How do you know when it’s time to reevaluate your existing configure, pricing, and quoting process? Many businesses reach a point where creating quotes for their products and services becomes a drain on their resources, budget, and productivity.

If your team is experiencing delays in getting quotes to customers or finding errors in the sales quotes your team is generating, it may be time to consider a modern CPQ solution that can streamline your end-to-end sales process.

Here are some of the top signs you’re ready for a modern CPQ:

1. Inaccurate or error-prone quotes

Human error is almost inevitable if your sales reps are manually configuring pricing and quoting through spreadsheets and shared documents, and it only takes one typo or miscalculation to slip up in a big way.

In fact, according to a StorageCraft survey, human error accounts for at least 30% of all mistakes in the workplace, especially during repetitive tasks. In today’s competitive environment, businesses need to ensure that their pricing and quoting is 100% accurate. A quote that is filled with errors and inaccuracies can slow down your sales cycle, sabotage deals, or result in lost revenue.

“I think a huge benefit of a modern CPQ is using the fields required to create order forms because it reduces errors,” explained Amy Lin, Head of Revenue Operations at ngrok. “I remember once getting an order form back that said we were going to charge the customer ‘$4.800’ and we didn’t know if that was ‘$4,800’ or ‘$480.’ That ambiguity creates confusion, risk, and wasted time.”

While human errors in sales quotes can be a deal killer, missed opportunities on discounting, bundling, or add-ons can also cost your team deals or revenue. A modern CPQ can ensure that any quote your team is generating offers a complete set of discounts, product configurations, and bundles—something that can easily be missed in a manual quoting process.

2. Slow turnaround times

In today’s digital economy, businesses have to streamline their sales cycle to meet customer demands. If your existing quoting process requires extensive manual inputs, is dependent upon heavy support from other teams (e.g., sales operations, finance), or relies on one or few people for every quote review and approval, it’s not a long-term solution.

“In the early stages, manually customizing every deal was no problem. But as volume increases, manual work is a productivity killer. Any back and forth between finance and sales creates a time gap, and we all know time kills all deals,” Lin said. “Automating anything pre-approved and established keeps deals on track. As your company grows, it’s imperative to have a fast, flexible, and automated quoting system in place.”

According to Aberdeen research findings, sales reps who aren’t using a CPQ solution take 73% more time to produce a typical quote or proposal. Conversely, a CPQ solution simplifies and accelerates your sales cycle by making it easier to generate accurate and error-free quotes. In doing so, businesses are able to reduce their sales cycle up to 28%, dropping the length of the average sale from 4.68 months to 3.42 months.

3. Less focus on selling

The best sales reps focus their efforts on prospecting, closing sales, and maintaining relationships with customers. However, these priorities are all dependent upon time. In a study to determine how much time sales reps actually spent on sales activities, Pace Productivity found that the average sales rep spends only 22% (or 10.8 hours a week) of their time selling and 23% on administrative tasks.

A modern CPQ solution automates many unproductive, time-consuming tasks, lightening the load for your sales team. Moreover, an intuitive and easy-to-use CPQ allows your reps to quickly create even the most complex quotes on their own, without needing to seek help from the deal desk or a CPQ administrator. With a modern CPQ solution, your sales reps can spend less time doing paperwork or troubleshooting an outdated, cumbersome tool and more time out in the field generating leads and driving new business.

4. Poor customer experience

Customer experience is a key factor when making purchase decisions. Delivering a highly personalized buying experience requires sales reps to quickly and easily build customized product offerings, generate accurate pricing, and deliver quotes that meet the customer’s specific requirements. However, this is a challenge for a majority of enterprises.\

A Forbes Insight study reported that “only 36% of executives say they have attained real-time, highly integrated capabilities across all customer channels.” Legacy systems, inefficient processes, and slow sales cycles all negatively impact the customer experience. When 89% of customers are willing to switch to a competitor if they don’t receive the customer experience they expect, businesses need to reevaluate their current setup to meet demands. A modern CPQ solution elevates the customer experience by bringing speed, personalization, accuracy, and efficiencies into the sales process.

This blog post is an excerpt from our eBook "The Definitive CPQ Buyer's Guide for SaaS." To read more, download the full guide here.