Services CPQ Series: Guided Quoting

 

Modern sales cycles are more complex than ever for professional services organizations (PSOs). Many people, touchpoints, and tools are involved, and all impact the Quote-To-Cash process at every stage. 

Unsurprisingly, PSOs are looking for ways to streamline and optimize the process. That’s why many are turning to a services CPQ platform to help them manage the complexity. Guided Quoting is an integral element that makes it happen. 

This powerful Provus feature is part of our AI-led services CPQ platform. Guided Quoting empowers your sales reps to simplify project scoping services and planning complexity while removing risks from manual errors. 

Your reps are guided through consistent, repeatable, and scalable processes using automated templates. The result is accurate quotes every time. It’s how you can win more deals and deliver exceptional customer experiences. Ultimately, it leads to teams maximizing revenue and optimizing margins.

 

Why Sales Reps Need Guided Quoting

 

Guided Quoting solves many of the challenges sales reps have in day-to-day Quote-to-Cash tasks:

• Out-of-date spreadsheets
  Spreadsheets can not regularly update complex formulas or add new bundles and packages while incorporating localized taxes, shipping fees, and dynamic pricing changes.
• Siloed knowledge
  Unless data flows between teams, many reps are without knowledge when they need it – on a call or face-to-face with a prospect. Reliance on manual processes and tribal knowledge prevents services teams from being connected with the latest information. Improving visibility between teams is business-critical for increasing accuracy and confidence in your lead-to-cash data.
• Lack of audit trail for policy compliance
  Sales teams have unprecedented volumes of data to be managed. Without some form of centralization, it’s hard to maintain and surface audit-ready visibility.
• Tribal knowledge causes inconsistencies
  Without guided quoting, you have a spectrum of salespeople. Each has their individual preferences and experiences that drive their sales behaviors. They may also have certain services offerings and deal structures they prefer to lead with. Rather than leading with what’s best for maximizing revenue or optimizing margins
• Incorporate historical quoting data and share learnings
  Longer projects usually mean more complexity. Without historical data, there’s little to guide quoting or build alternative and contingency quotes. 

 

How Guided Quoting Accelerates Sales Cycles

 

Quote Wizard

Let’s say you’re quoting for a large multinational. 

Of course, because the project is so wide-ranging, there will be a wide range of scenarios to model, involving resource mixes, locations, project phases, etc. Plus training and other sessions can be opportunities to increase revenue. Quote Wizard ensures you include all the relevant steps. 

 

Multi-Service Templates

When creating quotes, your sales reps can switch quoting templates to check which elements are included in different services offerings. Giving you an automated way to compare, rather than manually configuring quotes. 

They can access easy-to-use templates, to automatically determine the services offered. Naturally, this saves time when dealing with large catalogs, ensuring only the relevant services are shown.

 

Flexible Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

This feature ensures visibility and clarity for what goes into a quote. You can also add guidance notes that automatically appear in the SOW template. Whether that’s specific instructions for each step or rationale to explain why and when a step is or isn’t needed. If the prospect wants to see how a longer project looks, add more milestones with a few clicks and review the impact.

 

Flexible Scoping Questionnaire

You can create different phases, to capture project requirements quickly and accurately. Maybe Delivery, strategy, consulting. These can be used based on how the prospect wants to proceed. They are free to request changes, while you maintain visibility over costs. There’s also the option to invite collaborators to review specific parts of the quote, or simply use their expertise to solve a bottleneck.

 

Excel-Like Formula Builder

Easy-to-learn functionality to ensure the successful adoption of new technology. That’s why Guided Quoting offers formula-building that’s familiar to any Excel user. With the calculations stored within the system, this keeps one centralized version you can invite others to join. There is no need to create local versions or risk data errors when formulas are manually copied and pasted.

 

Service Quoting Enhancements

The enhancements can be applied across your business. Support your staff for guided selling at pace. Enable your team to implement more advanced sales strategies, providing tools to be used in managed services, consulting services, and asset-based services.

 

How Guided Quoting Benefits Your Organization

 

There are three main areas where Guided Quoting improves your lead-to-cash selling processes. What’s more, they offer both immediate and longer-term benefits.

 

Revenue Maximization

Guided Quoting provides a basis for uncovering, recommending, and adding extra services – and revenue opportunities – to quotes. Sales reps have everything available when it comes to upselling and cross-selling, without having to worry about errors when creating complex quotes. 

A more streamlined process means faster time to market, optimized deal cycle lengths, and fewer scoping calls needed. Customers gain deal structures that better suit their needs. So they’re more likely to renew and contribute further to maximizing revenue.

Guided Quoting lays the foundations for building repeatable frameworks to attract and retain customers. There’s peace of mind for sales reps too. The predefined values help to maintain profitability and reduce revenue risks when testing incremental price changes. For example, when offering add-ons, introductory and tiers, or recurring services with baked-in discounts for renewing. 

 

Margin Optimization

Once that agreement or SOW becomes legally binding, you’ll soon find out the true profitability of a deal. However, unless it’s a fixed repeatable process, there will be some uncertainty around the edges especially when there have already been several rounds of proposals, updates, and potentially missed service areas.

Guided Quoting helps solve the risk. You can leverage what-if scenarios to achieve a margin-optimized resource mix, effort, and schedule while minimizing scope risk. You can customize pricing on a particular service, or adjust based on new and established customers, discovering where there are opportunities to increase gross margins. 

You can model multiple combinations at pace to keep momentum high while ensuring your prices reflect emerging competitors and industry trends. Explore the potential impact of volatile macroeconomic factors, such as inflation or disrupted supply chains. You can also set up churn modeling, to discover where to limit potential revenue leaks and expose risks.

 

Value-Added Compliance

Utilizing one central system, knowledge can be more easily accessed, shared, and scaled. 

Naturally, this cross-functional approach helps to share knowledge, add value, and support compliance. Logging each interaction automatically helps build traceability. This leads to greater opportunities for revenue, thanks to higher confidence when planning margin optimization. This transparency will help support legal requirements around auditing and visibility.

Clone existing quotes to ensure consistency ensuring quotes follow pre-agreed structures and contain the necessary disclaimers. You can also use conditional logic to speed up document generation. For example, you can automatically generate a contract based on the services sold.

 

Bringing Structure To Unstructured Data

 

With Provus Guided Quoting, your data is captured, organized, and formatted for you. Then it’s a case of sending out for e-signing, something you can do in just a few clicks, freeing you to focus on quoting and closing deals.