According to research by Bain & Company, “leading sales operations teams attribute 60% or more of their total pipeline in any quarter to actively designed and deployed sales plays. The playbook provides a reliable view of whether they are on track, and if not, recommends ways to deploy more targeted, alternative plays.”

Without a playbook, the sales process is largely guesswork. Without the tools to integrate that playbook into your sales team’s everyday workflow, it’s essentially useless.

The good news is that you can integrate a Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solution into your sales playbook for a more robust resource, leading to scalable and predictable results.

How a sales playbook and CPQ align for sales growth

A sales playbook and CPQ software represent two essential components of a sales organization’s toolkit that can align seamlessly to drive sales growth. A sales playbook serves as the strategic guide that outlines the overall sales process, best practices, and customer engagement strategies. CPQ software complements it by providing the tactical tools and resources to execute those strategies effectively.

When these two elements are integrated, they create a powerful synergy that streamlines the sales process and empowers sales teams to operate with precision.

The sales playbook sets the strategic direction by defining the ideal customer profile, sales messaging, and sales methodologies. It guides salespeople through each stage of the sales cycle, helping them understand customer pain points and preferences. When CPQ software is integrated into this playbook, it translates these strategic insights into practical actions.

Sales professionals can use CPQ software to configure tailored solutions, generate accurate quotes, and recommend complementary products or services in real time. This alignment ensures that sales teams have the right resources at their fingertips to engage customers effectively, resulting in faster and more personalized sales interactions.

Moreover, the data and insights gathered from CPQ software can feed into the sales playbook, enabling you to continually refine your organization’s sales strategies and adapt to changing market conditions. In this way, integrating a sales playbook and CPQ software creates a dynamic and growth-oriented sales environment that fosters improved close rates, increased revenue, and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Integrate CPQ solutions into your sales playbook

Integrating Configure Price Quote (CPQ) software into your sales playbook can significantly optimize your sales process and improve close rates in the following ways:

1. Reinforces your sales culture

Your playbook lets new hires acclimate quickly to the organization and its operating methodology. Likewise, it reinforces your sales culture by standardizing best practices and putting guardrails in place that ensure sales success.

When your CPQ solution becomes a seamless part of your sales playbook, new hires can hit the ground running. Productivity is improved, leads are easily qualified, and opportunities can be closed almost instantly.

2. Streamlines product configuration

CPQ software allows salespeople to configure complex products or services based on customer needs with ease. This capability is critical for selling custom-manufactured products, subscription enterprise SaaS products, or bundled services. Integrating this functionality into the sales playbook ensures sales teams can quickly generate accurate and customized quotes, eliminating errors and reducing turnaround time in your sales cycle.

3. Ensures product and pricing accuracy

Another challenge new hires typically have to overcome is learning the organization’s entire product catalog. CPQ software is linked to current product catalogs and pricing databases. By incorporating this real-time data access into the sales playbook, your sales team can stay up-to-date with product offerings, promotions, and pricing changes, enabling them to provide the most relevant and competitive solutions to customers.

Additionally, CPQ tools ensure pricing calculations and discounts are consistent and aligned with company policies. By incorporating pricing guidelines and rules from the CPQ system into the sales playbook, you can ensure your salespeople always provide customers with accurate and competitive pricing, increasing their trust and improving conversion rates. Additionally, all inventory is tracked to reduce order errors.

4. Guides selling

Guided selling is one of the most essential capabilities of CPQ software. CPQ takes the guesswork out of customizing sales conversations based on the customer’s needs by prompting salespeople to ask the right questions and recommend the most suitable products or configurations to meet customer needs. By embedding these sales guidance prompts and decision-making trees within the sales playbook via CPQ, you can ensure your sales team consistently follows a customer-centric approach and maximize upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

5. Automates quote generation

CPQ systems can automate the creation of quotes that will appeal most to your target audience. Integrating this automation into the playbook enables sales teams to generate professional and customized documents quickly, reducing administrative overhead and ensuring a consistent brand image.

6. Provides analytics and reporting

Many CPQ tools offer analytics and reporting capabilities that help organizations gain insights into sales performance and customer preferences. By including these reporting features in the sales playbook, sales teams can leverage data-driven decision-making and continuously improve their sales strategies.

Integrating CPQ within your broader sales framework also enables sales managers to track their sales team’s activities in real time, ensuring that all days are productive and feedback is based on data insights.

Improving close rates with a tighter sales process

Integrating CPQ software into a sales playbook enhances the sales process by streamlining configuration, ensuring pricing accuracy, guiding salespeople, automating proposal generation, and providing access to real-time data and analytics. A more efficient and effective sales process ultimately leads to improved close rates and higher customer satisfaction.

If your sales playbook needs an update, integrating with a CPQ solution could be the ticket to ensure a frictionless buying and selling experience for your customers and sales team.

The post 6 reasons to integrate CPQ into your sales playbook appeared first on DealHub.

The idea behind this quote is certainly applicable to sales teams. In fact, it underpins the need for a sales playbook (a.k.a. guided selling playbook) in your organization. Creating a sales playbook and putting it in the hands of your team helps to create a better and healthier sales culture. It also creates an immediate positive impact on your bottom line, and we’ll get into that shortly.

A playbook puts your sales team on the same page, transforming them from a group of individuals who independently score an occasional win, into a revenue engine that’s been optimized to perform. Ask any sales leader if they’d prefer to operate with or without a sales playbook, and the response will be overwhelming, if not unanimous.

Building a winning sales team isn’t just about personality, work ethic or cultural fit. Process is something that affects each and every employee, and this is where a guided selling playbook can become a sales manager’s best friend. It’s what enables you to train reps along established guidelines, implement sales best practices across the org, and lay the foundation of a successful sales culture.

In a recent episode of our RevAmp podcast, Saro Zargarian, Director of Sales Operations at Blueshift, said, “When you hire and build a sales org, don’t just look for that individual who is great at what they do, but how that hire fits within the culture and mindset you’re trying to establish across the entire sales org.” He then went on to explain how a sales playbook was essential to enforcing that mindset.

What is a sales playbook?

A sales playbook is designed to queue up a series of questions that branch out into different paths based on what your sales reps enter and/or your customer needs. Each answer is then used to determine the most appropriate product or service, price, and other considerations that will help close the deal. The outcome? A simpler and faster sales proposal process, more satisfied customers, and more accurate offerings based on established rules and pre-approved best practices.

Guided selling leverages a sales tool that asks your reps a series of questions about the core properties of their deal. The answers are then run through a set of rules defined by management. The result is a quote that aligns perfectly with the strategies created by sales and revenue leaders.

The best way to implement guided selling is via a sales playbook that shows sales reps what they should do in any given situation during the sales proposal process. In addition to helping them make the most strategic selling decisions, it accelerates sales training for new reps, and is a valuable resource that any rep can use to recall and implement best practices in real time. The end result is that sales reps across the organization are more consistent in their selling behavior, and each one is empowered to close more deals – and bigger deals – faster. 

The sales playbook is just a small part of what CPQ automation has to offer. CPQ software configures the right products to sell to your customer, whether you offer simple or very complex products.

By creating a B2B sales playbook template, sales leaders can quickly get new hires up to speed and get their whole sales team operating uniformly and effectively. The first step is to establish CPQ configuration rules and scenarios based on particular constraints. Whether its configurations are based on customer type, location, company size, or a combination of other factors, a sales playbook lets you accurately sell to each and every customer.

The benefits of a sales playbook

Shifting from a culture where inconsistency is common and mistakes are made routinely, to one where speed and accuracy are the norm, doesn’t happen overnight. It takes hard work and dedication. But sales playbooks make it incredibly easy.

Let’s get into the four key ways a sales playbook can transform your sales culture.

1. Standardization of best practices

Best practices may include the establishment of repeatable and successful processes, like knowing when it is appropriate to give a discount and how large that discount should be. Using a CPQ with guided selling ensures your sales reps are not able to give discounts outside the profit margin without managers’ approval.

DealHub CPQ includes built-in playbooks that enable sales reps to operate freely within certain limits, like around pricing, for example. At the same time, it enables them to accelerate their sales process with automated discount-approval workflows.

2. Empower sales reps to sell more strategically

Enable sales reps to offer products that are better aligned with their client’s needs. Guided selling will also automatically remind sales reps of any appropriate upsells and cross-sells that relate to the requested service or product. Selling more strategically drives deals towards closing sooner – and, ideally, for a larger amount.

3. Prioritize people over process

Automating these manual processes allows your sales reps to scale their processes and reach more clients than ever before.  Your sales reps now have a chance to perform more discovery and focus on their new leads with all the time saved. By creating this environment of caring for your sales reps time, you foster a trusting and motivated culture.

4. Refocus your reps on their clients

Time is precious, especially in business. Give your sales reps more time in their day so  they can focus on the needs of their customers and build trusted relationships, instead of wasting hours trying to work through manual processes and disconnected tools. If your sales reps can send proposals and quotes to their prospects more quickly than your competitors, you can shorten time to revenue, scale your sales team more effectively, and close more deals. 

Transform your sales culture with a guided selling playbook

Salespeople are a unique breed – they’re often fiercely independent and highly competitive. And some might be hesitant when it comes to using sales software like CRM and CPQ solutions. But it’s important to remember that building a culture of guidance and best practices comes before everything. 

With the right tools to foster a positive sales culture, your salespeople will embrace being part of a winning team. Streamlining the product configuration, pricing and quoting process by automating those time-intensive and error-prone tasks can have several huge impacts.

Implementing a sales playbook will make new hires more effective more quickly, and will unleash the full potential of your seasoned salespeople. Standardizing best practices and putting guard rails in place sets the whole team up for success. This is why DealHub’s Revenue Platform empowers leaders to connect their teams and processes – to foster a sales culture built around people, not processes.

Do you consider the impact of processes on your sales culture? Saro Zargarian shares his thoughts on building a sales culture and the impact of a sales playbook in this RevAmp podcast episode. A sales playbook can usher in real change for your sales culture. But it also provides the powerful digital transformation your company needs.

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