In our customer-centric business space, deals are getting more and more complicated. With companies offering dozens of solutions in a countless number of combinations, it’s easy for your quoting process to allow certain components of a sale to fall through the cracks. There is a lot that can go wrong in your quote and pricing strategies, and these mistakes can add up to a lot of lost revenue for your business.

Here are three reasons you might be losing customers–and how to retain them.

1. Your sales team put incorrect products on a quote.

If your sales team is manually entering their pricing on the quotes of the sales they make, there is inevitably a high margin of error. Common mishaps include incorrect combinations of products put together in a quote or entirely incorrect products for the specific client’s needs. Nothing says “I don’t understand your needs” to customers like over/underselling them on products they don’t want or perhaps can’t even use.

A CPQ product enables your business to create relationships between products and accounts, opportunities, previous contracts, other products, and even custom factors, which are used to ensure your quotes will only contain accurate product combinations.

2. Your pricing is inaccurate.

For every business, pricing is in a constant state of fluctuation. Updating pricing and discounting is crucial to avoiding quoting issues. It’s important to make sure that your products aren’t priced too high to make your quote uncompetitive, but not low enough that your business loses money by winning the order. Your business might also want to automatically include discounts for high quantities or for strategic accounts. Not only is pricing and discounting through spreadsheets a major time drain on your sales team, it allows your business to send out quotes with the wrong price. This can cost your business money if the price is too low and customers if it’s too high or is inaccurate and revised later.

CPQ brings all your pricing into the automation space, giving you dynamic default pricing and enabling you to price products and quotes based on the account, product quantities, and other information.

3. Your output document process needs work.

A lot can fall through the cracks in your documentation process if it isn’t centralized and automated. Issues can include long customer wait times on quotes and customers not getting the marketing, legal, or financial information they need on their quotes. This in turn can have a severe impact on your overall revenue.

A CPQ solution provides your clients with unprecedented transparency on the exact obligations of the quote. It also lets you control the quotes your users send to potential clients, makes sure that all quotes discounted at a certain level are not sent out to potential customers without permission, and that there are no legal or financial issues with quotes sent out to potential customers.  Additionally, CPQ notifies your sales team that a contract is about to expire. All of this is accomplished in only a matter of minutes.

Most importantly, CPQ dramatically decreases time between a sales conversation and an official quote. Processes that used to take weeks can now take minutes. For instance, CPQ decreased the quoting time by 1000% for our client Mitsubishi Electric. Simplifying the buying process is the quickest way to a sell, and CPQ helps us and our clients win revenue.

If you find yourself losing customers and money due to operational oversight or inaccuracies in your pricing, quoting, and documentation, you may want to look into a CPQ solution. Please give us a call at 833-SIMPLUS or email [email protected] for more information.