The CPQ in Salesforce (Salesforce CPQ) is great, but it could be better.
While it’s convenient to house all of your business activities under the Salesforce banner, you could be missing out on vital functionality.
Engineer-to-order manufacturers, in particular, are often left wanting more when it comes to product configurators (Salesforce is great on the pricing and quoting side). Then there’s the additional functionality they don’t even know they’re missing out on.
By seamlessly integrating a visual CPQ like KBMax and other CPQ tools for Salesforce, you can supercharge the CPQ in Salesforce, making vital improvements in the following areas:
Visual product configuration in 3D, VR, and AR Embedding into e-commerce websites for digital self-service CAD and design automation to ship complex configurable products without delay
What is the CPQ in Salesforce?
The CPQ in Salesforce – hosted within the Sales Cloud – is a sales tool that handles configuring, pricing, and quoting activities for companies that sell configurable and non-configurable products.
Sales reps answer questions posed by the software regarding the customer and their needs. The CPQ then calculates pricing complete with applicable discounts and generates a quote or proposal for the customer.
By using the CPQ in Salesforce, sales reps can respond to quotes faster with fewer mistakes. They configure products according to pre-determined product rules that increase customer satisfaction and boost collaboration and efficiency behind the scenes.
Make Salesforce CPQ more visual with 3D product configuration.
For companies that sell a large number of configurable products, the CPQ in Salesforce is a gamechanger. Sales reps can input data about a customer and their needs, and Salesforce will guide them towards the optimal solution for that specific deal. This so-called guided selling helps reduce mistakes, speeds up sales cycles, and brings new hires up to speed in days rather than months.
But the CPQ in Salesforce is somewhat of a black box when it comes to product configuration: data flows in, and data comes out, but nobody quite understands what goes on in between. Obscuring the middle bit leaves sales reps with a superficial understanding of products and the hundreds, thousands, or even millions of options and dependencies at their disposal.
Of course, you want your sales reps to have a deep knowledge of your products and act as trusted advisors to customers. But properly educating reps can only be done by showing them how products are assembled and letting them play a more significant role in the configuration process.
While the CPQ in Salesforce is predominantly a text-based tool with some 2D visuals thrown in, KBMax is a visual-first CPQ solution. Rather than ticking boxes, sales reps configure products by interacting with 3D computer-generated product images on-screen. They point and click to make configuration changes – changing colors, dimensions, parts, and more.
As reps configure products, they’re learning all the time. It’s fast and transparent. They can see how products work, better match products to customers, and increase their win rate while driving customer satisfaction and retention. Embed your visual product configurator into your website for digital self-service
The CPQ in Salesforce is designed predominantly for use by sales reps. And it serves as a powerful and eminently usable internal tool.
But the way today’s B2B buyers place orders has changed and continues to do so. A growing majority no longer wants to interact with salespeople. They want to self-serve and buy online.
What’s driving this shift?
Millennials are starting to dominate most decision-making buying roles in large organizations (with Gen Z snapping at their heels.) The Millennial generation has grown up with the internet, prefers to buy everything online, and has no qualms about purchasing big-ticket items on suppliers’ websites. The B2C world has set the standard for e-commerce. Companies (Amazon being the clear leader) have conditioned us to expect instant gratification and a seamless online path-to-purchase whether we’re buying for work or pleasure. Covid has greatly accelerated a pre-existing trend towards B2B eCommerce. With more of us remote working and fewer traveling on business trips, B2B eCommerce has become as much a necessity as a preference.
KBMax enables Salesforce users to take the visual product configurator (as discussed above) and embed it into their e-commerce websites. Visitors to their site can then use the configurator to configure their products and make an immediate purchase depending on the chosen setup.
A KBMax visual product configurator has a highly intuitive visual interface that end-customers can use without any training. It’s self-explanatory. They can configure products whenever they want, from anywhere, using any device.
As customers experiment with different options, they frequently upsell themselves. The configurator ends up doing the job of the salesperson who is now absent from the equation (much to the relief of many buyers.)
Sellers that want to take visual product configuration to another level can use augmented reality and virtual reality to provide fully immersive experiences. Buyers can use AR to see computer-generated products “in situ” (as captured by the camera on their device) and VR to enter a simulated reality where they can move around and watch products come to life.
In summary, the more visual your product configuration process is, the better. Here’s why:
You can differentiate your brand from competitors that have more traditional, low-tech e-commerce offerings. You can reduce purchase anxiety in buyers by showing them exactly what they will receive before they get out their credit cards. You can better educate your customers about the intricacies of your products (we’re visual learners and comprehend and retain visual information better than text.) You can engage buyers, give them ownership over the configuration process, and connect them to products more emotionally, driving up conversion rate.
Use CAD and design automation to get products to customers faster.
So you’ve implemented a 3D product configurator, and it’s started to have a profound impact on your sales results. You’re reaching more customers, achieving a higher conversion rate, and moving them more quickly through the sales pipeline. It sounds like a dream come true.
But engineer-to-order manufacturers know that configuring, pricing, and quoting are just the first steps on the path to shipping their finished goods. The next step is engineering, and this is where complexity and bottlenecks frequently occur.
The great thing about the CPQ in Salesforce is that it eradicates invalid configurations. Product and pricing rules coded into the configurators’ back-end ensure that every configuration is optimized for engineering efficiency. Every product configuration that makes its way from sales to engineering is validated up-front, so no more of the back-and-forth that leaves sales cycles paralyzed.
Improved communication between the customer, salesperson, and engineer saves a ton of time. However, engineers still have to create technical drawings before custom products can be manufactured on the shop floor. Producing these drawings is repetitive, menial, time-consuming, and (previously) unavoidable where complex configurable products are concerned. This is not the case with KBMax.
KBMax features CAD and design automation that takes all the configuration data captured at the product configuration stage and turns it into technical drawings automatically. All the user has to do is click a button. Engineers can get back to more creative, forward-looking R&D work, and the shop floor can get products into customers’ hands faster than ever.
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