Introduction
Configure Price Quote (CPQ) software is transforming the way modern B2B sales teams operate. By automating and streamlining the quote-to-cash process, CPQ solutions enable sales reps to quickly generate accurate quotes tailored to each buyer's unique needs. This not only dramatically improves sales productivity but also provides a better buying experience for customers.
With CPQ, sales reps can efficiently configure complex products and services, apply up-to-date pricing rules, generate quotes, get approvals, and revise quotes when needed. This eliminates the bottlenecks, errors, and delays typical of manual quoting. Companies report CPQ software reducing the average time to generate a quote from days to minutes.
By integrating CPQ with your CRM, you gain a centralized hub for all product, pricing, and customer data. This gives sales teams guidance and guardrails for creating quotes that comply with policies and provide the right options, terms, and discounts for each customer. The result is sales reps can work faster and smarter to close more deals and generate higher profits.
What is CPQ?
CPQ stands for Configure, Price and Quote. It is a software that helps organizations configure pricing for their products and generate quotes and proposals to present to buyers. A CPQ can be set up using pricing models, product dependencies, discounts, and other attributes. It typically includes approvals contingencies as well.
The software then prepares the quote or proposal, tracks receipt of the document and electronic signature. Configuration ensures that products or services are available, meet the buyer's specifications, and can be delivered within agreed upon terms. Pricing management empowers salespeople to choose between products, bundles, and services, and offer mutually beneficial discounts. Quote generation ensures everything is integrated in a legally valid, on-brand, and contains all the material needed to close the deal.
Why CPQ for Microsoft Dynamics 365?
CPQ streamlines the B2B sales process by allowing sales teams to create precise sales quotes within minutes, rather than hours, using consistent product configurations and pricing guidelines. It enhances the functionality of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales by giving sales representatives the ability to deliver personalized, precise, and compliant quotes to customers, all while tracking their engagement and interest levels.
In today's fiercely competitive global market, CPQ is seen as an essential sales tool that helps sales teams promptly respond to customer quote requests while minimizing administrative duties.
Integrated CPQ software streamlines the quoting process and allows reps to generate error-free quotes directly within their CRM using real-time updated templates and pricing. For companies with complex pricing or variable product configurations, CPQ software is essential because it can automate and streamline the creation of accurate quotes for products with multiple variations. This saves time, improves accuracy, and provides valuable insights into the most popular product configurations.
CRM-CPQ integration: the importance of the connector
In some cases, integrating new software into an existing infrastructure may require development work on APIs, while in other cases an ad hoc connector may be required.
The benefits of integrating CRM and CPQ are amplified by the native connector between Apparound and Microsoft Dynamics 365, which allows them to work synergically by implementing CRM functionality with the addition of Apparound's CPQ and creating an extremely efficient and digitized system that enables the completion of an end-to-end workflow, from lead generation to contract conclusion with electronic signature collection.
In this article we will look at the CRM-CPQ integration developed between Apparound’s offer configurator and the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Platform ecosystem.
How does the integration between CPQ Apparound and Microsoft Dynamics CRM work?
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It is possible to show digital content and product catalogues, pricing and promotions always up to date using Apparound.
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Get leads, opportunities and accounts directly from the CRM, to target a quote.
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Create quotes with customers suited to their needs in real time. Then, send quotes via email.
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Close the deal by generating a contract and collecting the customer’s electronic signature: Finally, save the signed PDF contracts.
This makes it possible to take advantage of the updated data in the CRM and use the CPQ for bid configuration, using already implemented price and discount rules. Everything in a few minutes.
What are the benefits of the integration?
Streamline the Sales Process
Key benefits of CPQ for streamlining the sales process include:
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Reduce Errors - CPQ guides the sales process by allowing sales teams to generate accurate sales quotes in minutes rather than hours based on evergreen product configuration rules and pricing logic. This saves time, improves accuracy, and provides valuable insights into the most popular product configurations. CPQ can also help sales reps avoid mistakes by automatically checking for compatibility across products and configurations.
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Ensure Compliance - CPQ solutions ensure generated quotes adhere to all pricing policies, discount approvals, and legal requirements. Sales reps are empowered to stay within guidelines to avoid compliance issues.
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Increase Efficiency - Research shows that top-performing sales teams are over 2x more effective at minimizing the number of people, roles, and systems required to produce a quote. CPQ integrated with Dynamics 365 CRM maintains a single source of truth for product data and guided selling workflows so sales teams can efficiently create accurate quotes.
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Shorten Sales Cycle - With CPQ, sales reps can quickly respond to buyer requests and move deals forward faster. The guided selling process keeps deals focused on buyer needs and pushes deals forward with relevant content. CPQ helps sales reps configure the right solutions for each customer, ensuring consistent pricing, discounts, and approvals.
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Improve Visibility - Management gains visibility into quote performance with CPQ analytics and reporting. Dashboards provide insights into quote trends, popular configurations and rep performance. This visibility enables data-driven coaching.
By streamlining quote creation and empowering sales teams with guided selling workflows, CPQ solutions like Apparound integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM optimize the quote-to-cash process. This results in faster sales cycle times, reduced errors, lower administrative costs and increased revenue.
Simplify Pricing and Configuration
CPQ software is crucial for businesses with intricate pricing or diverse product options, as it can automate and simplify the process of generating precise quotes for products with various configurations. This saves time, improves accuracy, and provides valuable insights into the most popular product configurations.
With CPQ, you can:
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Handle product variations and complexity by using guided selling flows and rules-based pricing. This simplifies the many SKU variations into a guided question and answer process that produces easy-to-understand quotes for buyers.
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Configure the right products or services to meet buyer specifications and ensure they are deliverable within agreed terms. The software will only show valid options to prevent errors.
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Enable sales teams to select from products, bundles and services, and offer mutually beneficial discounts. The system automatically applies valid discounts and promotions.
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Ensure pricing policies and business rules are always followed, so legal compliance is guaranteed. CPQ software centralizes pricing logic for consistency.
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Analyze popular configurations to optimize the product catalogue and identify new cross-selling opportunities. CPQ provides data-driven insights from all quotes generated.
Automate Renewals
Automating the renewal process is one of the key benefits of CPQ software. Rather than having sales reps manually generate renewal quotes, CPQ tools can automatically trigger renewal quotes based on criteria you set.
For example, you can configure rules to automatically generate renewal quotes 60 days before a contract expires. The CPQ software would pull in the relevant pricing, products, and account information to generate an updated quote for the next contract term.
The automated renewal process standardizes renewals across your organization. Every customer gets a renewal quote on time without reps having to remember contract dates. Automation also reduces manual errors from reps pulling old quotes or outdated pricing.
With a streamlined renewal process, you can retain more customers and increase contract renewal revenue. Your sales team also spends less time on administrative work and more time engaging with customers. Overall, automating contract renewals is a major advantage of CPQ solutions integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Ensure Compliance
CPQ software helps sales teams stay compliant with pricing policies and legal requirements in several ways:
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It centralizes pricing rules, discounts, and approval workflows so quotes follow standardized guidelines. Without CPQ, sales reps may use outdated price lists or apply unauthorized discounts.
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It automatically applies correct pricing based on up-to-date rules and conditions. Manual errors are eliminated.
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Approval workflows guarantee quotes meet legal regulations before sending to the customer. For example, requiring a manager approval for quotes above a certain amount.
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Version control retains a record of all changes to quotes. This provides traceability and ensures compliance if audited.
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CPQ integrates with CRM data to apply correct pricing based on customer segment or geography. This prevents illegal price discrimination.
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Renewals can be automated based on pricing policies like not increasing price more than 10% year-over-year.
By centralizing pricing logic and automating compliance checks, CPQ reduces human error and policy violations. This protects profit margins and avoids potential legal issues. Sales teams can quote confidently knowing the system ensures adherence to all pricing and legal regulations.
Improve Collaboration
CPQ software fosters better collaboration across sales teams by centralizing product and pricing information into one system. Without CPQ, sales reps may rely on multiple spreadsheets, legacy systems, and tribal knowledge to configure deals. This fragmentation leads to errors and inconsistencies.
With CPQ integrated into Microsoft Dynamics, all sales reps access the same up-to-date information within their CRM. The guided workflows ensure proper cross-team coordination at each stage. For example, subject matter experts can be automatically notified to review specialized configurations. Legal and finance teams can verify pricing policies and discount approvals.
By improving cross-functional teamwork, CPQ eliminates friction in deal progression. Sales reps spend less time tracking down answers from different departments. The increased transparency and consistency accelerate sales cycles while ensuring accuracy.
Standardize Proposals
With CPQ for Microsoft Dynamics 365, your sales team can generate proposals using standardized templates that align to your company's branding guidelines. The CPQ software ensures each quote contains all required pricing, product details, terms and conditions, and any other materials needed to close the deal.
Having a standardized template makes the proposal process more efficient. Sales reps don't need to create custom quotes from scratch or copy and paste content into new documents. The CPQ system populates the template with the right information for each deal.
Standardizing proposals also provides a more professional, polished look to quotes. When you apply your branding and content guidelines to the template, every proposal maintains visual consistency. This elevates your company's image in the eyes of prospective buyers.
In addition, a CPQ template guarantees proposals include necessary disclaimers, terms and conditions, and any other standard language your legal team requires. By automatically populating this compliant content into each quote, you avoid missed requirements that could put the deal at risk.
With CPQ, your sales team spends less time building proposals and more time selling. Automating the documentation process with standardized templates helps your reps' close deals faster.
Conclusion
In summary, CPQ software like Apparound integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps sales teams streamline the quoting and pricing process to close deals faster. By automating complex configurations and pricing rules, CPQ eliminates errors and creates quotes tailored to each buyer's needs with up-to-date pricing. This improves the buyer experience and sales team efficiency.
