As sales deals grow in complexity and customer expectations become more demanding, Salesforce CPQ provides a path to streamline quoting and tighten sales cycles.
However, implementing CPQ is a major undertaking, and driving successful user adoption has its challenges. The platform presents a significant shift in the organization’s revenue-related workflows and in the tools involved. Businesses that struggle to optimize the CPQ experience around their users may take years to see a meaningful return for their implementation efforts – if at all.
To learn ways to optimize your Salesforce CPQ and drive adoption, you can download our guide: Optimizing Salesforce CPQ. Whether you’re considering Salesforce CPQ or looking to improve upon what you already have, this guide will help. Use the right tools to meaningfully improve your user experience across every team connected to the platform.
Now let’s look at four major Salesforce CPQ challenges that prevent businesses from leveraging the system’s full potential, along with the value that can be captured from optimization.
4 Significant Salesforce CPQ Challenges to Overcome
1. Lagging Performance and Inefficiencies
Salesforce CPQ is designed to handle higher volume quotes, but it has its limitations. Processing price rules and calculations for thousands of quote lines puts pressure on the system, performance declines, and the work of your CPQ users slows down. Anticipating the threshold at which these performance-related errors will hit is difficult, so there’s always the risk that users are stopped dead in their tracks after already spending considerable time on a quote.
Similarly, working with a high number of fields is challenging. The CPQ interface doesn’t allow users to hide values that aren’t relevant or focus attention on those that are. There is no ability to leverage conditional formatting, which means critical information can be hard to spot amidst a large volume of data.
2. Imperfect Multi-Dimensional Quoting (MDQ)
Even though Salesforce CPQ supports multidimensional quoting, its method for doing so pushes the upper limits of the system. Salesforce CPQ treats every quote-line dimension as a separate entry. With multiple dimensions and many additional quote lines, it’s easy to overwhelm the CPQ engine – even a modest quote can impair performance.
3. A Restrictive User Experience
Adopting a new process with Salesforce CPQ requires changes in current sales workflows. These changes can be a significant barrier to user acceptance and adoption, as they require teams to adapt to different ways of working. Users are forced to work on quotes separately, continuously switching between them, hindering productivity and quote turn-around timing.
4. Dispersed Data and Poor Visibility For Leaders
User adoption challenges lead to downstream implications on data gaps and revenue leakage. The aforementioned performance and usability challenges prompt users to pull data out of Salesforce and work from offline spreadsheets. Data is spread over different systems, devices, and applications. With this data no longer centrally managed, the likelihood of errors increases and the process of generating quotes becomes far less efficient.
This issue makes it hard for leadership to plan effectively. Without access to all the most up-to-date information, it’s difficult to understand how the business is performing or where to make improvements.
Why Optimize Salesforce CPQ?
Salesforce CPQ provides a competitive advantage for quoting. On average, sales reps not using CPQ take 73% more time to generate a quote than their CPQ-using counterparts.
CPQ systems are used across industries ranging from manufacturing to healthcare. In industries such as high-tech and manufacturing, adoption rates are as high as 80%.
As Salesforce CPQ, or similar software, becomes the norm for industry leaders, businesses need new ways to stay competitive, close deals faster, and generate more revenue.
The majority of businesses have not fully optimized their Salesforce CPQ experience. Those investing in elevating Salesforce CPQ for their teams, and improving speed and usability, are setting themselves up for a competitive advantage and growth. Here’s why…
Improved Efficiency and Speed in Quoting Drives Revenue
Studies have shown that the first vendor to respond to prospects wins 50% more deals.
Prospects rarely only evaluate one vendor or service provider. You’re likely competing against a few other businesses. When you beat your competition to the punch, it’s a significant advantage.
Improved Data Security and Visibility
When users struggle to work in Salesforce CPQ, they default to Excel or Google Sheets. A lot of the quoting then happens outside of Salesforce CPQ, offline.
This is harmful from a business planning and forecasting perspective. The most up-to-date data no longer lives in the CRM, and leaders cannot make informed decisions about business performance or plan for the future effectively. Also, when users take CRM data offline, they make themselves vulnerable to several security issues – phishing scams, hacks, crashes, and more.
When Salesforce CPQ is optimized for the different teams using it, there’s no longer the need to take data elsewhere. Your data remains where it should be, online and in your CRM.
Driving Success With Salesforce CPQ
“CPQ is one of the few products that interacts with an entire organization, from a pricing team to a go-to-market team, to operations, their sellers, whether they’re direct sellers, indirect resellers. Everybody is involved in this. And everybody needs CPQ to work for them.”
Jerret Kasper, Co-Founder & Head of Sales, Valorx
Salesforce CPQ is a business-wide system that many teams need to use. A rising tide lifts all boats, as the saying goes. In the same way, an optimal CPQ experience delivers more efficiency not just to sales reps generating quotes but to every team that supports the quoting process or has to interact with, update, and maintain the CPQ system.
There is revenue on the table that many businesses miss when they delay optimizing their Salesforce CPQ experience. They risk taking longer to engage with their prospects and close deals, thereby providing more opportunities for competitors to win.
Learn how to get the most out of your Salesforce CPQ. Download the guide: Optimizing Salesforce CPQ, to see how the right tools can minimize change management, drive adoption, and streamline quoting – whether it’s high volume, complex, or both.