Why an efficient access quoting process is so important
In this era of self-serve, convenience and automation, companies are feeling the pressure to provide instant results to their consumers. Demands for connectivity, and other complex solutions are placing a spotlight on organizational inefficiencies, forcing telcos to reinvent the way they provide services to consumers.
A key area in ensuring an efficient and accurate provision of services to customers is around pricing and third-party access quoting. At the pricing stage, quick response time, personalization and accuracy are incremental for a successful sales process.
Organizations and their sales personnel are often held back by legacy architecture with disconnected data and systems that force them to undertake tedious, repetitive, mundane manual tasks that consume their day and hinder their productivity.
As a result, customers are no longer satisfied with the speed at which they receive quotes, having a negative push on profitability. Welcome relief comes in the form of real-time quoting and CPQ to offset these shortcomings.
The quoting challenge
Quoting processes historically tend to be long and complex due to legacy tech set ups of many telco providers, making it difficult to scale processes and implement changes. Sales teams have to manually build quotes themselves - often on Excel sheets - and gather necessary information from various emails and sources.
Held back by tedious, manual steps, sales reps end up wasting 66% of their time solely on unproductive tasks: organizing and relying on data in Excel increases the chances of creating inaccurate prices, discounts and promotions. Employees find themselves pulling their quotes from disparate spreadsheets and manually track orders.
Quotation time can last weeks, when it should be hours - creating severe bottlenecks. The time it takes to chase down a sales manager to get an approval on a discount or lower prices leaves room for competitors to come in and close the deal. The manual nature of generating quotes creates errors, delays and customer dissatisfaction, with 82% of existing customers churning because of bad customer service.
Local access quoting: Why you have to quote faster
Speed is the currency of the digital economy. Businesses have to be able to execute their processes both reliably, and at speed. With customers being king, they expect nothing less than lightning-fast service.
With 52% of consumers willing to pay more for a speedy and efficient customer experience, businesses need to look at their processes and streamline their sales cycle to meet demands. Getting your quotes out quickly is a must to make a positive first and ongoing impression with customers.
Sales reps spend only 34% of their time selling, the majority of their time is spent creating quotes, proposals or gaining approvals. This reflects the inefficient, time consuming nature of organization's current quoting processes. Sales representatives need to spend more time on value-adding tasks such as finding new customers.
With the removal of manual processes and the need to monitor data and markets thanks to automation, sales reps are able to ensure that quotes are 100% accurate and time is used more efficiently.
CPQ to the rescue
With the help of a CPQ solution, sales reps are able to streamline the quoting process through providing an automated, scalable solution that can process and produce quotes all in real time.
It takes non-CPQ users 73% more time to produce a typical quote or proposal. Through the use of an advanced CPQ solution, businesses are able to optimize this process helping them:
- Sell more effectively across your own and partner services to boost
conversion and maximize deal value - Shorten quote times from weeks or days to hours and minutes and increase sales volume 3-4x without increasing pre-sales headcount costs
- Deliver vastly more accurate first quote pricing to maximize chance of down-selection in deals
- Ensure deal profitability while maintaining price competitivity with integrated negotiation and pricing approvals
- Automate delivery of services across your partner ecosystem: increase reliability, improve supplier relationships and manage to customer SLAs
- Use accurate site and supplier information to benchmark pricing, identify trends and guide capital investment to optimize margins
By eliminating time-consuming processes, creating a centralized system with zero room for error, and automating tedious tasks, a CPQ solution leaves employees more room to focus on value-enhancing processes.
