SAP CPQ, or Configure Price Quote, is designed to help companies of all sizes and structures create accurate quotes, proposals, and contracts more efficiently to improve sales efficiency, reduce data and configuration errors, increase sales volume, and enhance customer satisfaction across sales teams and business units.
Read on to learn more about SAP CPQ and its key capabilities, as well as where our team of senior-level SAP consultants can fit in your organization (and lead you to success.)
What is CPQ in SAP?
Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) systems help customers leverage intuitive, adaptable configuration processes across their sales channels to make it easier for sales teams to create their own sales quotes, respond to customer quotes, and provide a better sales experience for customers and everyone involved on the sales team.
SAP offers an easy-to-use CPQ solution that enables companies to…
- Leverage cloud-based software to optimize pricing and performance across teams
- Configure complex quotes and improve product configurations and offerings
- Quote complex business offerings more efficiently to accelerate sales
- Simplify sales processes to improve approval times and cut sales cycles over time
- Connect operations in the SAP Sales Cloud with other SAP applications, non-SAP systems, and third-party solutions to improve sales efficiency
- Use embedded AI functionality to facilitate quote automation and acceleration
CPQ functionality within the SAP landscape offers an intuitive configuration process for customers, allowing them to enhance operational efficiency across business units and improve business insights to improve sales opportunities, while also eliminating errors in sales data and helping sales reps reach more customers across their sales channels.
Challenges Addressed by the SAP CPQ Solution
- Human Error: Manual quoting processes often provide greater risk for errors, resulting in broken sales agreements, customer dissatisfaction, and overall loss of revenue. SAP CPQ software combats this by eliminating the need for manual data entry and automating business processes across the entire sales cycle.
- Configurations: Managing complex product configurations and updated versions of your SAP solutions can make it difficult for sales representatives to extend existing business models across organizations and optimize sales processes. With SAP CPQ architecture, sales reps are enabled to improve their sales knowledge and configure optimized solutions.
- Overhead: Manual overhead processes, like quote approvals, discount rates, and product comparisons, can slow down the sales cycle for companies in any industry. SAP CPQ can help with this by streamlining approval processes and improving sales efficiency.
- Manual Processes: With outdated or underperforming sales management tools, sales reps are forced to spend too much time creating complex customer quotes, rather than focusing on finding new customers or making sales. CPQ capabilities in SAP automates these processes to give your sales team greater sales functionality and flexibility.
Key Components of SAP Configure-Price-Quote
1) Optimized Configuration
The configuration engine is the heart of SAP CPQ, as it allows users to define and maintain product configurations and rules, ensuring that only valid configurations can be quoted or ordered within the SAP Sales Cloud.
The configuration engine is highly flexible, making it easier for users to adapt to changing business or industry needs and define complex product models that can accommodate even the most intricate product configurations.
2) Pricing Management
The pricing engine provides the ability to define pricing rules, discounts, promotions, and other incentives for different customers or customer groups to improve sales over time.
Pricing management capabilities within SAP CPQ also support the creation of dynamic pricing based on various factors, such as volume, location, and other customer-specific information to ensure products are priced correctly for target customer groups.
3) Quote Generation
SAP CPQ provides comprehensive quote creation and management capabilities that allow users to create, modify, and track quotes throughout the sales process.
Advanced features like quote approval workflows, quote versioning, and quote collaboration simplify quoting processes and make it easier for customers to maintain sales effectiveness across even the most complex sales cycles.
4) Integrations
SAP CPQ seamlessly integrates with other SAP solutions, like the SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Service Cloud, allowing for the automatic creation of sales orders and the transfer of product and pricing data to downstream systems.
This way, SAP users can support multiple product types at the same time throughout their entire SAP landscape, making workflow automation and optimized pricing across solutions seem like a piece of cake.
5) Analytics and Reporting
The SAP Sales Cloud (and SAP CPQ specifically) provides a wide range of reporting and analytics capabilities that allow users to track sales performance, quote-to-order conversion rates, and other key metrics.
With better data and insights, SAP users can optimize customer-specific pricing strategies, streamline integration of key sales data across business units, and improve sales performance over time.
Main Advantages for Your Organization
- Guided Selling Processes: SAP CPQ offers intuitive guided selling functions that allow sales teams to use customized product configurations to upsell and cross-sell, reducing time-to-value and increasing product reach for customers.
- Scalability: CPQ SAP functionality operates under a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) approach to help customers access solutions anytime, anywhere and scale capabilities up or down as needed to integrate with other applications and maintain efficiency.
- Margin Protection: Channel, product, and customer pricing controls in SAP CPQ help users protect margins for all sales opportunities and increase deal sizes for sales reps.
- Streamlined Configurations: SAP CPQ allows customers to streamline quote configuration and generate quotes with automated exceptions and approval workflows.
- Interoperability: With an interconnected quote-to-fulfillment process, SAP CPQ is able to integrate with SAP and non-SAP solutions, drive engagement between teams, and increase revenue across the board.
How Can We Help?
Whether you need help introducing SAP CPQ implementation processes to each team across your organization, an extra hand conducting sales rep training to ensure CPQ solutions are used correctly and efficiently, or additional support helping users understand how SAP CPQ can connect with other tools in their solution ecosystem, Surety Systems is here to help.
Our team of senior-level SAP consultants has the skills and experience needed to lead you to success, regardless of the scope, scale, or complexity of your project needs.
And, even better, we’ve included a sample profile of one of our top-notch SAP consultants to give you a better idea of what to expect when partnering with us…
Surety Senior SAP CPQ Consultant
- US Citizen
- 24+ years of SAP SD & VC experience
- 17 successful, complete implementation cycles of SAP
- Expert in Variant Configuration; Extensive background tied to SAP Pricing
- Excels with SAP Pricing conditions, procedures, and quotes
- Completion of SAP Callidus Cloud CPQ Boot Camp (2019)
- Maintains 3-4 years of SAP S/4HANA experience
Partnering with the Best
Interested in learning more about our SAP ERP consulting services? Ready to get started on an SAP CPQ implementation or integration project with our team of SAP consultants?
Contact us today for more information!
