopify or an on-prem solution like Magento. 

Once integrated, your buyers can use the CPQ’s visual configurator to look at different product configurations and design their own using a drag-and-drop interface without talking to a sales rep.

This lets buyers get all the information they need without having to talk to your sales team and deal with the hassle that comes with it. Since 33% of all buyers want to buy without having to deal with the seller, an eCommerce integration is a great value for both your buyers and your business. 

Integrating CPQ with your eCommerce website not only makes the customer experience better, but also makes it easier for your website and internal systems to share data. 

For example, once a customer decides on a configuration, the CPQ sends the information to the engineering team for approval. Then, it automatically makes CAD drawings, CNC cut sheets and other production documents that are needed to start making things.

3D Visual Configurator

Personalizing the buying experience is important if you want your customers to come back to you the next time they need to buy something you sell. 

Personalization is a little harder for companies that can change products differently. Buyers don’t want to spend much time with sales reps. But sales reps can’t offer unique configurations that closely fit a buyer’s needs if they don’t spend enough time learning about their pain points. 

With a CPQ, buyers and sales reps can use a visual configurator that works in 3D, AR, or VR and gives buyers possible configurations that meet their needs. Even if you’ve never made that configuration before, the buyer can look at it to ensure they’re happy with it before making a purchase decision (hence less purchase anxiety). 

The visual configurator works best on your website because it lets customers help themselves. But your sales reps can also use the configurator to create configurations, prices, and quotes on the spot when assisting clients in person.

Processes with no mistakes 

Many of your internal and client-facing processes are likely to go wrong. These mistakes can cause you to lose a lot of money in sales. 

More importantly, mistakes can hurt your reputation as a trustworthy seller and make it harder for you to keep customers. 

A CPQ can help eliminate mistakes. 

For example, let’s say a customer wants a quote for three complicated ways to set up a product. Your sales rep gets all the information, talks to engineering, looks at your current pricing strategy, adds a margin, and then gives you a quote. 

But the sales rep made a mistake when pricing one of the parts in Excel, which is understandable given the number of factors and people involved. 

Your long-time customer notices the mistake and asks for a change. You still might make the sale. Or the client may back out of the whole deal. Either way, if they lose faith in your sales rep, they tend to lose faith in your entire company and the accuracy of how your products are made. 

CPQ ensures this doesn’t happen with its no-code rules engine that automatically calculates prices and makes quotes without help from a person. 

CPQ does more than just make sure that your prices are correct. It also automates your internal processes and creates a digital thread between your customer and the shop floor. This shortens the length of the sales cycle and the lead time. 

Since CPQ solutions automatically create manufacturing documentation and send data to internal applications like ERP and CRM, the final product has little room for error.

Final Thoughts: How to Keep Your Best Customers 

Top-notch customer service is the best way to keep your best-paying customers. But pricing and manufacturing mistakes, slow responses, and not doing enough to help customers are common problems that make it hard for manufacturers to keep customers. 

A CPQ solution helps you eliminate these roadblocks to give buyers the kind of sales journey they want. Your customers will like the robust technology you’ve implemented to make buying easy and let them serve themselves. This will make them think of you first when they go shopping again. 

CPQ also helps make your processes more efficient and your business more profitable, so you’ll see a quick return on your investment (ROI) when you buy a CPQ solution. When a CPQ solution is used, the conversion rate goes up by 40%, and the deal size goes up by 105%.