How CPQ Sales Solves the 4 Biggest Challenges Facing VP's of Sales

As if life as a VP of Sales isn’t hard enough, the onset of COVID-19 has changed the game. Existing challenges have become even more formidable and harder to solve.

Fortunately, CPQ sales goes a long way towards tackling the challenges facing sales leaders of today. The challenges we address in this article are as follows:

A poorly defined sales process

1. A slow sales cycle
2. A lack of essential skills among sales reps
3. A lack of virtual selling capabilities
4. What is CPQ Sales?

CPQ sales are sales made through CPQ software. What is CPQ software? It’s software designed to help companies configure, price, and quote products – often highly customizable ones. CPQ software automates many of the most time-sapping sales processes, eliminating errors, and accelerating sales cycles.

Let’s split CPQ up into its three key stages – configuration, pricing, and quoting – and dig a bit deeper:

Stage #1: Configuration

Configuring complex products with hundreds, if not thousands, of potential options is incredibly challenging for sales reps. With CPQ, sales reps configure products using a “product configurator” that guides them through the process (guided selling), ensuring that every configuration is optimized for engineering, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

Product configurators are either text-based or visual. Text-based configurators ask a series of questions to filter out unsuitable options until the rep is left with the ideal product selection. With visual product configurators, sales reps interact with images as well as text.

CPQ product and pricing rules (little chunks of code) built into the configurator’s back-end govern the configuration process. They control how products can be configured, making nonviable configurations impossible and eradicating errors.

Visual product configurators come in all shapes and sizes. They range from more basic 2D interfaces that tend to be used by sales reps internally, right up to 3D interfaces with VR and AR capabilities. These advanced, 3D configurators provide a full-on, lifelike buying experience, and they can be embedded into an external, customer-facing website for end-customers to use independently.

Stage #2: Pricing

As CPQ users experiment with different product options, dynamic pricing rules working away in the background calculate prices for products in real-time, making it easier for buyers to stay within budgetary constraints, giving them greater control.

Stage #3: Quoting

Once the user has configured their product, the CPQ system automatically generates a quote which it sends out to the customer. More robust CPQ solutions like KBMax will even auto-generate CAD outputs, product renderings, and other technical documents. These documents might be appended to the quote or be passed to engineering for approval.

Using CPQ Sales Configuration to solve 4 Key Challenges Facing VP’s of Sales

Challenge #1: The sales process is poorly defined

It doesn't matter how talented your sales team is; you can't operate efficiently without a formalized sales process. It's harder to ramp new hires, it's harder to forecast revenue, it's harder to gauge performance, and it's harder to provide a consistent customer experience if, say, a core member of the sales team leaves.

The more complicated the product and the more customizable options, the more critical it becomes to standardize the sales process. It’s unrealistic to expect sales reps (especially new hires) to put together faultlessly optimized products when there are thousands of possible permutations to choose from. The result – customers receive products ill-suited to their needs, and you risk losing a customer to a competitor.

Guided selling walks sales reps through a series of carefully defined questions that narrow down vast product catalogs into perfectly optimized customer-specific selections. New hires can be brought up to speed in days, becoming trusted advisors to customers.

Challenge #2: The sales cycle is too slow

CPQ sales take minutes, not days – all configuration, pricing, and quoting processes can be carried out in a few clicks. By standardizing the most error-prone, time-consuming sales processes, you can get your sales teams’ heads out of Excel so they can focus on the revenue-generating activities they’re actually good at.

Product and pricing rules ensure that every product that a sales rep (or end-customer, depending on your setup) configures is optimized for engineering efficiency and validated up-front. Sales-engineering hand-offs become effortless – only viable configurations make it downstream. CAD and design automation means less back-and-forth, fewer delays, and an end to engineering bottlenecks.

Challenge #3: Sales reps lack the necessary technical knowledge

Training sales reps across every product option is a huge challenge in many industries. Product complexity and the onboarding process's length are tightly correlated – there's just not enough time to get new hires up to speed.

CPQ sales makes ramping new hires straightforward and turns struggling sellers into top performers. Here’s how:

Guided selling leads sales reps, via upsells and cross-sells, to the best product for each customer at the best margin for you.

Product and pricing rules make configuration mistakes impossible – reps don’t have to worry about suitability or compatibility (i.e., whether the product they configure will actually work in the real world.)

Visual product configuration gives sales reps a crystal-clear understanding of products that they can easily convey to buyers.

Embedding a visual product configurator into an eCommerce website lets end-customers browse and buy without any sales rep input. Fewer sales reps = less training needed.

Challenge #4: Lack of virtual capabilities

Covid has called a halt to business travel and face-to-face sales meetings, and research suggests that remote work and virtual selling will dominate in the new normal. Companies, therefore, will need to find new and engaging ways to sell their products through virtual means. But more than half the respondents to Gartner's CSO Priorities Pulse Survey feel unable to deliver similar value through virtual sales as they can through in-person interactions.

3D product configurators bring products to life. Buyers can configure products by clicking and moving options around their screen. Add VR and AR into the mix and you can provide a buying experience that’s even more compelling than viewing a product in the flesh and infinitely more captivating than configuring a product from generic pictures and lengthy descriptions.

Choosing the Right CPQ Sales Solution: What is Salesforce CPQ?

The ubiquitous Salesforce provides one of the most popular CPQ solutions on the market. It’s a fairly straightforward tool. Salesforce CPQ asks sales reps questions about each prospect and, based on the answers, picks out the optimal configuration at the right price before generating a quote as a PDF.

Why Salesforce CPQ?

The main reason for choosing Salesforce CPQ over a visual CPQ solution like KBMax (explored below) is if your company is already heavily invested in Salesforce CRM – your sales, marketing, commerce, and service teams like it, and they know how to use it.

Why not Salesforce CPQ?

The main downside of Salesforce CPQ is that it's weak on the visual side. If you want to sell complex products, leverage CAD automation, and provide a fully immersive 3D buying experience, then you're going to have to a) implement an alternative solution like KBMax or b) integrate a solution like KBMax into your existing Salesforce platform. As a registered Salesforce partner, KBMax users can manage every lead in Sales Cloud.