8 Steps To Shorten the Sales Opportunity to Revenue Conversion Cycle: Implementing Salesforce CPQ

When your business is about to close deals, but your schedules depend on manual tasks, your quote creation is bound to get affected. This can greatly bother your sales team. Recent research has depicted that only 34 percent of the time of sales representatives is spent effectively on selling and their remaining time is spent on tasks like quote creation, proposals, and gaining approvals which takes the majority of their bandwidth. This is where Salesforce CPQ can come to the rescue, assisting sales teams in automating their key tasks and streamlining sales operations.

Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) software is a sales tool designed for organizations to offer accurate pricing for any possible scenario concerning product configuration. The software allows sales representatives to quote prices accurately and quickly for things like customizations, optional features, discounts, and quantities. Salesforce CPQ equips sales teams with convenient software that is accessible on any device owing to its cloud based platform. Since it is hosted within the Sales Cloud platform, it provides you a direct link with your CRM, allowing you to make sales decisions that will have the biggest impact.

8 Key Steps for Salesforce CPQ Implementation

While beginning a Salesforce CPQ implementation project, you can feel overwhelmed by the multiple things you need to consider. Here’s a step-by-step guide that can make the CPQ implementation project easy for you:

1. Define Your Objectives

Before you start the implementation process, you need to define your objectives. Understand the requirements of your sales process and set CPQ goals that you can measure. This will prove to be beneficial for you when you need to calculate the true ROI of your CPQ efforts. Before you get started, consider the following KPIs:

• Improved quote accuracy
• Reduced overall time spent selling
• Enhanced Average Order Value (AOV)
• Reduced churn and increased renewal and win rate
• Improved quote turnaround time

2. Concentrate on Crucial CPQ Features

CPQ offers a range of features to users. This can at times make it challenging for the team if they implement it all at once. Hence, it is recommended that you choose the features that are critical for your sales goals. For instance, if you are Salesforce CPQ, get started by implementing innovative features that can meet your crucial business needs. These features include key functionalities such as price book, product bundles, product catalog, order management, guided selling, etc.

3. Select the Ideal Project Team

You need to be careful while choosing your CPQ resources. Ensure you have a team of experts to work on your project. Hire top performers along with their backups incase of unexpected resource shortages. Get in touch with your Salesforce CPQ implementation partner to decide on the project methodology you need to adopt.

4. Optimize Your Quote-to-Cash Process

Optimizing the Quote-to-Cash process of your business is the key component of CPQ implementation. Since every organization is equipped with a special sales team catering to unique business requirements, it is important to evaluate each and every aspect of your sales process. This will allow you to modify the sales process as per the needs of your new implementation project.

5. Pay Attention to Data Management

The key reason for Salesforce CPQ implementation is to boost productivity by equipping your sales team with appropriate data while creating quotes. It goes without saying that these data are presently scattered across various systems, spreadsheets, etc. Thus, the next vital step is keeping your data ready for exchange among your organization’s CRM, CPQ, and ERP. Ensure that you move all product names, SKUs, pricing, codes, etc. to one place. Discover the data that is needed for the CPQ process, the system it is recorded in, and the owners linked with the master data so that you can include them in the process of implementation.

6. Consider a Change Management Team

Even if you’ve implemented a top-notch CPQ solution to make your team’s life easier, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when they resist change. Thus, having a well-crafted change management plan is necessary. The main reason behind the downfall of a much-heralded CPQ project is it mistakes the end user as the sales team alone. This results in the project ignoring the needs of the engineering, IT, finance, and project management teams.

A CPQ project has various stakeholders for carrying out both technical and non-technical tasks. Hence, the first thing you need to comprehend is that each of these stakeholders will have their own expectations from the CPQ project. Therefore, it is advisable to form a change management team and select a representative from each department to provide end user expectations. Along with this, construct user groups to introduce the product to them while training. The entire messaging also needs to be adjusted to meet their needs.

7. Make a Documentation Plan

While implementing Salesforce CPQ, maintaining a record of your sales process can prove to be highly beneficial. The documentation can be done in two stages: Admin user documentation and Sales user training documentation.

Sales user training documentation helps you get a good grasp of the execution process of quoting. You can include things like quoting, adding products, configuring products, approvals, document generation, document signing, amendments, renewals, etc. in Sales user training documentation.

Admin user documentation includes how CPQ is set up. Here you can incorporate things such as product configuration, pricing configuration, approval configuration, eSignature configuration, quote templates, automation, legacy data migration template, and product migration template.

8. Guarantee Post Production Support

After migrating CPQ to the production state, it is essential to discuss with your implementation partner the potential issues that can come up in the next few weeks. The probability of issues arising during this period is directly proportional to how complex the configuration is.

Conclusion

When you implement Salesforce CPQ, you get the chance to boost efficiency, accuracy, and overall sales performance. By following the above-mentioned eight steps, you can guarantee yourself a successful CPQ implementation addresses your particular business requirements. With Damco Solutions as your Salesforce implementation partner, you can gear up to embrace the power of data accuracy, automation, and streamlined business processes, resulting in competitive advantage and faster revenue recognition.