Whether you manufacture commercial or residential HVAC-R and plumbing equipment, your business has its own unique challenges. Seasonal impacts on demand can be accompanied by the challenges of addressing geographic subdivisions of global markets. Manufacturing requirements range from the highly repetitive to the totally customised, and the impact of circular manufacturing, energy efficiency and other regulatory requirements vary widely by market.

Demand for more efficient solutions drives a steep technological curve that challenges product designers and sales personnel. See how Cincom CPQ (Configure-Price-Quote) software helps HVAC-R and plumbing equipment manufacturers and distributors embrace and overcome these challenges.

How Does CPQ Benefit the HVAC-R and Plumbing Manufacturers and Distributors?

Overcome Dynamic Technology and Regulatory Challenges, Minimise Onboarding Time

New technologies come and go, and regulations evolve and change over time. CPQ gives HVAC-R and plumbing equipment manufacturers and distributors easy administrative control of product specifications and options available to buyers based on the latest product updates and regulatory requirements.

With CPQ, your sales force and distributors always have access to the most up-to-date product features, options and benefits without the need for expensive product education meetings and time-consuming training and onboarding.

Grow Revenue, Increase Margins and Enable Sales Teams

CPQ enables your sales team to operate more efficiently than ever before. CPQ incorporates tribal technical product knowledge into a guided-selling-based, interactive, scripted interview process that walks the seller through product options and configurations. The sales conversation will stay on track, and the propsect’s questions will be addressed instantly without relying on time-consuming calls to engineers and product experts.

Accelerated sales velocity allows each salesperson to engage with more prospects, close more deals faster, and maximise the value of each sale. This improves both sales force retention and customer satisfaction, which are key factors enabling you to surge ahead of competitors.

Address Market Complexities

CPQ helps businesses address complex markets with ease. Multiple price lists associated with market-specific products and configurations provide sales with a set of products and prices customised to their individual customer base. Language, currency and regulatory differences are all reflected in content accessible by individual sales reps. CPQ supports channel and direct sales models individually or simultaneously as needed.

Role-Based Product and Sales Configuration Solutions

Pipeline, quota and revenue … when it comes to time and budget, everything has to point back to one of those three numbers. Here’s how Cincom CPQ helps businesses manage the sales pipeline, make (or exceed) sales quotas and increase revenue:

  • Achieve growth through multiple sales channels and capitalise on omnichannel opportunities. Cincom CPQ gives you the ability to quickly capture, replicate and implement your best sales processes globally across all of your sales channels and to adapt them to the unique requirements of each specific market.
  • Improve margins. Guided-selling functionality helps salepspeople identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Pricing is always up-to-date and reflective of volatility within your supply chain and within the market addressed.
  • Address complex customisations at the point of sale. Customers with unique and highly detailed requirements are confidently served by your sales force because CPQ guides the sales conversation through all of the prospect’s needs and requirements. There’s no need to pull in additional outside resources because all product knowledge is captured and stored within the CPQ system.
  • Maximise revenue and enhance customer experience. Cincom CPQ ensures optimal pricing on all configurations and allows you to better manage discounts, promotions and specials, so you’re achieving maximum revenue on every deal and providing better buying experiences for customers.
  • Reduce costs. Digitised price lists and sales collateral are maintained and updated centrally within the CPQ system, ensuring the information prospects see is accurate and current.

Sales operations leads the charge for digital transformation in sales processes–or at least looks for ways to operate more effectively in the digital age. Cincom CPQ enables the digitisation of your sales force.

  • Overcome skill and knowledge gaps. Cincom CPQ digitizes hard copy collateral and systemises tribal knowledge of products, making product knowledge and engineering expertise available at the point of sales engagement.
  • Replicate sales success. Capture the processes of your best salespeople, and leverage them across sales channels throughout your business.
  • Keep pace with industry standards and regulations. Point-and-click maintenance of business, product and pricing rules gives users responsible for compliance management and oversight of the go-to-market product without reliance on IT involvement.
  • Accurate product and pricing. CPQ builds expert knowledge into the sales conversation and transparently maintains up-to-date knowledge within its system. Pricing rules and product information related collateral materials are maintained centrally and updated globally, so regardless of their locations, salespeople always have access to current, accurate information and data.
  • Automate order entry. Manually entered data means inaccurate and error-laden orders. CPQ software automates the order-entry process by transferring pricing, bills of materials (BOMs), parts and assembly lists into order management, production scheduling and inventory systems.

Implementing an enterprise CPQ system enables IT departments to focus on managing the technology your organisation relies on to do business. Cincom CPQ helps IT departments:

  • Improve transparency. Make sales, marketing and field-generated data secure and accessible through APIs, meaning it’s readily available for mining and output, as needed, by different departments for internal use or to facilitate compliance with regulatory requirements.
  • Enable collaboration. Cincom CPQ provides a collaborative system for business users, regardless of their physical locations, eliminating sales-cycle bottlenecks, and facilitating go-to-market processes across the organisation. Sales office, back office and engineers are integrated into one application/solution.
  • Simplify maintenance. Cincom CPQ allows for point-and-click, drag-and-drop maintenance of business, product and pricing rules and role-based applications. IT can build, test and deploy those rules or simply grant access for other users to make updates without IT involvement and assistance.
  • Manage integrations. Easily manage integration via standard API calls into your existing technology, enterprise applications and legacy systems. Cincom CPQ is built on an API open architecture and uses industry-grade compliance protocols to ensure security.

The Finance department needs to show the business its investments are delivering positive results. “Cut costs and grow revenue” are the Finance team’s standing orders. Here’s how CPQ helps Finance departments achieve goals:

  • Shorten time-to-market. CPQ helps get your newly developed products to market faster and through more sales channels, delivering quicker ROI through broader availability.
  • Mitigate compliance risks. CPQ helps mitigate risks associated with lack of compliance with localised regulatory agencies. Process standardisation, rules-based option selection and centralised, localised pricing ensure the product and sales processes utilitised are appropriate for each individual market addressed.
  • Improve reporting. The data captured by the CPQ system means greater transparency for the executive team when evaluating products, processes, channels, margins and overall sales performance.
  • Ensure profitability. Rules and processes created through CPQ ensure optimised, profitable pricing is used across sales channels, preserving margins and creating scalable, repeatable and predictable revenue.
  • Reduce costs. CPQ reduces real costs in terms of people, resources and processes, as well as implied or intangible costs that come with reworks and poor customer experience.
  • Enhance partner channels. CPQ enhances opportunities for partners, such as distributors, dealers and resellers, to work with you more easily, enabling them to better represent your products and services. This is a win-win for your business, partners and customers.

Additional Resources for HVAC-R and Plumbing Manufacturers and Distributors

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