Salesforce CPQ contributes to Sales Enablement in the Manufacturing Industry
By: Rajesh Cv
Tags: Salesforce Productivity, Sales, Manufacturing, Customer Experience, Salesforce

In the current arena, buyers are more involved in selling than ever. It is no longer a financial transaction but a business partnership with the end-users. If manufacturing a product is one side of the coin, handling the ever-evolving supply-demand chain is another.

Consider a large car manufacturing industry that works with a wider network of stakeholders — channel partners, vendors, dealers, distributors, resellers, contracts, engineers, and, not to forget, the end-users. With multinational companies, these stakeholders are distributed in different geographies. This creates a more complex ecosystem considering the changing local laws, tax regulations, and localized process operations in each geography.

Manufacturing companies that deal with a vast product base are faced with a plethora of challenges from product configuration to customer service. The above scenario calls for the need for an “automated ecosystem” for rapid problem-solving and process streamlining.

Meanwhile, what if a single, central platform can coordinate with the various BUs, and bring closer collaboration amongst them, resulting in no or limited errors?

Salesforce, it is!

Improve Customer Experiences (CX) with Salesforce CPQ!

Salesforce is a highly diverse platform that brings together super-intelligent Einstein AI solutions and a robust set of applications to coordinate a larger operations base across the globe, at the click of a button. One aspect of Salesforce — the Configure, Price, and Quote software, has the ability to bring a plethora of transformations to the way your company’s multifaceted sales transactions are managed.

In the most precise form of explanation, CPQ is a tool that streamlines the process of “moving a customer through the sales pipeline” — from the discovery phase to an actual sale phase, all the while recording customer behavior, for futuristic insights. CPQ uses a quick, streamlined, efficient, and well-designed process flow to present an accurate quote to your customers, and helps bridge the gap between customer and sales.

CPQ contributes to Sales Enablement in the Manufacturing Industry

Coming back to our previous example of large car manufacturing companies, CPQ allows the sales teams to offer accurate quotes to buyers, as per individual customization. Customizations may include anything from additional accessories, engine classes, to transmission models, and much more.

In this article, we will cover the various aspects of the manufacturing business processes that are benefited from implementing Salesforce CPQ for sales enablement.

Drives Business Transformation

Still following traditional approaches to configure products? Are you looking for out-of-the-box ways to comprehend how Salesforce CPQ can contribute to an intelligent quote-to-fulfillment process? Salesforce CPQ application not only contributes to enhanced supply chain management but also helps make intelligent inventory management decisions.

Consider a typical scenario where the customer is already provided with a traditional quote but the inventory is unavailable for the next few weeks. This results in bad customer experience. In this case, centralized inventory management (such as an ERP) when collaborated with the Salesforce platform (here, CRM) alerts the sales agent about stockroom availability before generating the final purchase order.

Salesforce CPQ helps in automated product configuration and price calculation for accurate quote generation, resulting in limited or no scope for rework. This triggers a lean and low-waste process business model that improves overall productivity.

Consider a situation where your sales dealers are still opting for manual price quotes. imagine the additional time and efforts invested in applying bulk discounts, geography-specific offers and revising quotes every time a customer choosing between extra accessories’ combinations.

Here, Salesforce CPQ software can help with dynamic product configurations, price fetching, auto-calculation and proposal generation and a bunch of other features.

Agile Selling Process

Integrating Salesforce CPQ into your Sales operations results in adding intelligence to your agile sales operations. CPQ drastically reduces the amount of manual effort needed on simpler tasks, creating a well-defined change management implementation.

The fully automated platform creates self-managed process such as guided selling, approval workflows, catalog management, and data reporting & analytics. This is a major organization-wide shift, resulting in well-managed multi-channel sales and cross-department collaboration for better conversions.

Risk Minimization

Salesforce CPQ is a complete cloud-based delivery model, thus contributing to zero investment in physical infrastructure and a highly secured and dynamically synced data backup on the cloud.

Meanwhile, with robust database management, CPQ cuts down on substantial inaccuracies with manual quotes — such as incorrect pricing and discount calculation, inaccurate component details, wrong client contact details and more. This contributes to effective risk management in the quote-to-order cycle.

Salesforce CPQ instills AI-powered intelligence into a traditional sales process, thereby streamlining the entire quote-to-order process to deliver an user-centric experience across different channels and user touchpoints.

You can go through my other articles on the key features and benefits of Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) software. Speaking of which, you can find a comprehensive understanding of the Salesforce CPQ software here.

At Prudent, we focus on a holistic approach to implement Salesforce CPQ, with the integration of the right teams and BUs to create a well-defined lead-to-order process.

Get in touch with a Prudent expert at rc@prudentconsulting.com to transform the way you build your loyal customer base.