Quote Like a Pro: Key CPQ Features to Boost Accuracy

Quoting errors are costing your business dearly. Miscalculated pricing, poorly enforced pricing rules, and incorrect product configurations lead to lost sales, reduced profit margins, and dissatisfied customers.

CPQ software is proven to eliminate 40% of all human error associated with the quoting process. Its rules and configuration engine can automate complex pricing and product configuration tasks, making it an essential tool for any sales team.

But it’s about more than just that. The ability to deliver branded quotes in a matter of minutes makes it far easier to make a good impression on prospects. You’ll look more professional and close bigger deals using CPQ.

Without the right software, your quoting won’t reach its full potential. In this article, we’ll show you how CPQ can help you run an efficient quoting process.

The pain points of manual quoting

In this day and age, “manual” anything is considered a thing of the past. While 83% of sales professionals already use a CPQ solution, plenty of businesses are still using spreadsheet-based methods to build and deliver quotes. And unless you’re using a modern CPQ, there are still manual elements to your quoting process.

This poses a few critical problems:

• Inaccurate or outdated product data causes errors in quoting and frustrates customers.
• No rules engine means pricing and discount rules aren’t uniform, leading to inconsistencies in how they’re applied.
• Overly or incorrectly applying discounts negatively impacts profit margins.
• Spreadsheets and basic quoting tools can’t handle complex configurations and customer requirements.
• It takes a long time (sometimes several days) to build a quote and get it approved without an intuitive quote builder and automated approval routing system.
• A lack of branding and consistency in sales quotes and proposals looks and feels unprofessional to the customer.
• There’s no visibility into your sales pipeline or deal history with manual quoting, making it difficult to track, analyze, and project sales.

Whether you realize it or not, your customer experience, sales rep productivity, and profit margins are all suffering if you aren’t using modern CPQ software.

How modern CPQ solves quoting challenges

Today’s best CPQ software does more than just produce accurate pricing. It has dozens of features designed to eliminate the challenges that come with manual quoting and boost your sales effectiveness.

Let’s take a look at some of the key CPQ features that will transform your quoting:

Product configuration engine

The product configurator is one of the core features within CPQ software. This powerful engine ensures 100% accurate quotes every time by automating the selection and configuration of products based on a customer’s unique needs.

With a configurator, you can build complex products and bundles with ease, even if they have hundreds or thousands of possible combinations. They use techniques like caching and stateful processing to minimize performance overhead and provide a responsive user experience even for highly detailed configurations.

The process looks like this:

1. An admin adds product and pricing data to the CPQ system’s backend.
2. Sales reps use a simple interface with guided selling to select products and options based on customer requirements.
3. The configurator pulls data from the product catalog to present all available options. This includes different models, features, colors, and accessories.
4. As users make selections, the configurator validates each choice in real time, based on your product rules. Sales reps cannot include incompatible options, avoiding errors and delays in the quoting process

The core component of a CPQ configurator is the rules engine. This is what defines and enforces the business logic and constraints during the configuration process.

For example, if a certain feature is selected, the rules engine will automatically adjust other options to ensure compatibility and compliance with business policies. It handles dependencies and advanced calculations to provide a seamless and accurate configuration experience​.

In the case of businesses selling physical products, the configurator is normally integrated with the ERP system to ensure all selected configurations are viable from a manufacturing, inventory, and delivery standpoint.

Automated pricing rules

Pricing rules are the backbone of accurate quoting. They create consistency across all quotes and to protect your margins by enforcing minimum prices or price floors on specific products, product categories, or customers.

In a manual quoting process, applying discounts and other pricing rules is often done manually using spreadsheets or basic tools like Microsoft Word. In CPQ, all pricing requirements are programmed into the software’s backend.

Just like it applies product rules during configuration, it automatically applies contingencies, discounts, and promotions during pricing calculations. This guarantees accuracy and consistency.

Here are a few examples of pricing rules you can set up in CPQ:

• Volume or bulk discounts
• Contract pricing for specific customers
• Bundled items with special pricing
• Promotions and seasonal discounts
• Minimum order quantities
• Price floors or minimum profit margins for discounts
• Percentage or fixed discounts for specific products, customers, or sales reps

Real-time data integration

CPQ software is connected to your product and pricing data in real time. This means all changes made to your product catalog or price books are immediately reflected in your reps’ quoting process.

For example, if you add a new product or update pricing for an existing item, it will immediately show in the product configurator. This ensures your reps always have access to the most up-to-date information when building quotes, avoiding outdated pricing and incorrect configurations.

Integration also extends to your CRM system. CPQ integrates with CRM software like Salesforce Sales Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics to provide real-time visibility into your sales pipeline.

You can easily track quote status, view deal history, and analyze sales data without having to switch between multiple tools.

Quote and proposal automation

Creating quotes and proposals is a time-consuming process, especially if you’re using manual tools like spreadsheets. CPQ streamlines this process with automated quote generation.

After selecting products and applying pricing rules, reps can generate professional-looking quotes in a matter of minutes. These quotes are fully customizable and can include your branding, product images, and legal disclaimers.

You can even automate proposal creation by using pre-built templates that pull in the relevant quote data. This ensures consistency across all proposals while saving reps time and effort.

Approval workflows

In complex B2B sales processes, there will be high-value deals requiring multiple levels of approval before sending the quote to a customer. CPQ software streamlines this process with configurable approval workflows.

That way, when a sales rep builds a quote that hits a certain threshold, it will automatically trigger and route an approval request. It’ll notify that person (usually a member of your deal desk), and you’ll have it approved or rejected within minutes.

You can even set up different levels of approvals for different products or customers based on their pricing requirements and deal values. This eliminates delays and confusion during the approval process and helps you close deals faster.

Reporting and analytics

CPQ software provides real-time data and insights into your entire sales process. You can easily track quote status, conversion rates, and deal values to identify areas for improvement.

You can also analyze which products or pricing strategies are performing well, where customers are dropping out of the deal, and which sales reps are hitting their targets. You can use this information to optimize your sales workflow and product mix.

You can also use CPQ analytics to project future sales growth. Since it’s granular (based on products and customer segments), you’ll get a more complete picture of where your business is heading and how to capitalize on opportunities.

Additional benefits of CPQ for sales operations

Beyond its ability to optimize the entire configuration and quotation process, CPQ offers serious benefits for your entire sales cycle.

Reps close bigger deals, faster.

Since CPQ reduces the amount of time they have to spend entering information and waiting for approvals, reps can get quotes to customers days sooner. That means they can have more deals in their pipeline at once.

It’s not just deal volume that gets a boost, though. Businesses using CPQ have a 105% larger average deal size.

That’s because CPQ encourages reps to upsell and cross-sell related products during the configuration process. Plus, with all pricing and product rules programmed into the software, reps can confidently offer discounts and promotions without worrying about eroding margins.

Customers are happier with the buying experience and end product.

Accurate and timely quotes leave a great first impression on prospects. Gartner research finds that 75% of B2B buyers don’t want to interact with sales reps at all. The more friction you can remove from the process, the better.

CPQ also minimizes the amount of interaction needed to complete a sale. Since sales reps have all the necessary information at their fingertips, they can quickly and accurately answer customers’ questions or concerns while configuring a product or building a quote.

The whole CPQ workflow facilitates solution selling, so customers are generally happier with the end product as well. Once they’ve made it to the final stage of the deal cycle, they can be confident the product they’ve selected is a good fit for them and their business.

Better data quality improves forecasting and pipeline management.

Perhaps the most costly issue with outdated quoting methods isn’t even related to the process itself. It’s the fact that every time a small change happens, you lose the opportunity to accurately analyze and forecast your business.

CPQ reduces these errors. It accounts for your entire product mix, price book, and customer base. It can even consider regional variations.

All this data can be used to make better business decisions around product development, expected sales growth, and market saturation. The more accurate your data is, the better you can set targets, make sales forecasts, and optimize the sales process.

Sales Ops teams have a lower administrative burden.

Sales Ops teams shoulder a lot of the administrative burden in organizations. They set up pricing rules, create product bundles, update price books, and help with approvals.

It’s tough to enforce policies and improve the selling process when there isn’t a centralized system to handle it or an automated tool to enforce it. CPQ solves both of these issues.

By automating many of these tasks, CPQ software frees up your Sales Ops team to focus on more strategic initiatives. They can develop new pricing strategies, work with Marketing to create product bundles or promotions, and onboard new sales reps into the organization with greater ease.

Minimize your quote errors with CPQ.

CPQ software is the missing piece of your sales puzzle. It automates complex pricing and configuration rules, streamlines approvals, delivers real-time analytics, and generally makes life easier for everyone involved in revenue-generating processes.

With CPQ, businesses can quickly configure quotes with minimal effort while ensuring accuracy every time. The result? Happier customers, more revenue growth, and a better system that empowers everyone involved to work smarter — not harder.

Ready to invest in a modern CPQ system? Check out our guide to evaluating CPQ for SMB vs. enterprise needs and read through our reviews of popular CPQ systems before making the decision.