This is the second in an eight-part series looking at the typical failure points in the last mile of the sales cycle, often referred to as the Quote-to-Cash process.

In our last installment we set up the overall Quote-to-Cash (QTC) process, discussing how you’ve automated nearly all of your marketing and sales processes, yet the “last mile”—that gap between an opportunity and a signed contract—remains a tangled web of manual processes and risky, uncontrolled documents.

In this and the subsequent installments, we’ll break QTC down into its stages and dive into each. Today we’re going to look at the initial step of the quote: the selection and configuration of products and services you’ll present to the potential customer.

Your initial offer sets the relationship’s foundation

When it comes time to put together an initial quote for an opportunity, do you look forward to the process or are you filled with dread?

In many companies, building a quote is a manual process where spreadsheets are consulted, documents are gathered, and reviews are made. All the while you’re never really sure that the information is current, you’re using the latest pricing, the products and/or services are all complementary, or you’ve included the correct SKUs or add-ons.

It’s an error-prone process that can come back to bite you later, whether you have to explain internally how you quoted the wrong price or offerings to a customer, or have to explain to a customer that your quote had mistakes that might impact their costs. In either case, it’s not a pleasant feeling.

More importantly, mistakes and delays at this “select & configure” stage of the process, the first step in the last mile of your sales deal, can undermine the entire relationship by creating a weak foundation for what should be a long and valuable relationship.

Errors and delays are cracks in the foundation

As you build your initial offer for a potential customer, you are taking the first step toward making your relationship official. Even minor errors at this point can create ripples that derail a deal later in the cycle. Using static sources of information, like pulling pricing from a spreadsheet on your laptop, just adds to the risk. Are you sure you have the latest version? Are you pulling the correct items? If you choose this product, what’s the best add-on product to offer?

Having choices compounds the challenge, regardless of the complexity in your offerings. Companies with relatively simple offerings even have to overcome these potential points of error: Does our volume discount kick in at 100 units, or did we change that to 75? Should I offer the notepads in white, or does this industry prefer yellow? Is my best upsell offer the plastic pallets or the metal pallets?

Everyone who relies on manual processes recognizes these potential errors, and just knowing the high likelihood of errors causes delays. Instead of emailing your initial offer to a customer, it has to be reviewed by your manager, and then her manager, and then legal, and then finance. Oh, and Maggie in legal is on vacation, so who should review it?

Those delays offer openings for competitors and decrease the productivity of your customer-facing teams because, instead of selling, they’re buying time and making excuses. Furthermore, with an inherently manual process and no controls over information, the risks actually increaseas more people review and approve. It’s counter-intuitive, but what if legal is working from a different spreadsheet than finance, and they make an edit that’s subsequently missed?

All of this adds up to create cracks in the very foundation you’re trying to build with your customer. It comes down to trust. In the next step of the process, pricing & quoting, you’re actually putting this offer in front of the customer so you’d better be sure it’s complete, accurate, and approved.

A guided process ensures consistency and conformity

Automated QTC helps guide sales reps through the process of selecting and configuring technically valid products and services that match the specifics of the deal and the customer.

If you’ve ever built a new car on a manufacturer’s website, you know exactly how this works. Select the leather seats and you’re forced to choose the bigger wheels. Add the floor mats and you’re offered black or gray, but not brown because you chose a blue exterior and brown mats aren’t offered with that exterior color.

Guiding the select and configure process gives all of the power to your frontline team to build an initial offer while ensuring that it’s always accurate and complete. It’s guided selling through questions, and the answers dictate not only the choices offered, but the subsequent questions. It eliminates the chance of error and helps reps make the right choices, use the right information, and include the right add-ons or up-sells.

That power leads to substantially increased productivity. Reps are empowered to put offers together on their own, with the confidence to know that they aren’t making guesses or might have to make uncomfortable changes later in the process. It helps new reps be productive almost immediately, because there’s no chance of error. And it lets reps build an offer and quickly move to the next step or focus on other deals rather than chase approvals through your organization.

The rules and automation built into QTC also help you sell more by automatically including up-sell offers or highlighting cross-sell opportunities that a rep might miss. The combination of faster select & configure, along with the ability to offer more while having the time to sell more, all adds up to revenue growth.

Case study: Nimble Storage

Nimble Storage has grown since its beginnings in 2008, and with that growth has come an increase in products, now totaling more than 600 line items. Prolific output can be a good thing for a company, but the existing solution for building an offer couldn’t keep up with the need for quick releases.

Nimble Storage needed an affordable quoting tool that was seamless with its existing Salesforce CRM platform and would streamline the quoting process, so they chose Salesforce CPQ.

For Nimble Storage, quoting didn’t just get faster and easier, it also got more accurate. Before Salesforce CPQ, one in every five quotes created manually contained errors in pricing, configuration, or account information. With Salesforce CPQ, the accuracy of product configuration options in quotes rose to nearly 100 percent, even as reps created multiple quotes.

Want to learn more about how Nimble Storage improved quote accuracy with Salesforce CPQ? Download our customer stories.

Next installment

Next, we’ll dive into the next phase of the QTC process: price & quote. This phase is where pricing and discounting consistency can cause havoc, but also where your sales team can get bogged down with generating detailed quotes from scratch.