Optimize Sales Conversion with Salesforce CPQ & Einstein Analytics

Every business aims to increase sales and has a specific sales target. Each organization holds numerous meetings and discussions to decide these sales targets.

An organization’s sales team uses elbow grease to achieve them. In this digital era of technology, there are innovative solutions that help companies reach their dedicated target. This software is referred to as CPQ software.

CPQ software is used by various organizations to provide accurate pricing with any given product configuration scenario.

Organizations can avail of the benefits of CPQ software to achieve designed sales targets. CPQ for Salesforce software works in various sections and figures out results with the most accuracy.

According to the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Configure, Price, and Quote Application Suites, CPQ revenue estimates were approximately $1.1 billion. And it is estimated to rise 25% annually through 2020. .

Why CPQ?

CPQ solutions speed up sales activities like quoting, pricing, and sales analyzing.

They increase CRM adoption, boosting sales productivity, offering personalization, and reducing error rates.

• CPQ provides a complete package for a complex working environment.

• It provides effective time management implementation in the sales cycle.

• It highlights key business priorities in order to assist organizations in redesigning their business strategies.

• It helps business owners step toward business expansion.

• Scrutinizing in-depth global market and outlook coupled with the driving factors of the market.

• Enhancing the decision-making process.

What to look for in a CPQ

CPQ software has a significant impact on the whole sales cycle and customer experience, but not all CPQs are created equal.

An efficient CPQ leaves an impact on your bottom line and improves the quoting and ordering experience.

According to CPQ guide, a good CPQ suite should include the following features:

• Easy visual interface

• A cloud-based and mobile-friendly CPQ solution

• Automated Quoting and Pricing Management

• Guided selling

• Integration with ERP/CRM systems

• Advanced Rules Engine

Salesforce CPQ has features that enable any sales team to produce pricing quotations rapidly and accurately.

Some of these features are mentioned below:

a) Approval Process Control

The Salesforce CPQ has far better control over the approval process. It includes approval rules that will determine which approver receives an approval request, and an email template used to send the requests.

b) Sales Automation

Salesforce CPQ makes the sales process faster, easier, and more organized. Salesforce CPQ provides automated sales tools to process important parts of the sales cycle. It helps in selling product combinations, controls discounting, and automates approval.

c) ERP integration

Salesforce CPQ allows you to transfer information from your ERP system to Salesforce and configure two-way integration.

d) Sales Analytics

Salesforce CPQ utilizes its sales analytics features by enabling you to configure products, price orders, and generate quotes while reducing errors and increasing salesperson productivity. It also helps to identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

e) Usage tracking

Salesforce CPQ prepares unique consumption schedules associated with the quote line, subscription, and order product made from that product.

Salesforce CPQ has two pillars on which this software is based on:

• Integration

• Artificial Intelligence

All CPQ software supports product configuration, quote creation, order capturing across multiple customer interaction channels, pricing optimization, and subscription billing features.

Integration is where Salesforce CPQ stands out. This software integrates not only with their own products but they also seamlessly integrate with third-party digital transformation offerings.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) , an immersive technology, has provided great support in predictive analytics.

Salesforce CPQ uses Einstein AI as a CRM assistant for predicting and recommending additional products and services to customers.

Salesforce CPQ Benefits:

1) Effective Time Management

Time management plays a vital role in the entire sales cycle. Efficient and smart processes help to make the organization profitable.

It is observed that an average salesperson spends 35.2% of their time on actual selling, and the rest of their time on non-selling activities like comparison, generating quotes, proposals, and gaining approval.

Salesforce CPQ allows you to manage these factors more efficiently.

Salesforce CPQ is integrated with Salesforce CRM, so it helps any sales team to be ready with all sales-related information on their mobile devices.

Transparency is maintained by discussing all available options with the buyer. Salesforce CPQ shares answers to customer requests give required information about pricing and configuration.

Salesforce CPQ beats the traditional way of mailing/calling by giving new insights into the entire sales cycle.

2) Accuracy in quotes leads to a rise in sales

In the manual method, the salesperson does research manually and writes each quote.

This process is time-consuming. Big deals can be affected when the sales team cannot match the buyer’s needs.

Salesforce CPQ covers the maximum possible scenarios that can be encountered in the sales cycle.

This gives the ability to propose the most accurate and efficient quotes, making your organization more trustworthy.

3) Process speed booster

The sales process must be quicker and must take all irregular circumstances into account. That makes the process all-inclusive.

4) CPQ + CRM = Increased profitability

Salesforce CPQ can be easily integrated with existing CRM software. This combination has proved to increase revenue and efficiency.

The brain behind Salesforce CPQ – Salesforce Einstein Analytics

Salesforce CPQ uses Salesforce Einstein AI, a cloud-based analytical tool.Salesforce Einstein is seamlessly integrated with Salesforce CPQ, featuring the prediction tool with its ability to automate work and responses. It is .

Salesforce Einstein Analytics is unique, compared to its contemporaries. Many reporting tools are available in the market, but all are not designed to analyze complex and large data.

Salesforce Einstein Analytics features data manipulation and visualization, which enable you to explore large and complex datasets quickly and easily.

Many financial organizations that handle sensitive data use Salesforce Einstein Analytics as an analytic tool to have the type of visibility that can prevent data breaches.

What is Salesforce Einstein Analytics?

Salesforce Einstein Analytics is an app that is used to visualize the activity occurring in your sales environment.

This visibility tool offers insights into data (like contacts, campaigns, or accounts) and what your users add to the CRM every day.

Because Salesforce CPQ is built upon Salesforce Einstein AI, it enhances your Quote-to-Cash software implementation, provides winning deals faster, and offers automated billing.

According to the expert’s opinion , Salesforce Einstein Analytics is an excellent tool with various useful analytical uses.

Salesforce Einstein puts the ‘intelligence’ in Artificial Intelligence solutions.

There are four major components of Salesforce Einstein Analytics

1) App

The Salesforce Einstein Analytics app allows you to share the app by the user name, role, and group, each with a different level of access: manager, editor, or viewer.

In the Salesforce Einstein Analytics app, each user manages his/her app called ‘My Private App’. This allows you to store reports.

2) Dashboard

The Salesforce Einstein Analytics dashboard is a key component that is made up of multiple widgets. One can refer to a date filter or list filter as a widget in Salesforce Einstein Analytics.

Einstein Dashboard allows users to explore and analyze the widgets. One of the highlighted features of the Salesforce Einstein Analytics dashboard is faceting.

3) Lens

It is similar to a Salesforce report that sits behind a dashboard. But the only difference is that the Salesforce Einstein Analytics dashboard does not use the lens as a data source.

The Dashboard widget can be explored as a lens by its users; it can be stored in the app for future use. It also enables you to store into My Private App.

4) Dataflow

Dataflow can be depicted as a chain of connected nodes that builds Datasets for data transformation.

Salesforce Einstein Analytics users can manage dashboard requirements and craft the data flow to orchestrate data transformation; the result of dataflow creates Datasets for the dashboard.

How does Salesforce Einstein Analytics work?

Benefits of Einstein Analytics

For a salesperson, using reports and dashboards is a daily task to quickly look up their data, perceive performance, and communicate results.

With the growth of the organization comes a larger volume of data, which becomes more difficult to handle.

Salesforce Einstein Analytics solves the challenge of gathering different types of data in one place.

Salesforce Einstein Analytics

Along with customization and many other features like dashboards, efficient reporting, and analytics ability, Salesforce Einstein Analytics provides the following benefits to any organization:

1) Faster CPQ Implementation Process

Artificial Intelligence enables professional service teams to implement CPQ faster. Salesforce Einstein Analytics in Salesforce CPQ makes the sales process more time-efficient by reducing wasted time in figuring out quotes and pricing.

The objective of Salesforce Einstein Analytics is that one can start with existing implementations, apply an AI layer, and enable it to read current as well as future development and data.

This layering structure allows the Salesforce CPQ to pick up new solutions much faster than a human.

When a new product or process is being introduced, the implementation time is significantly reduced.

Salesforce Einstein Analytics has a pre-stored algorithm mechanism. This eliminates the redundancy procedure of starting from scratch.

2) Shorter Deal Life Cycle

One of the main objectives behind inventing business AI is making the process faster. In sales, Salesforce Einstein Analytics aims at a shorter sales cycle and scoring more deals.

Sales managers can easily learn about what changes are made in the opportunity pipeline in real-time. Viewing this data, sales managers can accurately forecast new deals .

Salesforce Einstein Analytics helps evaluate trends and opportunity categories for the growth of the sales pipeline and provides a list of opportunities to work on, all within the application.

The changes in the sales process automatically reflect the dashboards and data.

3) Sales Einstein Forecasting

Einstein’s predictive forecasting feature enables the sales manager to estimate sales and revenue.

Forecasting dashboards allow users to set up a sales period and prepare for the future quarter and learn when expected deals will close.

Salesforce Einstein Analytics also has a notification feature that intimates when changes in pipelines quantity or modification in deals occur.

Salesforce Einstein Analytics also provides datasets perspective ability, which helps the sales team to get ready with an effective sales process and prepare for bottlenecks.

4) White space Analytics

Salesforce Einstein Analytics has a white space analytics feature that allows the sales manager to focus their time and energy on correcting deals.

Salesforce Einstein Analytics provides the best scenarios prospectively and retrospectively to make the sales process human-like.

It helps increase sales revenue, automates trends, and prepares for future market needs.

Einstein Journey Insights is among the popular features of Salesforce Einstein Analytics, as it predicts the most effective marketing touch points and the optimal sequence of events for lead conversion in Salesforce to improve marketing ROI.

Thus, Salesforce CPQ optimizes the overall sales process. Salesforce CPQ with embedded Salesforce Einstein Analytics makes your sales process efficient and allows you to get closer to your customers.

Source: Sales Conversion with Salesforce CPQ