Getting to the “right” price for your customer can be difficult and time consuming. How do you know you are pricing correctly? How do you create consistency across your organization? And more importantly, how do you maximize your profitability without losing business?

Navigating your way through these challenges usually requires taking a step back to level-set your current processes. So, where do you start?

Through our extensive work with sales teams, we have identified three success factors that must be in place for effective quoting:

Drive with Guardrails

“Creative” pricing is not sustainable in the long-term. To effectively run your organization, it’s imperative to have a pricing strategy and guardrails. Implement a pricing framework that allows flexibility when needed – order or market driven for example – within limits. Yes, you can still move fast and win deals with an eye on pricing strategy, guidelines, and realistic pricing boundaries.

Increase the Speed

Many quoting processes are manual. They may be on spreadsheets or back-and-forth emails between sales and operations. Who needs to approve the quote? How do you keep track of changes? This time-consuming process can slow down your quote response time. In order to increase the speed—and even accuracy—of your quotes, you must automate the process. Most of our clients are dealing with dynamic pricing elements that are difficult to capture; the more you can automate these inputs, the faster your sales team can focus on customers and selling.

Keep Improving

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said. “Life is a journey, not a destination.” The same is true about pricing. Quoting and never looking back is a recipe for failure. Set a cadence of quote reviews, including feedback from won/lost quotes, sales, customers, and operations. Take advantage of key learnings to refine your strategy, pricing inputs, or target price ranges.

The Bottom Line

When you have the right strategies, processes, and tools in place, the payoff is limitless and may be the difference in achieving—or missing—profitable growth.

Many pricing tools in the market today help with automating your processes, but are just a “one size fits all” approach that leaves out the foundational strategy part of the equation. That’s where a quoting solution like Price Builder CPQ  comes in. Part of our DRIVE cloud-based platform, Price Builder CPQ helps sales teams quote faster, sell better and improve win rate.

If you’re ready to capture the full value of every quote, check the video below to see how Price Builder CPQ can help.