When customers call you for a quote, how long does it take you to get one back to them? If your answer involves the words ‘hours’ or ‘days’, chances are you’re losing business due to lengthy response times.

Customers appreciate having market-relevant pricing available immediately when requested, especially if they’ve been shopping around. Businesses can benefit tremendously – in terms of operational efficiencies, customer satisfaction, win/loss rates, and profitability – by implementing a quoting process that gives customer service representatives the opportunity to close the sale before hanging up the phone. But how do you make that happen?

You need a simple quoting interface that empowers Sales Reps or CSRs to make quick, educated decisions that allow them to generate a quote that meets your expected price or margin targets in 60 seconds. As part of our engagements, we frequently design a customized quoting tool (or CPQ) to enable our clients to do just that. In one example, our quoting improvements eliminated 6,400 hours of quote support time!

Here are some considerations when implementing a quoting tool:

  • Analyze your historical quoting data and processes to ensure the quoting tool meets your requirements.
  • Incorporate your key price drivers and segmentation factors (e.g. customer market, size of the order, competitive nature of the product, etc.)
  • Allow for dynamic price driver updates for rapid response to market and situational changes (e.g. tariffs, capacity or inventory levels, competitive dynamics, etc.)
  • Include caps, floors, and multi-level approvals workflows to empower your team to make educated pricing decisions.
  • Measure and monitor all factors of the tool – its frequency of use, CSRs’ compliance to its pricing recommendations, to what extent you’re winning new business because of it (win/loss analysis), and whether customer satisfaction increasing.

Full transparency into quoting activities and behaviors will ensure best practices are adopted so that the right price for the right customer is always quoted.

You hired your sales & customer service representatives to be relationship experts, not pricing experts. Give them the quoting tools and pricing support they need so they can focus on what they do best – serving your customers.

For more information about how to help your organization respond to customer inquiries in real-time to maximize profitability and close the sale, contact us.