Benefits of rolling CPQ into your CRM

A fully automated CPQ solution that is incorporated with your Dynamics CRM (ideally via single sign-on) will do the following:

• Allow salespeople to produce more clear ideas in a shorter amount of time.
• Ensure that all quotations presented to clients have the same look and feel.
• Enable management to track quotes in Dynamics in the same way as they can track calls.

Here are five main advantages to incorporating CPQ into the CRM: improved throughput, increased sales, and a quantifiable return on investment for all Dynamics apps.

Allow the best of the CRM skillsets that you already have.

When you incorporate a CPQ approach into the Dynamics solution, you’re not telling your workers to start from scratch; instead, you’re offering them a different method to use.

Automation of sales plans is not a new method but rather a step ahead in an existing system. That is when you combine CPQ with CRM, and you aren’t asking salespeople to learn how to drive a car — you’re asking them to learn how to sell. They already know how to go; what you’re doing helps them do so (and with fewer accidents to boot).

Salespeople marching in lockstep

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Automating ideas entails streamlining the way the plans are written and presented and ensuring that all of your salespeople are using the same tools and procedures.

An automated, streamlined sales pitch platform can help new employees get up to speed faster by more accurately calculating and monitoring each quote’s efficacy. High turnover is expected in sales, as anybody who works in the industry understands. Although Monday’s representative might not always be the same as Friday’s, an integrated, centralized proposal process will help consumers have a consistent experience every day of the week.

Dare to think of better marketing-sales coordination.

“Why aren’t you closing the leads we’re sending you?” says marketing.

“The leads you give us stink,” says sales.

Although CPQ won’t fully fix this problem, the simplicity it brings to your proposal process will help you remove a lot of the guesswork by following a prospect from the proposal to the client.

Connecting closed opportunities to their origins will also help make the everyday dialogue flow more smoothly:

“The leads you provided us from campaign X culminated in 20% more ideas and 10% more new business,” says sales.

“Wow!” exclaims marketing. We’ll up the ante on the initiative and go after them again!”

It’s all about (wait for it) SETTING THE TIME.

The clock starts ticking the moment a sales request is submitted. Perhaps the price is only valid for a month. Maybe the person who wants to sign can only do it for the next week. Maybe the end of the quarter is just ten days out, and a bonus is on the table.

There are several explanations for timeliness in the proposal process, but there is only one way to ensure that deadlines are met: CPQ. Missed chances will be a thing of the past for an advanced sales proposal system seamlessly incorporated into the CRM. You won’t miss a deadline or delay a move because the machine won’t let you.

The more you know

In an average month, how many ideas would a salesperson deliver? How long would it take to bring a plan into the hands of a prospective client? After a proposal has been submitted, how long does it take a rep to transfer a prospect from request to won/lost status? How long do you think it should take?

This and other questions can be answered using the reporting features of your CPQ system. And learning the answers to these questions will help you identify change places, not only in sales proposals but also in the business.

What if someone else in the community is sending a hundred proposals each month, but Fred is just submitting five? Likely, the concern isn’t with the nature of the leads but with the proposals’ quality.

Do you want to hear more about how Cleverativity will interact with your Dynamics system? And keep in touch with us.