Salesforce, throughout the years, has enabled organizations to connect with their customers in more personalized and agile ways. However, as telecom enterprises are growing quickly and maturing, it becomes difficult for a CRM system to overcome the increasing sales requirements on its own. To address this challenge, Salesforce has introduced an enterprise-grade CPQ solution that scales with the organization as it grows. In this blog post, we will walk through the amazing functionalities of Salesforce CPQ tool for telecommunications service providers.
Why Salesforce CPQ
Many telecom enterprises aim to eliminate paper and spreadsheet processes to improve their quote-to-purchase times. And Salesforce CPQ implementation is exactly what they need. It is flexible and easy to integrate into your IT infrastructure and moreover, it supports most of the guided selling channels. Salesforce CPQ features not only enables a traditional telecom company with improved quoting, standardized discounting across countries and customers, but also provides sales analysis with accurate quotes and purchases. Basically, it is an end-to-end product that serves the entire sales operation by standardizing all quoting and pricing processes.
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Awesome benefits of Salesforce CPQ for a telecom company:
- Streamlines the entire quoting process
- Allows sales agents to understand pricing faster
- Saves salespeople from manual quoting and pricing
- Offers cross-channel and multinational capabilities
- Increases efficiency in quote approvals
- Provides instant access to quotes and pricing
Here’s how Salesforce CPQ can be utilized by telecom service providers
The needs of telecom customers are varied, and everyone requires a personalized combination of devices, data services, promotional plans, financing terms, trade-in arrangements and many other services. But, at the same time, sales reps struggle to put all requirements in one bucket and show the final quote. Data may not be centralized; service rules may be conflicting and even their databases may be inaccessible to them. Thus, sales teams often end up creating inaccurate quotes, resulting in orders falling out.
As much as we know about the challenges that the telecom sector faces, CPQ solution is an ideal fit. It empowers your sales agents to configure, price and quote any combination of products and services. Creating ad-hoc quotes and understanding internal costs becomes relatively easy for the sales reps. Besides, the CPQ tool also enables incorporating eligibility criteria, financing terms, sales occasions, customer segments and operator channels. This feature is quick to launch and simple to integrate.
Before a quote is turned into an order, Salesforce CPQ assures accurate pricing, even when thousands of variables are combined. Moreover, it validates each quote to make sure it is technically sound and commercially feasible.
Using the Salesforce CPQ tool, your sales reps can prepare an internal quote with real-time pricing and discounts. They can also combine different offers during the negotiation process while the software retains all past versions of the quote. The quote is then formatted for email and print. Once accepted, the quote is automatically fed to the CPQ software for any other fulfillment.
Introduce flexible subscription plans
Upselling and cross-selling of products and services generate more revenue than traditional selling. Telecom companies are hooked up on asset-based ordering. Apart from telecom service providers, other retail businesses are also encouraged to know about subscription models that help to upsell or cross-sell new products to their existing customers. Thus, Salesforce CPQ is designed to configure, price and quote products in the interest of telecom providers and accommodate them with cloud solutions.
Let’s discuss a scenario for better understanding:
Let’s say, Andrew has just shifted to a new city and he contacts the local telecom provider to avail a phone, broadband, and television connection. Most likely, the company will configure quotes as per Andrew’s requirements and send it further for fulfillment and approval. Andrew’s service request will appear in the CPQ portal when the fulfillment system activates all the services.
Now, during summer, Andrew decides to watch his favorite historical shows, so he contacts customer service and requests to add ‘History Pack’ in his subscription. Therefore, the agent modifies Andrew’s subscription plan in CPQ and submits the quote for fulfillment. Interestingly, the agent gets an opportunity to sell and successfully cross-sells ‘Music Pack’. Moreover, before the new pack gets activated, Andrew calls back and requests to add ‘Movie Pack’. The agent reconfigures the current quote and now as per Andrew’s request, CPQ will show History Pack, Music pack and Movie Pack in the new quote as getting fulfilled.
Andrew’s subscription can be easily terminated when he moves out of town again or when he fails to pay his bills on time. In both situations, the agent can simply initiate a termination within the CPQ software. This way, the features of Salesforce CPQ tool can successfully act as a good selling point for saturated markets of the telecom domain.
Take away
It is indeed time for telecom providers to transcend their business requirements by using Salesforce CPQ. Accelerate your time to market for new products and services as CPQ will let you resolve sales cycles challenges fast. If you wish to know more about how you can get started with Salesforce CPQ software, get in touch with our experts.
