Picture this: You’re a global B2B manufacturing company producing large volumes of goods for customers. Every day you’re creating exclusive products that impact your customer’s bottom line and profitability. A lot is riding on your work if you want to be recognized as a reliable manufacturing company that takes care of its customers and its businesses. The accuracy and speed to which you’re able to specify appropriate requirements, generate accurate estimation quotes, and send out invoices promptly for revenue recognition are very important in retaining customers and running a successful, profitable, and growing manufacturing business.
How a Manual Sales Process Is Costing Your Business
Due to the complexity of the quote and sales-to-order process, especially in a manufacturing company, it’s hard (some might say impossible) to keep up if you’re manually managing it. According to Forbes, sales reps spend 35.2% of their time selling and 65% on everything else – aka not selling. That accounts for a company spending $68,352 per rep per year to pay them for activities they were not hired to do. Imagine the revenue generated when you put those wasted dollars towards the actual selling of products, rather than the manual and administrative activities that come with it.
CPQ Software is a Manufacturer’s Dream
Leveraging Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) technology to transform the sales process is extremely beneficial for manufacturing companies that sell complicated product specifications, like equipment and machinery. CPQ uses a step-by-step rules-based software platform that takes into consideration quantities, markdowns, customizations and available features, and any applicable incompatibilities, with just a few clicks.
To simplify the quote and sales order process for manufacturing companies, we joined forces with Renaissance Tech. As a consulting firm specializing in Infor CSI’s CPQ software, they’re technology streamlines the process and ensures accurate estimates, quicker closing, and happier customers. All in a day’s work, right?
With the Infor CPQ, you have a product configuration software program that integrates with many ERP systems and handles the sales process for you. Using CPQ with its seamless integration to an ERP, like Infor’s Cloudsuite Industrial, your system will handle everything from pricing, to proposals, to quoting, to approvals, to orders, to contracts, to billing. Your entire process under one system assuring an accurate and accelerated process for ordering products from your business. Now, your sales team can amplify revenue because they have so much more time to focus on selling products rather than on organizing spreadsheets and pushing paper around the office.
The ABCs of CPQ
On average, it takes non-CPQ users 73% more time to produce a typical quote or proposal. That’s what makes Infor CPQ a sales-optimizing tool. Manufacturing companies can use CPQ software in tandem with their existing systems, like their CRM platforms and ERP solutions, making it a highly integrable and scalable software solution. It’s critical for the CPQ system to easily integrate with other software programs because otherwise, you end up working with disconnected systems which create duplication of work and silos. Ultimately, this slows down the configuration process rather than optimizing it.
89% of customers will switch to a competitor if a business doesn’t provide them with the customer service experience they expect. CPQ software empowers your sales team by giving them a way to offer customers a more personalized customer service experience. There’s less miscommunication over product specifications among sales teams and clients because you can easily share data and create custom reports from within the system. No one enjoys being misquoted, and if you’re in sales (which most of us are, even indirectly), you know that a bad misquote can have a fatal impact. With Infor’s CPQ digitizing the manufacturing sales process, your sales team is confident in the data and can make accurate and consistent cost predictions.
Adoption of CPQ technology in your manufacturing business is a big step towards becoming a technology-driven organization and ensuring you are a step ahead of competitors. A non-standardized and manual quote-to-order process results in lost revenue, erratic quoting, and wrong product specifications, all of which impact your bottom line. If you’re in the manufacturing business and are looking for ways to become more agile and intelligent, contact our Infor CSI team. We can help.
