Impacts of CPQ Software on Profits

Your profit margin is the heartbeat of your business. And right now, it’s under attack from all sides–inefficiencies, price inconsistencies, and sluggish sales response times are chipping away at your hard-earned gains. Every quoting error, every misstep in your pricing eats into your bottom line–and you need a solution.

Enter configure price quote (CPQ) software. This isn’t just another SaaS tool; it’s your ticket to profit protection and growth. It arms you against pricing pitfalls and gives you the power to fight back against demanding customers.

In this article, we’ll lift the lid off configure price quote software. What is it? How does it work? And how can it fortify your profit margins? We’ll focus on efficiency, accuracy, strategic pricing, and cross-selling, all of which gain a significant boost.

By the end of this article, you’ll understand why the global market for configure price quote software is skyrocketing. It’s forecast to grow from $2.2 Billion in 2022 to $7.3 Billion by 2030. So, let’s get into it!

How to Grow Margins With CPQ Solutions

Are your pricing methods stuck in the past?

In the age of soaring global competition, advanced price-matching technologies, and widespread eCommerce, over-reliance on traditional pricing methods threatens your profit margins.

Consider cost-plus pricing, a straightforward method. You calculate your costs, add a profit margin, and get your price. But this method doesn’t hold up in today’s fast-paced, highly competitive market. It fails to account for shifting market dynamics and fluctuating customer demand, making your prices too rigid and unresponsive.

Epicor CPQ Brochure

The way that companies quote, sell, design and manufacture products has fundamentally changed. Epicor CPQ is different too, and this brochure distinguishes it from other CPQ solutions.

Check it out

Nowadays, customers can compare prices instantly online. They’re not just calling a few sales reps but browsing a global marketplace teeming with agile competitors ready to undercut you. Your prices must be flexible and adaptable to these market demands.

Moreover, there’s the issue of price-matching technologies. It’s not only your customers comparing prices but your competitors too. They’re using advanced software to monitor your prices and adjust their own in real-time (something you can do with Epicor CPQ.)

These factors put unnecessary pressure on businesses that stick with traditional pricing methods, causing shrinking profit margins, lost customers, and missed growth opportunities. It’s clear that–to stay competitive–these pricing strategy needs a significant upgrade.

Are You Overspending on Sales?

Pursuing growth, many companies are overspending on their sales process with minimal gain. This is especially true for businesses selling complex configurable products, where traditional sales methods often demand significant time and effort and require the involvement of hard-to-hire reps with deep industry knowledge.

Think about the manual steps: Sales reps spend hours, even days, designing products, calculating prices, and drafting quotes. Each stage introduces the potential for errors, leading to rework, back and forth, frustrated engineers, dissatisfied customers, and lost sales.

How CPQ Systems Can Help

CPQ software optimizes sales by automating configuration, pricing, and quoting. This frees the sales team to prioritize customer relationships and closing deals while reducing engineering inefficiencies. As a result, labor costs per sale decrease, profit margins improve, and quotes are fast, accurate, and tailored to market needs.

Here’s a rundown of CPQ’s core functionalities and capabilities:

Product Configuration

If you’re selling customizable products, CPQ ensures everything fits together correctly. Your quotes reflect exactly what your customer needs every single time, eliminating misquoted and incompatible components.

Automated Dynamic Pricing

When it comes to maximizing margins, the most crucial element of CPQ software is its dynamic pricing control. It makes pricing adaptable, flexible, and responsive to the market, empowering businesses to calibrate pricing strategies by harnessing various data points.

These data points span from customer-specific factors, such as historical order patterns, volume-based discounts, or specially negotiated deals, to larger, market-driven dynamics, like fluctuating demand or shifts within the competitive landscape.

With CPQ, pricing becomes more than just assigning a number to your product or service—it becomes a strategy. Every price is a carefully calculated response to market conditions, maximizing profitability for each sale.

Automated Quoting

In the digital age, customers expect swift responses, and competitors are always ready to capitalize on your delays. But the grueling task of quote generation leaves sales teams stuck manually piecing together spreadsheets, which is time-consuming and fraught with human error.

With CPQ, the game changes dramatically. Automated quoting mechanisms churn out accurate quotes at lightning speed. Your sales team can respond to more customers quickly and with fewer mistakes. It’s like swapping out a hand-cranked generator for a high-powered engine.

It’s important to note that automated quoting isn’t just about sending out a generic quote faster; it’s about creating customized, targeted proposals in bulk. It enables your sales team to respond to customers promptly without compromising personalization. The result? A surge in successful deals.

A Visual CPQ Process Maximizes Margin Uplift

The best CPQ solutions allow users to configure products visually. Instead of relying on text, they use 3D images. This has a number of benefits for sales reps and customers, especially those wanting to self-serve online. Read on to find out why.

Salespeople

Visual product configuration makes it faster and easier for sales reps to configure complex products, regardless of their level of product knowledge. Providing a clear, intuitive visual interface removes the need for in-depth product understanding or specialized training. Sales reps can see the product and its options in real-time, enabling them to configure products quickly and accurately.

Customers

For customers, the benefits of visual product configuration are even more significant. They can see exactly what they’re getting, configure products to their exact specifications, and understand how different options affect the price. This clarity and transparency enhance the customer experience, increasing satisfaction and conversion rates.

eCommerce (Self Serve)

Embedding a visual product configurator in your website helps you stand out in crowded online marketplaces and enables self-serve experiences. It provides greater transparency into the product and its options, allowing customers to make informed decisions and increasing their confidence to place orders.

CPQ Automates Cross-Selling and Upselling

As we all know, there’s no easier sale than to an existing customer. And yet so many businesses squander the chance to make more out of each customer relationship. This is where upselling (selling a higher-priced product) and cross-selling (selling an additional product) come into play. It’s also where CPQ software shines.

Let’s imagine your customer is purchasing a modular building. In this case, CPQ can automatically suggest upgrading to triple-glazing over double-glazing (upselling) or adding solar panels (cross-selling). This isn’t just about increasing deal size—it’s about enhancing the customer’s value while adding to your profits.

CPQ transforms upselling and cross-selling into data-driven strategies. Using customer data, it crafts relevant suggestions and provides a clear script for salespeople. This way, sales strategies are no longer guesswork but rooted in solid customer understanding.

Conclusion

Configure price quote software is a powerful, dynamic tool that catalyzes your business profitability. It promises a long-term impact on profit margins by boosting efficiency, enhancing accuracy, and promoting strategic pricing decisions. Furthermore, it elevates the art of upselling and cross-selling, increasing your average order value and profit margins.

CPQ’s contribution to improved customer satisfaction is also crucial. By providing accurate quotes, quick responses, and pertinent product suggestions, CPQ curates an enhanced buying experience, cultivating a loyal customer base that powers your sales and elevates profit margins over time.