Digital transformation is commonly thought of as being a thoroughly top-down proposition. The thinking often goes that the only way to successfully ride the second wave of digital transformation is to do a massive overhaul that is incredibly drastic — and disruptive — all at the same time.
However, this type of thinking misses the broader point. Digital transformation is not a purely strategic decision, and thinking of it that way causes many sales and Revenue leaders to miss the forest through the trees. Although the end goal is to overhaul the organization, the way to get there is better execution of the tasks that drive revenue.
Visionary leaders understand changing sales processes is part of this shift. To hit your revenue targets and close your revenue gap, you must enable your sales teams with advanced solutions that execute more efficiently and effectively than ever before.
DealHub CPQ is that advanced solution.
How DealHub Evolved CPQ Into a Digital Transformation Technology
Historically, CPQ has not been considered a digital transformation technology because leaders viewed it purely through the lens of generating sales quotes. Its limited use as a kind of glorified calculator for price and product spreadsheets was considered useful — but not a game changer.
DealHub CPQ changed that. By tying the stages of the revenue pipeline together and increasing cross-departmental connectivity, we’ve evolved CPQ into an integral part of how revenue moves through every stage of your pipeline.
Here’s how we embed CPQ into your teams so you can hit your revenue targets quarter after quarter.
CRM Integration
Digital transformation strategy requires a single source of truth for customer data. But customer relationship management software (CRM) data is often separate from all the other sales tech stack tools that use it.
Old CPQ tools were part of this problem. They didn’t connect natively to the cloud, making data hygiene impossible. Sales reps needed to manually move information from the CRM into a quote, and then maintain records throughout the negotiation process until the deal closed. Without an automatic connection between the stages that make up the entire quote-to-close sales cycle, errors were inevitable.
DealHub CPQ solves this problem by connecting natively to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. Data is instantly synced between the CRM and the CPQ via a cloud-enabled integration that is completely user-configurable without any coding.
Connecting your CRM to your sales cycle realizes the full benefit of digital transformation strategy. Instead of using separate technologies that don’t work together, DealHub CPQ + CRM creates a single data stream that connects your tech stack so you can create a coherent pipeline that is accurate and worth more than the sum of its parts.
Guided Selling Playbooks
DealHub CPQ’s guided selling playbooks turn your quotes into the central nervous system for your entire revenue pipeline, delivering on the promise of digital transformation.
Implement your sales strategy
Your digital transformation strategy should empower you to translate your sales strategy into action in the field. Old CPQ technologies didn’t do that. They merely calculated pricing and product configurations for any given quote, without doing anything to ensure those configurations matched leadership’s expectations for the deal type.
DealHub CPQ eliminates this problem by letting you configure a rules-based engine to generate quotes with specific configurations for specific deal parameters. Every time a rep creates a quote, they are asked a series of questions about their deal. The rules-engine analyzes their responses and creates a quote that matches the parameters you set.
You can ensure that certain products are always sold together, include upsell and cross-sell opportunities known to convert, and set optimal pricing discounts.
With DealHub CPQ, your sales team creates quotes that consistently reflect the broader sales strategy, bringing leadership and front-line reps together onto the same page.
Deliver consistent customer experiences
Digital transformation promises the delivery of consistent customer experiences. But old CPQ technology left reps to deliver whatever content they wanted — it did nothing to ensure consistent, coherent communication between you and buyers.
DealHub CPQ lets you put specific assets into the master playbook, empowering your team to deliver a package of [specific messaging] + [quote] throughout the sales process. You can replace an ad-hoc content strategy with communications that deliver unified messaging across your marketing, sales, and customer support teams.
This is not only more effective as a strategy. It also creates a consistent, repeatable content pipeline that you can measure and adjust based on reliable performance data.
Automated Discounting Approvals
All digital transformation strategies should streamline workflows. Old CPQ eliminated paper and did math faster, both of which brought nice productivity gains. But they remained focused on the rep’s tasks in isolation when the reality is much different. Generating quotes is the start of the broader contract negotiation process.
Here too, old CPQ tools failed to deliver integration in key ways. First, the initial discounting process remained on an honor system. Management could not know what reps offered on every contract. Second, reps needed to ask permission to offer discounts — even for routinely approved levels. All of this created additional administrative tasks without solving either problem: Time to proposal suffered and rogue reps still undercut margins anyway.
DealHub CPQ is a new solution that solves both of these problems with advanced automated discounting approvals. You set a maximum discount threshold. Everything below it gets automatically approved; everything below it gets automatically routed to management for review. You can notify multiple stakeholders at once, if necessary.
This places guardrails around reps that protect margins, but also eliminates unnecessary administrative tasks while strengthening the connections between stakeholders and departments. Achieving more revenue from streamlined, cross-departmental workflows is at the heart of the promise of digital transformation.
Subscription Contracts
Subscription revenue is a cornerstone of revenue achievement. The ability to build consistent, predictable revenue pipelines is the goal of any modern sales team. Digital transformation strategy cannot focus only on winning more closed won deals — it must focus on how to get the most revenue out of each of them.
Old CPQ did not do this. It limited itself to configuring product and pricing lists based solely on predetermined rules. It had limited ability to manage subscription contracts’ two biggest challenges: Co-terming and discounting on multi-year packages.
DealHub CPQ empowers leaders to create a single payment schedule for co-termed contracts, creating a predictable pipeline even as your relationship with buyers deepens. It also connects with our DealRoom to enable contract lifecycle management (CLM) that lets you quickly and easily generate and negotiate contracts.
Faster Sales Rep Onboarding
Sales and revenue leaders looking to close the revenue gap often hire new sales reps to try and make up the difference. But hiring new team members isn’t enough. Onboarding is required before they can bring value. Unfortunately, many sales and revenue leaders who are otherwise committed to digital transformation don’t prioritize decreasing the amount of time it takes to bring new employees up to speed.
This mentality is strongly influenced by the limitation of old CPQ technology. In the past, CPQ’s narrowly defined role as a spreadsheet organizer and calculator required new hires to learn how to configure quotes. That required extensive training — sometimes months or even a year — before they could deliver their full value.
DealHub CPQ reduces time to value for new sales rep hires in three key ways. Guided selling playbooks remove the requirement of extensive product configuration knowledge; subscription management automatically creates quotes with optimized upsell and cross-sell bundles; automated workflows remove the need to understand organizational hierarchies and decision making processes when negotiating quotes.
Removing these roadblocks reduces the ramp up required before new sales reps can focus on what they love to do — sell.
DealHub CPQ + DealRoom Powers Digital Transformation Across the Entire Quote to Close Cycle
What DealHub CPQ did for configure price quote, DealRoom did to bring digital transformation to the entire quote to close cycle.
In the past, CPQ existed on an island. Revenue leaders understood its value to sales teams, but any other benefits were considered ancillary. Legacy sales tools bolting CPQ tools on, ad hoc, added to this perception.
With DealHub, CPQ is not an ‘add on’ — it’s an integrated part of a complete quote-to-close solution. DealHub CPQ + DealRoom creates a single sales motion that connects your technologies and processes. Integrate with CLM, eSign, and our virtual roundtable that delivers real-time buyer notifications, shares personalized content, collects long-term data on your deal performance, and more.
Welcome to the future of the digital transformation: A seamless pipeline that enables more revenue achievement than ever before.
To schedule a demo, click here.
The post How to Use CPQ to Hit Your Revenue Targets appeared first on DealHub.
