I bet you’d agree that the Salesforce CRM has revolutionized the way sales teams function. If only all our companies had expanded revenue by 38% last year! But even Salesforce has its shortcomings. Case in point—sales quotes, especially when it comes to product selection.

The basic Salesforce product selection functionality is a bit lacking in the user-friendliness department. Sales people constantly must retype prices, order quantities, and other information, which leaves tainted data in the system. This is dirty data is problematic in more ways than one.

Shortcuts Lead Nowhere Fast

Sales teams try to make up for product configuration deficiencies by copying and pasting data back and forth between the Salesforce application and programs like Excel. While this is certainly faster than the manual approach, this method is prone to errors – lots of them.

Excel, in particular, lacks features such as the ability to apply discounts. And then there’s the clunky interface that does not lend itself to importing high volumes of product data between two repositories.

More often than not, having your pricing information and rules scattered across multiple applications spells trouble. It makes sales teams more susceptible to submitting sales proposals with incorrect prices, inaccurate configurations, and even incompatible products. These data entry errors can be very costly.

Reps Want an Easy Ride

In terms of the sales cycle, reps are generally concerned about two things:

1. Their commissions

2. How easy their sales tools are to use

The less easy a task is to complete, the less likely salespeople are to do it well—or at all. When reps aren’t on the ball, it limits the visibility sales managers have into the pipeline. This not only makes it harder for them to see what is and what isn’t working in their team—it hinders their ability to coach reps to close sales and generate accurate forecasts.

(SOURCES: @stephantopher, @telnotes)

Under these conditions, creating sales quotes and orders with accuracy and efficiency is difficult at best. The lack of granular, up-to-date data in the CRM hurts everyone—reps, partners, customers, but especially the company.

(SOURCES: Neil Curran, Edson Maciel)

Solutions for the Complex Sales Cycle

Companies today have complex requirements when it comes to the product configuration, pricing, and opportunity management aspects of their sales processes. For these organizations, the standard tools in Salesforce aren’t enough. The more complex your sales cycle, the better suited your organization is for a configure price quote (CPQ) solution.

Advances in software technology are making the sales quoting process more reliable than ever. They are robust enough to deliver the out-of-box functionality sales teams require, and flexible enough to support existing systems and platforms.

Optimizing Administrative Tasks in Salesforce

Businesses who add CPQ applications to the Salesforce CRM are skyrocketing revenue in the following ways:

• Streamlined Efficiency – The product configuration feature in a CPQ solution automatically populates data for sales quotes into opportunities in Salesforce. It also provides the ability to quickly and easily customize product bundles. This translates to the user-friendly environment reps need to work with fast, streamlined efficiency.

• Improved Quality - Thanks to automated bundling suggestions, like that of QuoteQuickly’s Guided Selling functionality, reps can select the bundles they need from a list of relevant options. Now sales managers can ensure both quality and accuracy before sales quotes are sent.