Prepare good-looking and personalized quote proposal templates
CPQ is all about efficiency and the ease of configuring, pricing and creating quotations. But all that is wasted if the quotes you send to your customers look bland and uninspiring. Make sure to create attractive templates for your quotes that fit your company's visual brand identity and that are ready to ‘wow’. For that cherry on top, make sure to include the logo of your customer in the quote, or find another way to personalize it specifically for your customer. This shows your customers that you pay attention to details, which may just be the one thing that tips scale to your favor and helps you close the deal.
Make use of visualizations
Take full advantage of the visualizations available within the SAP CPQ software, which now offer the ability to make use of 3D visualizations. It makes the system even more useful. This can even be used to create visualizations in VR, which allows for unique visualization and seeing how the product would look like in real life situations. Being able to present the product and customize it in real-time through visualizations shows your customers how dedicated you are to offering them the perfect product for them.
Additionally, being able to show the product to the customer makes it a lot more tangible, which customers always appreciate. Nobody likes buying something without knowing what it looks like or how it works in real life.
It can also enable to sell extra features and add-on more easily, since your customers can actually see them and not just some words on a piece of paper. They are more likely to want to check them out and in turn be more inclined to purchase the extra features. It is as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so then you imagine how much a VR demo would be worth! :D
Check out the example seen in the photo above of how we at Canguru did this for one of our clients: https://youtu.be/tD1Z2mjgHwY
Take advantage of Workflow capabilities
Workflows enable you to define which phase a quote must go through during its lifecycle. You can have a workflow that you build on the basis of the statues of a quote, or it can also be based on the approval of the quote. An example of this would be to have it first have the phase ´Draft´and then having to be `Approved´ before sending the quote to the customer.
With CPQ, you can also determine the actions that are possible or mandatory at a particular moment, depending on the status of the quote. For example, a must in your workflow is to have your quote be approved by the Finance department, but in order to do so, the draft of the quote needs to have certain fields filled out and only after filling out the mandatory fields are filled out, is the user able to send the quote for approval to the finance department. This saves time as it removes the unnecessary back and forth between the user and the finance department because certain required info is missing. These types of workflows are already built into CPQ, so when approval is requested, the request is sent from CPQ to the finance department via mail and once the quote is approved the user is also notified via mail.
When you combine these capabilities with all the possibilities to combine the mechanism of workflow with the use of permissions of what can be done by whom in which step. With this you can unlock the power of CPQ to improve business efficiency and efficiency means more turnover and quicker close rates. All you have to do is define the process of a quote and define who has what responsibility in the process.
Achieve business excellence with available Integrations
Make use of the various integrations available with SAP CPQ, you can integrate it with your CRM system or even something simple such as e-signature applications like DocuSign and Adobe Sign. Even having these simple integrations with e-signature applications have added value by providing convenience to your customers, and as a result shorten the time to close the deal.
Integrating CPQ is not exclusive to other SAP solutions, but it is the optimal choice. For most integrations, as a middleware solution, we advise using SAP CPI (Cloud Platform Integrator), as it comes with 6 standard integration flows. Integrations with e.g. S/4HANA, SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Sales Cloud are foreseen. Which makes integrating your SAP CPQ a lot easier.
To find out more about the integration options and how to do it, as well as a lot more info on the best practices we shared, sign up for our free ‘Ultimate CPQ Implementation Guide’ here.