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As the needs of the SMB market grow, most IT Partners and MSPs are coming up with new and emerging technologies to serve their clients. As MSPs continue to grow and scale with complex product lines, more often than ever, they lose revenue because of cumbersome and manual sales processes. 

Luckily, this is where CPQ software comes into play. 

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What is CPQ? CPQ or a configure, price, quote software is a tool that enables sales teams to quickly and accurately produce price quotes for complex and configurable products. 

Let’s look at some statistics

• CPQ software can increase quote productivity by 33% states a report by the Aberdeen Group.
• Using CPQ solution increases the average deal size from 211k to 432k, according to a Cincom report.
  

These statistics show how valuable CPQ software can be to increase both sales productivity and velocity. 

Most MSPs or IT Partners have product bundles that require different configurations, pricing, and quoting needs. CPQ software helps you streamline all these three into one automated system by helping you create highly specialized and customized quotes for your products, tailored to your customers. This leads to an efficient, productive, and successful sales cycle. Also frees up time for your sales reps to focus on what matters the most - closing deals, building relations, and delivering value.

Why do IT Partners need CPQ?

MSP sales are rarely quick or easy. So any tool that frees up time for sales to talk to customers is an added advantage. Ask yourself these questions, if you want to start out with CPQ/quoting software or are struggling with your existing quote sales process:

• Does your business include a lot of complex products with even more complicated pricing models?
• Are your sales reps losing revenue by sending out incorrect configurations and pricing?
• Are you over-discounting products and losing out on revenue?
• Are you losing productive hours which could be spent strengthening relationships with your prospects?
• Are you still using spreadsheets and word documents to build your proposals?
• Someone from your team manually reviews all your quotes before sending them out?
• Are you struggling with creating better-looking quotes that attract your prospects?

If the answer to most of them is YES, you should invest in CPQ. 

Regardless of the size of your IT partner business or the complexity of your products, if your sales team is spending too much time creating quotes, is sending out inaccurate quotes, or is not able to track quotes through your sales pipeline, it is time to consider CPQ.

How does CPQ software work?

Let’s break down CPQ into its three subparts to understand how CPQ software works:

Configure

In the context of MSPs, configuration refers to configuring your products. This includes IT services, product bundles, subscription, hardware, etc. CPQ helps you deliver personalized product configurations and bundles on the basis of your customer’s requirements.

Apart from configuring complex product bundles, CPQ software also identifies cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Above all, it reduces manual errors and opens up more time for your sales team to focus on creating customer connections.

Pricing

Complex products lead to complicated pricing structures. Pre-determined pricing doesn’t work for all products. In this scenario, CPQ helps you achieve pricing control on individual and bundle products with customizable price and discount options based on what a deal demands. CPQ also provides different pricing plan options including one-time charges and recurring revenue options.

Quote

Once product configuration and pricing are finalized, your business needs to send the customer a finalized, error-free quote, which will offer them more details. CPQ offers ready-to-use, personalized, and accurate quote templates that illustrate your business and the deal requirements perfectly. An error-free automated quote saves you time, communicates value, clarifies and overcome objections, and helps you gain approvals faster.

Why implement a CPQ in your Sales Process?

For a Sales team, the two most important factors are - closing more deals and closing deals faster. 

CPQ helps in both. 

CPQ Software lets you create quick, easy, and personalized quotes. CPQ also automates the sales process by minimizing errors and mistakes in quoting customers with complex product needs.

Shorten the wait time for clients

CPQ tool allows you to specify each configuration, price, and discount based on your company’s capability and the needs of your customers. 

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The sales rep builds the quote based on customer requirements, CPQ takes them through a process to create a quick, complete, and accurate quote, using a customized template. Once the sales rep is satisfied, the quote is automatically sent for approval to correct parties with legally binding e-signatures, shortening the wait time even more.

Speed up your sales cycle

CPQ leads to quicker response times, lower churn rates, and a higher sales closing ratio.

Fast proposal building and fast revisions give your sales reps time to work on more deals as they are not building proposals manually. Time spent working around manual and cluttered spreadsheets is zero. They don’t have to worry about errors or check the version history of documents. All products and configurations are validated, centralized, and continuously updated to stay current.

A fast sales quote process simplifies the buying experience allowing deals to move forward quickly through the sales pipeline. More importantly, a faster sales cycle help your customers view you and your company as a partner who is genuinely interested in helping them succeed. 

CPQ also integrates with your existing PSAs or sales funnel management tools (which are essential requirements of an MSP workflow), to quickly pull accurate information about your products and services.

Are you ready to try out a better CPQ? 

If you are an IT channel partner, Zomentum is for you. The Zomentum Sales Acceleration Platform offers an intuitive CPQ toolset that lets you configure, price, and quote, and then move the client swiftly through the approval process with a secure and legally binding e-signature. 

Zomentum gives you instant access to a powerful and flexible editor that automates the entire document creation process for CPQ. With pre-built templates and dynamic content blocks, it’s easy for sales reps and IT channel partners to generate personalized documents on the fly. 

Looking for a comprehensive Sales Acceleration Platform that goes beyond CPQ? Look no further than Zomentum. Our all-in-one solution includes sales funnel management, sales automation, proposal and quote building, reporting, and analytics, providing everything MSP Sales Reps need to succeed. Ready to learn more? Contact us today to schedule a demo and discover the power of Zomentum.