SaaS has recently become an extremely competitive industry and to survive on the market your company must fight more than ever before. The healthiest approach to this rivalry is to perceive it as an inspiration to proactively improve your own tools. There is no other way than evolution and whatever questions your company has, growth is always a good answer. SaaS businesses are like sharks: if they stop moving forward, they die.
Win the game
Sales is a multiplayer game and your aim is to convince a customer to play in your team. It is not easy as you usually don’t know what your competitors’ moves are but you are still required to make decisions based on this incomplete information. State-of-the-art solution is crucial to gain an advantage over your opponents and personalize your offer to make it the best available on the market.
To close big deals, sales reps negotiate with clients. They might want to apply discounts to at least a few products and many times businesses want to encourage customers to buy large quantities of items by giving them a volume-based discount. It might be a troublesome issue if your company stores all the pricing data in spreadsheets. Consulting these documents slows workflows down and hinders the revenue stream of your company.
Salesforce CPQ makes pricing easy by simplifying and automating the process. It provides several ways to conditionally apply discounts for your customers which can be set across the entire quote or on individual products and product groups. There are also special types of discounts available out-of-the-box, as for example Discount Schedules which create discounts based on quantity and automatically update the prices. This way all of your quotes are always accurate and up-to-date, which makes your company the MVP in customer’s eyes.
Make quality your business plan
In an increasingly saturated market, you need to provide a value that will make you stand out from the crowd and differentiate your brand. Manual processes are not the way to go.
However, it is still common that each sales rep has their own version of the proposal and then manually fills in the offering according to the customer needs. It is not only time consuming but also leads to typos and other human errors. Your customer wouldn’t probably be pleased to hear that a rep confused 9 with 0 on the quote because of their keyboard layout. Furthermore, choosing the wrong data during product configuration might result in buying incompatible items. Such mistakes are perceived as a lack of professionalism from the customer’s side and may be lethal for your company’s reputation.
To overcome these problems, Salesforce CPQ offers a wide range of different types of product configurations to match your pricing and selling needs. Amongst them, you can find product bundles and automations such as Product/Price Rules and Guided Selling to get accurate and up-to-date quotes. You can also easily configure a customizable Quote pdf template so that a quote document is automatically generated directly from the quote context in the system. These automations will speed up the quote process and increase the proposal volume of representatives by saving their time on repetitive tasks. And we all know time is money.
Live happily ever after
When finally the customer is won, you want to keep them with you as long as possible so that you can make the most revenue out of this relationship. One thing that you must be aware of is that businesses transform with time and might want to adjust the contract so your company must be flexible enough to fit the customer’s evolving needs.
Problems might arise if there is no place to support the potential modifications from the current contract so each time a change should be applied, a new contract must be created from scratch. It also makes it impossible to report on the contract data or to get important financial metrics, which can impair the strategic financial decisions of a company. What’s more, SaaS products are usually time-dependent and must be renewed – by your sales representatives. If they must remember to consult spreadsheets or emails to stay updated, they will often miss the date of renewal and eventually lose hard-earned customers.
This is why Salesforce CPQ provides you with Subscription Records that are used to track the ongoing subscription services a customer has bought over time. You can also configure Contract and Amendment automations so that accurate quotes are created each time an opportunity gets won or updated. When the contract end date comes, automation for the pipeline will automatically create Renewal Opportunity and Quote. No more missed renewals, no more regrets.
Both you and your customer live happily ever after.
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Article by Maria Bajena
