How Pricefx’s CPQ Software (And More) Helps With Quoting

Sales teams often need to juggle multiple challenges while navigating the quoting process, ranging from negotiating profitable deals to addressing inconsistent pricing to mitigating lengthy sales cycles, that make profitable selling a challenge. Unfortunately, these issues are exacerbated when complex pricing structures are imposed onto traditional pricing systems. Enter Pricefx’s CPQ software, designed to not only alleviate those challenges, but also turn the entire quoting process on its head for the better.  

Here at Pricefx, as a leading cloud-native pricing software company and Best SaaS product for Sales and Marketing finalist, our CPQ software empowers sales teams to confidently navigate negotiations to optimize deals and enhance the overall efficiency of their day-to-day operations. 

In this article, we explore how Pricefx’s CPQ software helps sales teams with quoting, as well as highlight other capabilities that can be used in tandem to enhance its impact. 

So, let’s dive in.  

How Pricefx Helps With Quoting: Key Benefits from Our CPQ Solution and Beyond   

When companies implement pricing software, one of the key challenges is getting their account managers and sales reps to follow the pricing guidance that the system produces. So, while a business may have the means to generate optimal prices, the effectiveness of their pricing software solution is still dependent on whether its sellers are able to access – and understand – those prices. CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) software serves as an intermediary between pricers and sellers by delivering prices directly to the hands of sellers in an easy-to-understand format, empowering them to make informed choices at each step of the sales cycle.  

In today’s cutthroat market landscape, as businesses continue to expand their client base and product offering (while often simultaneously reducing their workforce) to remain competitive, sellers need automated tools more than ever to keep up.  

Here are the key benefits companies can expect from our CPQ solution, as well as other capabilities to leverage to maximize sales potential and boost revenue.  

1. Personalized Price and Product Mix Recommendations 

Striking the right balance between profitable selling and customer preferences is made easy once sales teams take advantage of the combined power of our analytics and CPQ capabilities.  

Our AI-powered pricing guidance capability takes in selected criteria such as customer name and product to generate the optimal price to quote, enabling quicker and more accurate price calculations in the sales cycle. From there, sellers can rapidly adjust suggested prices according to purchased volumes and other factors that may shift over time.  

In situations when sellers are unfamiliar with the specifics of an account (a likely scenario when managing a large client base), our analytics seamlessly integrates customer data to suggest a product mix tailored to a customer’s historical buying behavior, boosting win rates and fostering stronger client relationships in the process. What’s more, because our CPQ solution doesn’t exist in isolation, it also factors in rebates and other agreements into price bids, ensuring sellers deliver accurate pricing that takes previous negotiations into account.  

2. Automated Approval Workflows 

Another key benefit of Pricefx’s CPQ solution is automated approval workflows, which incorporates a company’s multiple approval tiers and price exception logic to identify instances when price approval is required. Beyond flagging exceptions, the solution channels these requests to the assigned approver, all while keeping track of communication records, ensuring everyone is kept in the loop and approvers are held accountable. 

For example, a seller is working on a quote and finds the bid is a few cents below the acceptable price. The application instantly flags that the item requires approval, alerts the approving entity, and explains why their approval is needed – no more guessing games or endless email chains. 

To further support this process, the CPQ solution can be configured to include electronic signatures, ensuring both a streamlined confirmation process and increased visibility on approved prices, by who and when.   

The below example shows the workflow stages required on a quote. This allows the user to see what will be needed as well as track progress through the approval flow. 

3. Mass Updates   

When managing an extensive customer and product portfolio, sellers need the tools to update multiple quotes on the fly without compromising any of the quality. Our CPQ solution’s Mass Update capability provides easily configurable quote templates, flexible filtering options (including header information, customer group, and product line) and adaptable update logic to allow sellers to amend and submit their quotes en masse in just a few clicks. 

4. Integrated Analytics   

Pricefx’s analytics capabilities can be embedded directly into a company’s CPQ solution to provide sellers with a window into customer preferences, historical buying behavior, and deal win-loss rates, enabling more strategic decisions in future quoting.  

When armed with all the information needed to serve their accounts, sales teams can offer a personalized buying experience to their customers that truly gets at the heart of what they need. For example, distribution sales can tailor their quotes to reflect retailers’ preferred products and incorporate cross-selling opportunities.  

Additionally, sellers can leverage win-loss analysis to gain insights into quote performance and understand the factors leading to successful deals or lost opportunities, such as slow cycle time or multiple internal handoffs. In fast-paced industries like retail or e-commerce, win-loss analytics can point to the discounted product bundles bringing in the highest conversion rates, while in regulation-heavy industries like chemical, they can reveal the importance of streamlined documentation in deal closure speed.  

An example of a scatter plot showing a deal (the blue triangle) in relation to similar deals. Am I pricing this part correctly given the customer, volume, and other factors? 

An example of break-even analysis. If I offer this customer a special low price, how much extra volume is needed to re-coup that missed margin? 

5. Price Record Integration with ERP   

Often, a seller may agree on a price with their customer at the start of the week, only for their manual record system to lag for days, ultimately producing an older price in invoicing – and disgruntled customers. Pricefx provides easy integration of price records with a company’s ERP system to ensure that quoted prices, approved quoted prices, and the ERP system are automatically synced, in turn alleviating mutual frustrations of sellers and their customers around outdated invoice pricing. 

6. Sales Commission Impact Calculations  

By leveraging automated tools to visualize the commission impact of a quote, a company can harmonize its business goals and the personal incentives of its sales team. Our Sales Compensation capability is designed to complement our CPQ offering by instantly calculating commissions based on quoted prices and creating a mutually beneficial selling process for businesses and sellers alike.  

The header of this example shows the seller the impact of their pricing on their commission, while the chart and the table on the bottom right shows the line-level impact. 

7. Market Benchmarking   

Salespeople can also take advantage of PricefxPlasma, Pricefx’s industry benchmarking tool, to gain valuable insights into how well their quoting efforts measure up to their peers, including metrics like delay time in approval, number of approval steps, and the percentage of deals that fall outside of discount guidelines.  

By comparing their quoting performance against their competitors’, sellers can identify underperforming areas in their processes that should be optimized to stay competitive in deal cycles.  

The below is some of the charting provided by PricefxPlasma, which measures approvals, deal velocity, and so on:  

What Changes Should You Adopt in Your Work Culture to Prepare for CPQ Software? 

Although its benefits are clear, CPQ software implementation does require sellers and the larger organization to embrace vastly different cultural and IT approaches than they may be used to.  

Culturally, when adopting a centralized tool like CPQ software, sellers should be prepared for increased visibility into their quoting activities, a shift that may face resistance from those who have previously enjoyed relative anonymity in their work processes. Additionally, proactive change management, in which CPQ software is presented as a valuable resource and not another administrative burden, is essential to ensure seller buy-in. Understanding the cultural context underlying initial resistance will be decisive in how quickly, and to what extent, sellers take advantage of a CPQ solution. 

On the IT front, companies should consider their preferred integration platform with CPQ software.  For example, our CPQ tool can be embedded into existing CRM solutions, like Salesforce, to streamline quoting workflows by keeping everything in one place. Alternatively, a data connector could be chosen to enhance an existing quoting tool with any number of CPQ and analytics capabilities. Choosing the right integration method is crucial, as it will ultimately shape how sellers interact with the solution and how the tool supports them.  

Pricefx Is a Leading Sales and Marketing Solution – Here’s Why 

In this article, we’ve explored the many benefits sales teams can expect from our CPQ software (and complementary capabilities) to support profitable selling and accelerated sales cycles, and ultimately, give way to more efficient day-to-day sales operations. 

Interested in discovering more ways our solutions can optimize your sales and marketing processes? Look no further than the article below.