CPQ Software for Financial Services
Financial services is an industry with high risks and rewards. Financial firms, such as Banking, Wealth Management, and Financial Planning, face many challenges to their growth, including competitors, market forces, and changing customer priorities. Furthermore, complex regulatory restrictions and compliance requirements make financial firms’ challenges even more complicated. Whether selling insurance or wealth management products, financial services companies must be productive, profitable, and compliant to thrive in this ever-changing sector.
Digital transformation in sales is one avenue by which financial firms can innovate to stay ahead of the competition, meet their regulatory requirements, and improve their customer experience. Using sales automation tools such as CPQ (configure price quote) enables financial services companies to streamline the quote-to-order process. By automating product selection, order configuration, pricing, quote generation, contract negotiation, and approval workflows, CPQ simplifies the buying process and helps sales reps close compliant deals.
Why Financial Services Firms Need CPQ
CPQ software helps financial services firms save time and money by automatically configuring complex solutions for customers. For example, many CPQ solutions support complex product bundles and multi-currency pricing options. The software also eliminates the need for data re-entry by automating the creation of several proposals or investment strategies at once. With this capability, financial services firms can deliver a flawless customer experience by providing customers with the exact product or service they need without additional effort or time wasted on manual configurations.
Additionally, CPQ solutions provide valuable insights into customer buying behavior by tracking activities such as quote acceptance rates and order history. This data provides financial services revenue teams with an improved understanding of customer preferences and allows them to forecast future demand better. Furthermore, using dynamic pricing models built into the software allows businesses to adjust prices depending on market conditions or customer segments, further driving profitability.
In addition to the needs addressed above, here are some of the many business issues that CPQ helps solve:
- slow response to customers
- changing market trends
- inconsistent pricing
- regulatory compliance
- errors in quotes
- siloed data
- customer retention
How CPQ Reduces Risk and Improves Compliance
The use of CPQ (configure, price, and quote) solutions are increasingly important for financial services to remain compliant with the ever-evolving regulatory landscape. CPQ solutions enable these firms to remain ahead of the curve when it comes to meeting compliance standards and effectively managing customer relationships.
CPQ software enhances regulatory compliance during customer interactions, spanning from product selection and pricing to contracting and fulfillment. Compliance is maintained through the use of strict rule parameters, exceptions are processed through an approval process, standardized output documents are created to meet regulatory requirements, and all deals and channels are subject to transparent reporting.
Additionally, CPQ solutions provide detailed reports of customer interactions that can better help financial services firms comply with industry regulations. The digital paper trail produced by CPQ helps ensure that all transactions are in line with requirements set forth by regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and KYC/AML.
CPQ solutions also streamline processes such as order entry and invoicing, helping financial services firms efficiently manage their customer base without compromising on compliance or accuracy. Features like automated risk assessment help financial services companies identify potential risks before they become issues. In addition, CPQ solutions simplify maintenance tasks associated with updating contracts when changes are made in laws or regulations by allowing users to quickly update rules and requirements within their system.
Finally, CPQ solutions offer users a centralized repository for all documents related to customers and transactions. This further contributes to compliance as all documents related to customer requests are easily accessible in one location and can be tracked throughout their lifecycle for accuracy checks. By having real-time access to this data, financial service firms can more accurately monitor activities for compliance purposes without sacrificing productivity or efficiency.
CPQ Solutions for Financial Services
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How Financial Services Firms Optimize Selling with CPQ
Using AI to find efficiency gains across the customer lifecycle is becoming more common in financial firms. Many features of today’s CPQ software enable companies selling financial services to provide accurate quotes quickly while reducing customer acquisition costs and time to close. CPQ also unifies sales and financial data for better business forecasting and decision-making. In addition, CPQ helps sales teams automate quote generation, manage subscriptions and renewals, and streamline contract management.
Guided Selling: CPQ software is designed to help configure financial products using a rules-based engine. When implementing CPQ, pricing, compliance requirements, contract terms, and product details are loaded into the software. Then, sales reps guide customers through questions and answers to dynamically build quotes or proposals. An easy-to-use interface makes it simple to configure even the most complex products or service bundles.
Subscription Management: CPQ software is essential for managing recurring revenue from renewable products. It helps with creating and managing orders and processing renewals and cancellations. This ensures that customers always have the most up-to-date information about their orders and that they can make changes or updates as needed. Additionally, CPQ software can help with billing and invoicing, which makes it easier to track payments and subscription status.
Pricing: Complex pricing models are standard in financial services. With CPQ, the days of using spreadsheets and price lists are gone. Instead, CPQ provides accurate real-time pricing. In addition, automated quote approvals ensure proposals move forward without costly delays, improving customer satisfaction and increasing close rates.
Integration: CPQ software integrates natively with many CRM and ERP systems without middleware tools, eliminating manual processes such as updating client records and pricing in disconnected systems. It also integrates with contract management, asset management, and sales proposal software, so sales teams leverage real-time data across systems.
Compliance: CPQ allows financial firms to comply with ASC 606 and IFRS 15 by centralizing revenue streams in a single revenue recognition solution. The software also helps with regulatory compliance during customer interactions from product selection to pricing, contracting, and fulfillment and also ensures compliance by imposing rules on exceptions and approvals, using template documents that meet regulatory requirements, and transparent reporting for all deals and channels.
Service Team Collaboration with Sales: CPQ enables sales teams to work from one centralized platform to configure service packages, quote prices, close deals, and handoff projects to order fulfillment. Proposal documents are accessible by stakeholders online, and changes, notations, and approval stages are all tracked in the CPQ so sales teams can keep deals moving forward.
Reports and Analytics: CPQ software allows real-time visibility into deals to better forecast product demand and revenue. Sales pipeline and margin data provide accurate information to grow financial services businesses.
CPQ Software Benefits for Financial Services Companies
Selling financial services means developing relationships with customers built on trust. CPQ software boosts sales team performance by allowing them to spend more time building customer relationships and less time creating quotes and completing administrative tasks. However, this benefit is one of many produced by CPQ software.
Increase Deal Profitability: One core advantage of implementing CPQ software is that your financial services company can define price parameters and discounts to maximize margins and profits.
Streamline Approvals: Using CPQ software, you can skip the financial services system’s approval process by pre-determining quoting restrictions and automating approval workflows. Deals stay on track and close more quickly.
Standardize and Enhance Contracts: One crucial benefit of integrating CPQ with CRM and CLM is that it enables merging contracts, highlighting differences between contracts, and storing contracts within CRM and CLM systems.
Expand Your Firm: CPQ software scales as you expand your product and service offerings. For instance, you can quickly add new products and services as they become available or change the pricing, so quotes are always accurate and reflect real-time product and pricing data.
Increase Sales Efficiency and Minimize Errors: Sales reps no longer search through spreadsheets and outdated price lists to create accurate quotes, proposals, and contracts. Instead, they can concentrate on building customer relationships and growing recurring revenue.
Product Renewals: CPQ software offers self-serve options to enable customers to renew their subscriptions independently, freeing sales teams to focus on selling and expanding their accounts. Additionally, CPQ software can help you track customer interactions and preferences, which can help you personalize your offers and keep customers coming back.
Better Data: CPQ software can also help sales managers track and analyze sales data to identify best practices and optimize sales strategies. In addition, tracking customer preferences and buying trends can help service businesses better understand their target markets and develop new services.
Rhonda Bavaro excels in boosting SaaS companies’ growth through innovative content marketing, thriving in the dynamic sales tech industry amidst evolving technologies that drive revenue acceleration.
