Ever-changing technological advancements, management styles, and enterprise needs brought a greater reliance on the IT department than ever before. A few years ago, the IT department was formed to handle recorded data & info. Today, the IT department is critical for enterprises of diversified verticals and responsible for involving People, Processes, Data, Tools, and Technology to do its functions such as:
- Governance: authorizing people to use specific frameworks, data sources, technologies, and processes.
- Infrastructure: hardware, network, and other equipment equivalent to the number of people in an organization.
- Functionality: data, software usage, and maintenance by people for accomplishing processes using different business technologies.
- Network maintenance
- App development
- Communication
- Website maintenance and others
For performing all the tasks via people, processes, tools, & technologies, data is the critical element in improving the efficiency of overall IT functions.
Tools & Technology– enable repetitive processes to execute as per governance policies.
Processes– people follow agreed processes to ensure due diligence of stewardship & accountability along the value chain.
People– leverage technology and tools to accelerate process execution.
In this blog, let’s understand how people and processes rely on CPQ software (under tools & technologies) and see how they are interdependent in generating revenue by using CPQ Software.
Firstly, CPQ software – a Configure price quote solution is essential for streamlining the lead-to-cash process in any organization.
Sales, Product, Revenue, Customer Service teams & other stakeholders get involved in the lead-to-cash process.
IT systems like CRM, ERP, and other business technologies can improve the efficiency of the lead-to-cash process by using CPQ solutions only to ensure data quality, accessibility, authenticity, security, and integrity.
Apart from having good quality data, the essential thing is the proper INTEGRATION of IT systems and CPQ software.
Why is it essential to integrate CPQ software with other IT systems?
It is wise to bring people, processes, data, tools & technologies together (i.e., front and back-of-the-house processes) to save time, costs, and productivity.
For instance, you can handle front-of-the-house processes like management of sales, products, pipeline, and quoting using the CPQ system. You can manage back-of-the-house processes like lead and master data management, inventory, invoicing, production, order fulfillment, and other processes using IT systems like CRM, ERP, and other business technologies.
Without the integration of CPQ and IT systems: It becomes cumbersome for the business teams to juggle around the processes to move the data captured from IT systems, and this will result in errors, time consumption, negative ROI, no visibility of cash flow, and inability in managing the entire customer lifecycle.
On the contrary, integrating these two systems can automate the data’s back-and-forth movement and eliminate human errors, fastening the process by making data agile and visible on both ends.
Most importantly, your investment in CPQ software can support your company to pave the way for more efficient and profitable sales only on proper implementation of CPQ and integration of CPQ with IT systems.
How does CPQ & IT system integration matter for businesses?
These are the top four benefits you can expect after the proper CPQ & IT systems integration:
- A better understanding of customer requirements along with up-sell and cross-sell opportunities
- Increase the number of deals with higher profit margins
- Reduce turn-around-time in responding to customers with quotes & thereby enhancing CX
- Seamless data flow between billing systems and CPQ can make the quoting and pricing processes more efficient and accurate.
But how does Revenue generation take place with the support of IT and CPQ?
Revenue is generated through sales of products and services. In the process chain, the sales process is automated to an extent using some specialized applications like CPQ.
CPQ software relies on data. Thus, CRM, ERP, Sales automation, order management, and other IT systems and CPQ application work in tandem to perform an operation and ensure it gets completed in each phase of the revenue generation/lead-to-cash process.
Hence, the IT department has the responsibility and opportunity to integrate CPQ with IT systems to ensure data agility among systems along with data collection, processing, and distribution across the systems to facilitate the revenue generation processes.
That’s how the CPQ and IT integration are crucial in Revenue generation.
To conclude, the CPQ solution can directly impact revenue generation, and IT system integration is one vital element you should be wary of while implementing CPQ. With CPQ expertise, our teams can integrate and implement Dextara CPQ on the Salesforce Platform in 2 weeks. The next-generation Dextara CPQ enables businesses to personalize and sell their products/services. For further info, you may connect with our CPQ experts at sales@dextara.com.