Adding tooling to an existing sales, CS, or PS tech stack can feel like a burden, particularly as budgets are getting slashed and revenue teams are being asked to operate as lean as possible.
But recently, the idea of standardizing and templating as much of the sales process as possible is becoming a worthwhile endeavor for many teams in order to drive efficiency and avoid leaving revenue on the table.
This is where CPQ comes into play. “Configure, Price, Quote” tools have been around for decades now, but their use has typically been limited to products with little variability or complexity. While they certainly help in that regard, gaps left in the sales process for selling more variable and custom offerings such as professional services – are often filled by spreadsheets, docs, and homegrown systems.
Enter “Services CPQ”…
What is Services CPQ?
As the name implies, this subset of the CPQ category focuses more so on the configuration, quoting, and pricing of Professional Services, which are often more cumbersome, complex, and less repeatable for sales in comparison to products or SaaS subscriptions.
Furthermore, many Services CPQ platforms can handle services catalogs, and serve as a dynamic and integrated repository of all services skus, pricebooks, and other relevant content, allowing the business to scale and change its offerings quickly and easily.
So what are some signs your business might need a Services CPQ?
1. It takes many days or weeks to get a Statement of Work approved
-Lagging SOW velocity is arguably the top indicator your business needs a Services CPQ, because it’s almost always a sign of multiple smaller issues. Disjointed Sales + CS + PS + Ops + Finance relationship, rudimentary tools that aren’t integrated, slow approval workflows, or a combination of these. Outside of the most complex and custom services use cases, generating an accurate SOW should NEVER take weeks in today’s day and age. A Services CPQ solves this by removing the need for internal back and forth and allowing SOWs to be generated and approved by all relevant teams in a matter of clicks within a single platform.
2. Services content lives in spreadsheets, docs, and elsewhere
-This one is pretty simple – if your sales or CS reps have to even lay eyes on a spreadsheet when configuring or pricing services, then there’s a problem. Don’t get us wrong, we’ve seen some impressive spreadsheets, and we understand you whiz Sales Ops folks may have worked hard connecting 863 Zapiers to create your masterpiece pricing calculator. But let’s face the truth…sheets, docs, and homegrown systems will ALWAYS fall short of a dedicated Services CPQ platform. Why? They simply do not scale and almost always require dedicated time and resources to maintain properly. On top of that, they typically do not integrate well with other upstream and downstream systems in the sales and PS tech stack (CRM, PSA, etc.). Services CPQ provides a scalable, singular source of services truth (say that 5 times fast), so all teams involved can be assured that SOWs are being constructed with 100% accurate pricing and language.
3. Services are being improperly attached to products (or not attached at all!)
-For SaaS organizations, subscription ARR often takes centerstage as the key indicator of business growth. As such, SaaS sales teams have traditionally focused solely on closing SaaS deals and neglect attaching services. Recently though, the shift towards customer retention and renewal metrics has revenue leaders reconsidering the importance of services as a strategic revenue and customer adoption driver. As such, sales teams need to be equipped to easily quote and sell services early on in the sales cycle. The #1 blocker for this that we hear is that sales avoids getting PS involved early in fear of killing the deal or lengthening the sales cycle. Having a Services CPQ fills the role of pre-sales liaison between sales and PS, and is the best way to instill confidence in your sales team to attach the right services quickly and easily to their deals. What we often see for organizations that had this issue is that both average deal size and customer churn metrics SIGNIFICANTLY improve after implementing a Services CPQ.
If any of these three signs apply to your business, or if you’re simply curious about how Services CPQ works, then schedule a free demo of WorkRails.
