Utilities, energy and power generation equipment manufacturers face many industry challenges. Complex products, short product lifecycles, competition and changing customer expectations demand agility and acute forward vision.
Cincom CPQ enables utilities, energy and power generation equipment manufacturers to overcome the challenges of this dynamic, highly competitive and evolving market by providing the necessary tools that enable sales forces to dominate in this demanding industry.
How Do CPQ Tools Benefit Utilities, Energy and Power Generation Equipment Manufacturers?
CPQ Enables Rapid Sales Force Training
As a utilities, energy and power generation equipment manufacturer, you make and sell complex products that feature frequent revisions, enhancements and refinements that change the selling process and configuration options. CPQ automatically incorporates parts list revisions, pricing changes, discounts and product modifications into configuration and sales quoting processes.
Newly hired salespeople become productive more quickly through guided selling features built into the CPQ system. Selling scripts guide them through the selling process while product information, relevant parts and accurate prices are dynamically available through an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop electronic interface.
Tribal knowledge related to products is built into the CPQ platform for salespeople to access at the point of sale. When new products are introduced, enhanced, discontinued or recalled, data associated with all stages of the product, from manufacture to delivery, are available through the CPQ system.
CPQ Minimises Risk and Maximises the Value of Short Product Lifecycles
CPQ software mitigates new product risk by enabling manufacturers to get their products to market faster. The rules-based configurator and guided selling features of the CPQ platform:
- Protect and maximise margins on sales
- Ensure accurate, profitable pricing across multiple channels, languages, currencies and time zones
- Lead to scalable, repeatable and predictable revenue
CPQ Enables Real-Time Response to Dynamic Markets
Rapidly changing regulatory landscapes, spiking demand cycles and volatile pricing pressures all require an instantaneous response. CPQ provides centralised maintenance of price lists, parts lists, product configuration rules, technical documentation and drawings, warranty information and other sales elements.
CPQ prevents the creation of quotes based on out-of-date pricing, and configurations that do not meet regulatory requirements or use incorrect or obsolete parts.
Product configuration, pricing and quoting are automated based on the business rules and workflows built into the CPQ system. Information pertaining to product updates, price changes and sales documentation are dynamically accessible within the CPQ system.
CPQ enables sales teams to concentrate on selling by providing tools to easily access data and quickly generate accurate quotes that meet procurement requirements, fulfill buyers’ needs and enhance customers’ experiences.
Role-Based Product and Sales Configuration Solutions
How do you maintain current revenue, build new revenue streams and grow margins in this volatile, highly dynamic market? How do you ensure that business closes quickly with new product, new sales reps and new markets? Cincom CPQ helps sales managers:
- Acquire new customers and retain loyal customers. CPQ and CRM systems provide full and current product profiles and make them accessible to those who need the information. Salespeople can easily identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities with part and product recommendations prompted by the CPQ system.
- Prevent quotation and configuration errors. CPQ tools produce error-free product pricing and configurations, even with frequent pricing changes, varying discounts, product updates and new product introductions.
- Effectively manage multiple sales channels. CPQ can handle separate price lists, multiple currency and language types and time zones. Variable business rules can be created for different countries, particular local regulatory requirements and specific vertical markets.
- Build margins year over year. CPQ delivers operational efficiency via centralised management of pricing, product and business rules. Eliminate errors, rogue operations and renegade product sales.
- Reduce time-to-quote and accelerate sales velocity. Automating pricing and quoting functions reduces time-to-quote, giving salespeople a better shot at closing more deals faster.
How do your sales reps stay abreast of new products, new pricing and regulatory changes? How do sales reps access the expert knowledge required to answer complex questions regarding product, replacement parts, usage and pricing? Here’s how Cincom CPQ helps you pull it all together:
- Turn salespeople into product experts. Cincom CPQ digitises product and tribal knowledge making it available to salespeople at the point of sale, eliminating the need to chase down engineers, product managers or sales managers to answer product-related questions.
- Make new hires productive immediately. CPQ eliminates the need for salespeople to memorise product, pricing and selling approaches. The innovative script-driven sales interview guides the rookie salesperson through the customer conversation, ensuring all details are covered.
- Standardise and automate product configurations and pricing rules. Salespeople do not have to memorise product usage, parts and pricing information.
- Eliminate manual order entry. Your salespeople won’t waste valuable selling time manually entering orders. CPQ automates order entry and passes error-free bills of material (BOMs) to your production scheduling systems as well as your inventory and supply chain management systems.
- Improve product configuration speed and accuracy. Eliminate the need to micromanage each sales cycle through configuration and pricing. CPQ creates accurate quotations and perfect configurations each time.
Utilities, energy and power generation equipment technology markets demand quick turnaround of system updates as the velocity of business increases in response to brutal competition. Here’s how Cincom CPQ tools help IT departments create more value for the business, while reducing the organisation’s dependency on their staff for operational maintenance:
- Provide collaborative systems that eliminate bottlenecks. CPQ pulls together data from the back office, product management, marketing, production and scheduling to seamlessly and transparently present a complete product and pricing picture to Sales.
- Simplify maintenance. Cincom CPQ frees IT resources by providing point-and-click, drag-and-drop maintenance of product and pricing rules for end-users. IT departments can still control access through permission settings and rights-granting administrative functions.
- Manage integrations and protect proprietary data. Easily manage integration via standard API calls into your existing technology, enterprise applications and legacy systems. Cincom CPQ is built on an open API architecture and uses industry-grade compliance protocols to ensure security.
- Centralise pricing, business rules and roles. Free IT personnel from the time-consuming burden of maintaining complicated databases of product and pricing information. Role- and market-based business rules and workflows facilitate easy and effective management of the data and information driving the CPQ application.
Utilities, energy and power generation equipment technology markets are challenged by rapidly evolving technologies, highly competitive markets, changing regulatory rules and changes in customer expectations. Cincom CPQ helps finance departments deliver more value at lower cost:
- Shorten time-to-market. CPQ gets your products to market faster and in more channels, delivering quicker ROI and broader availability.
- Improve reporting. The data captured by CPQ means greater transparency for your executive team when evaluating products, processes, channels, margins and overall sales performance. CPQ data, interfaced with BI and analytical systems, delivers reliable, predictive reporting based on accurate information that allows for better forecasting.
- Ensure profitability. Rules and processes created through CPQ ensure optimised, profitable pricing is used across multiple 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 and dealers, to better represent your products and services and empower customers. This is a win-win for your business, partners and customers.