Introduction
Have you heard of a CPQ(Configure Price Quote) software before? Still, today, companies rely heavily on pricing their products on Excel and creating quotes, orders, and order specifications on Word. After which they send it to the product designers and construction department to get it approved. If there is any mistake, designers or constructors should inform salesperson and resolve the problem with or without involving customer. The resolving process sometimes takes weeks to get the agreement from all the needed parties party. However, with proper use of the CPQ software, you can avoid most of the problems. First of all, the system won’t allow making incorrect selections and therefore, prevents many mistakes in quotes by the configured rules. Additionally, you get real-time pricing for all selected items and the product as a whole. Just find out what is essential for you and learn how to choose the right CPQ software.
Selecting parameters
All you need to do is to decide what goals you want to reach with this tool. For this purpose, we provide an updated list of different aspects to take into consideration in the article “How to select the best CPQ for your business,” written by Imanuel for Predictive Analytics Today.
Here is the final version of the list:
– Fast implementation
CPQ software has different implementation times based on how well the software was created as well as the complexity of your product. The creation of your product on the software may take from a few weeks to several months or even years. You cannot affect much to the complexity of your product, yet you can select the CPQ software that provides you with a smooth implementation.
– Simple management of product configuration
If you have changes on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, you need to have a flexible system. A system where you can configure things by yourself. Some of the CPQ software companies don’t provide full control over the system. Hence, changes in your product configuration require the work from the CPQ provider. It slows down the process as you are bound to their resources to deliver those changes. Moreover, it drives up the cost as you need to pay for that work too, so be careful.
– Cloud deployment of software
For some companies, cloud deployment of software might be a crucial feature, because then, they can use CPQ everywhere on any device just with the internet connection.
– Possibility to use the software on the desktop, tablet, and mobile devices
If your salespeople make their sales outside the office, then it can be beneficial to have access to the software through any device such as phone, tablet, or laptop.
– Creation of dynamic documents
This functionality may provide you with a simple solution for reducing manual paperwork. A functional document generator can save up a lot of time. For example, after each sale, you can send all the needed documents to different parties rather in minutes than hours.
Once you have made a list of your requirements, you can start researching CPQ software products. We hope that this helped you to choose the right CPQ software for your business. If you want to check what Steve the Clerk CPQ software provides, go to our website.