Are you losing valuable time in endless sales cycles, wondering if there’s a faster way to get quotes to your prospects? You’re not alone.
Picture this: A sales rep spends hours configuring a complex product, cross-checking prices, and waiting for approvals. Days turn into weeks, and just when progress seems within reach, the prospect requests yet another revision.
Sound familiar? It’s a frustrating reality for many sales teams. Sales cycles can drag on forever. While getting to YES is the ultimate goal, even getting to NO can be better than endless back-and-forth conversations and “what if” scenarios.
Quoting is a pivotal step in the sales cycle—the bridge between interest and commitment. Yet, many businesses are riddled with delays, inefficiencies, and miscommunications. The result? Lost deals, frustrated teams, and wasted opportunities.
In this article, we are sharing six proven strategies to help you configure quotes faster and streamline your approach while demystifying the quoting process and steps and exploring the challenges that often derail it.
What is the Quoting Process?
The quoting process is a key function that directly impacts sales efficiency, revenue recognition, and the overall customer experience. It involves responding to customer requests, creating accurate and competitive quotes, obtaining necessary internal approvals, and securing customer acceptance.
For organizations selling complex or configurable products, the quoting process is not just a one-step task but a multi-faceted workflow that requires precision and integration across sales, pricing, product teams, and finance departments.
Common Challenges in Configuring Quotes Faster
Even the most experienced businesses face quoting challenges. Whether it’s complex configurations or slow response times, these hurdles can significantly delay your sales cycle. Let’s break down the most common issues and see where things often go off-track.
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Complexity in Product Configuration
When you’re selling products with a lot of moving parts—configurations, dependencies, constraints—it can get overwhelming. Sales teams often find themselves juggling different product combinations, which means frequent back-and-forth with product managers and leadership. Not only does this cause delays, but it increases the risk of mistakes in the quote. Getting the right configuration quickly can be the difference between winning or losing the deal.
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Lack of Product and Pricing Knowledge
For new sales reps or even experienced ones dealing with an ever-evolving product lineup, accessing accurate products and pricing information can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. Without easy access to this knowledge, generating accurate quotes takes longer. Worse, they might make errors or rely too much on internal experts and ignore clients’ requirements, which only slows down the sales cycle and frustrates everyone involved.
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Inaccurate or Incomplete Information
Getting the wrong information at the start can lead to a domino effect. If sales reps don’t gather all the necessary details during the initial prospecting phase, the quote will be inaccurate or incomplete. Multiple revisions are required, and each one adds a delay. This not only slows down the process but also creates frustration for both the sales team and the customer, as misaligned solutions might not fully meet their needs.
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Misalignment of Leads to Sales Efforts
Not every lead is worth chasing. Yet sales teams often spend valuable time on prospects that aren’t the right fit—whether they lack the budget, authority, or need for your product. When sales reps aren’t focused on the right leads, the quoting process takes longer, and high-value opportunities are left in the dust. This misalignment wastes time and drags out the process, making it harder to close deals quickly.
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Delays in Early Sales Cycle Engagement
In today’s world, buyers are doing their homework before they even talk to a sales rep. However, many companies still expect sales teams to answer basic product questions early on. This leads to delays, as prospects struggle to find the information they need, while sales reps spend time handling repetitive inquiries instead of focusing on closing deals. A more efficient process here can save time and help turn those early interactions into opportunities for closing.
6 Proven Strategies to Configure Quotes Faster
While the quoting process faces several challenges, addressing them head-on with the right strategies can significantly reduce delays. Speeding up the process is crucial to reduce the time between initial contact and quotation to improve sales effectiveness. The fact is a lot can be done
to boost the speed of the sales cycle and enable reps to configure quotes faster, ensuring quicker deal closures.
1. Share Key Product Knowledge Across Your Team
Does your team rely on a handful of experts for critical product knowledge?
If so, you could be slowing down your quoting process. Tribal knowledge—insights that are stored in the heads of senior staff—can be valuable, but it shouldn’t be the only resource you have.
A centralized knowledge base or automated discovery tools can capture and share this expertise, making it accessible to everyone. This means that new team members can quickly get up to speed, and your sales reps won’t have to chase down answers from the few who know them.
With streamlined access to this knowledge, your quoting process becomes faster, more consistent, and more accurate. This directly impacts the speed of your sales cycles and reduces the risk of errors, ultimately improving your quote-to-cash process.
By putting your tribal knowledge into the hands of your whole team, you empower them to make the best decisions quickly, keeping the momentum going through every stage of the quoting process.
2. Speed Up Product and Pricing Knowledge Transfer
Closely related to the first point is the acquisition of general product knowledge and pricing familiarity. The constant flow of new products and updates can leave reps scrambling for the right information. After all, reps can’t sell what they don’t fully understand.
But here’s the good news: you don’t have to expect your reps to memorize everything. A well-implemented CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) software ensures that all product and pricing details are easily accessible, giving sales teams the right tools without knowledge overload. Automated configuration tools can take the guesswork out of the process, allowing reps to focus on delivering a tailored solution rather than worrying about technical specs or price lists.
With the right sales quoting process CPQ software, sales teams can skip the endless calls to product managers and engineers. Instead, they can concentrate on asking the right questions and offering the best solutions based on real-time data—ultimately reducing delays and improving quote accuracy.
In the end, it’s about getting the product and pricing knowledge into the hands of your team quickly—so they can sell more and waste less time.
3. Streamline Sales with Scripted Prospect Interviews
Let’s set the record straight: “scripted” doesn’t mean your sales reps will be reading word-for-word from a script.
What it does mean is that the sales conversation is guided, ensuring reps ask the right questions in the right order to capture the key details needed to deliver an accurate quote. When reps try to improvise or rely on memory, things slip through the cracks, and quotes get delayed.
A sales interview script helps structure the conversation. It defines the questions to ask, the possible answers, and even follow-up questions—ensuring no important details are missed. From there, the script guides the rep to the correct product configurations and pricing options, based on what the customer needs.
The result? No confusion, no forgotten requirements, and no time wasted. With scripted interviews, reps are equipped to collect the right information quickly and accurately, leading to faster quotes and more confident sales.
Most modern and international sales quotes CPQ systems use script-driven configurations powered by AI, so the system analyzes customer responses and automatically suggests the right product and pricing options in real time.
4. Improve Qualification of Prospects for Smarter Selling
Selling is time-consuming—so why waste it on leads that don’t go anywhere? The key is ensuring your prospects match the right qualifications to make sure your efforts are spent on opportunities that convert.
For example, if you’re selling equipment for recreational deep-sea fishing, don’t just target general boat manufacturers. Instead, focus on large manufacturers of fiberglass recreational watercraft
specifically rated for saltwater use. This refined approach means your lead pool will be smaller but much more likely to convert into actual sales.
With existing customers, there are often untapped opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. CPQ systems can help identify these chances by mining historical data, showing you where the greatest growth potential lies.
By sharpening your qualification process, you’ll not only reduce wasted time but also improve your hit rate, ensuring that your sales team spends more time with prospects who are ready to buy.
5. Let Tech Handle the Early Cycle Sales Process for Smarter Lead Engagement
Sales reps often find themselves answering the same basic questions over and over during the early stages of the sales cycle. Meanwhile, buyers are not always eager to engage with reps at this phase either—they’re still in the research and education stage.
A well-designed customer portal can automate much of this early-stage education, addressing frequently asked questions and helping buyers understand the value of your products before speaking with a rep. With customer profiles and real-world user stories showcasing how your product benefits other companies, buyers can explore solutions at their own pace.
The benefit here? More buyers are willing to handle their own product research and education. This means sales reps can focus on qualified, motivated buyers rather than wasting time with tire kickers and merely curious prospects.
To make this work, investing in technology is key. eCommerce, extensive searchable content, and marketing automation tools are essential in organizing and presenting that content and tracking the online behaviors of your visitors.
When the time comes to initiate direct contact between Sales and the prospect, both seller and buyer are ready to move forward.
6. Automate the Configuration and Pricing Process
When you’re dealing with complex products, flexibility is key—but that complexity also makes the pricing and configuration process a critical step that can easily become cumbersome.
Sales cycles for intricate products often involve a lot of trial and error. Reps and prospects sift through multiple alternatives and options to find the best fit, but this trial-and-error approach can slow down the process and waste time.
Automating the configuration and pricing process is a game-changer. By integrating the configuration into an interactive interview process, you eliminate much of the guesswork. Questions are asked, the customer responds, and those responses drive the options available during the configuration phase.
Once the sales quote configuration is finalized, pricing is automatically calculated, BOMs and itemized part lists are generated, and a comprehensive quote is created—all in real time.
With CPQ software, you eliminate unnecessary iterations, pricing errors, and time-wasting discussions. The result? A faster, more accurate sales process that ultimately leads to more satisfied customers and quicker conversions.
Configure Quotes Faster and Close Deals Sooner with Cincom CPQ
Slow and inefficient quoting doesn’t just delay deals—it puts them at risk. Every extra day spent on revisions, approvals, and pricing checks increases the chances of losing a prospect to indecision or a competitor. By applying the right strategies with Cincom CPQ, your sales teams can configure quotes faster, eliminate bottlenecks, and keep momentum on their side.
Time is money for both sales reps and customers. A seamless quoting process ensures that prospects get the right information at the right time, accelerating their path from interest to commitment. The faster you deliver accurate, competitive quotes, the more deals you’ll close—without the frustration of endless back-and-forth.
Ready to Configure Quotes Faster and Close More Deals? Don’t let slow, inefficient quoting hold your sales back. Streamline your process, eliminate delays, and deliver accurate quotes in record time.
FAQs
1- Why is the quoting process often slow and inefficient?
The quoting process can be slow due to complex product configurations, pricing inconsistencies, lack of centralized product knowledge, and delays in approvals. Without the right tools, sales reps spend too much time on manual tasks, leading to prolonged sales cycles.
2- How can CPQ software help configure quotes faster?
CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) software automates product configuration, pricing calculations, and quote generation. It ensures accuracy, reduces manual errors, and speeds up approvals—helping sales teams generate quotes in minutes instead of days.
3- What roles do product and pricing knowledge play in speeding up quoting?
When sales teams lack easy access to product and pricing details, they rely on internal experts, causing delays. A centralized knowledge base or CPQ system ensures reps have instant access to the latest configurations, pricing, and rules—leading to faster and more accurate quotes.
4- How can automation improve the quoting process?
Automation eliminates the need for manual data entry, price calculations, and configuration approvals. By integrating automated workflows, sales teams can respond to prospects faster, ensuring consistency and accuracy in every quote.
5- How can businesses eliminate bottlenecks in the approval process?
Many quoting delays happen during internal approvals. A CPQ system streamlines this by automating approval workflows, ensuring compliance, and flagging only exceptions for manual review. This keeps deals moving forward without unnecessary roadblocks.