Modernizing B2B Buying and Quoting in Distribution
To stay afloat in today’s dynamic market, B2B businesses must make sure their direct sales, partner portals and digital channels, including eCommerce, enable the same frictionless and personalized buying experience today's customers expect.
In this post, we will look at why B2B organizations in Distribution and their sales teams are struggling and how they can engage their buyers during the sales process using enhanced online collaboration through Smart Configure Price Quote (CPQ).
The State of B2B Sales Workflows
As Gartner goes on to say, “Chief Sales Officers who want to modernize their virtual selling strategy should build a technology stack based on three critical attributes: improving buyer engagement, data-driven seller actions, and simplified seller workflows.”
And—possibly more importantly—this is what buyers want: a B2B buying experience that feels more like a B2C one.
Today’s B2B buyers are more informed in their choices—often prior to engaging with a sales team—and they demand more personalized interactions with companies. To convert with a business, they seek relevant product information, transparent pricing, and quick responses—and they tend to purchase from the channel of their choice.
According to another Gartner report, 27% of a B2B buyer’s time is spent researching independently online, 18% is spent researching independently offline, and only 17% is spent meeting with potential suppliers. Additionally, a report by McKinsey states that two out of every three B2B buyers “prefer remote human interactions or digital self-service.”
So, the future of B2B buying is going to be predominantly digital, and organizations need to find new and better ways to create meaningful long-lasting connections with customers.
When Sales Teams “Forget” their Buyers
The problem many sales teams are facing today is that their sales organization’s processes don’t match what their B2B customers want.
- The market is too competitive and it’s moving fast.
- Instead of focusing on nurturing customer relationships, sales teams are often struggling with non-revenue generating tasks and manual processes.
- They are compiling sales information from siloed systems and spreadsheets, and even executing manual updates.
- Sales reps’ responses to buyers are not quick, their offers often lack personalization and have price and product discrepancies.
The result is frustrated buyers and churning customers.
Just take Manitou Group, a French heavy equipment manufacturer, for example. Before partnering with PROS and implementing Smart Configure Price Quote (CPQ), their sales agents were using a bulky paper catalog to communicate options to customers and place orders verbally or by email. These analog processes introduced a ton of problems as the company grew: no real-time prices to provide accurate quotes, no product listing updates to communicate changes in pricing, options, and upsells to customers, long communication and collaboration wait times, missed new offers for customers, and more.
So, what can sales organizations still relying on outdated processes do?
How CPQ Can Enhance Spot-buying
The right CPQ solution can solve many of the challenges today’s sales teams face. Especially when it comes to spot-buying. Mundane tasks like those mentioned previously—looking for the right product and service information, calculating pricing and applying relevant discounts or rebates, creating competitive, personalized proposals, and more—are all simplified and automated. This means sales teams working in Distribution will have everything they need quickly, efficiently, and at their fingertips so they can be more responsive to those most important throughout the process: their customers.
A robust CPQ solution may have features like AI-powered pricing, cross-sell product recommendations and real-time collaboration capabilities that empower salespeople to engage with buyers to close deals quickly; after all, the distributor that responds first is 50% more likely to win the deal.
Especially when it comes to quote creation and management, sales teams will be able to visualize margins, analyze deal performance and profitability, and know which prices are automatically approved—all allowing for deals to keep moving through the pipeline faster. These capabilities can even be extended to your partners and eCommerce channels, meaning you will be able to provide the same great buying experience wherever your customers choose to engage with your organization.
Meet Collaborative Quoting in PROS Smart CPQ
PROS Smart Configure Price Quote (CPQ) offers all these functionalities and more, allowing your salespeople to be efficient, skip the time-consuming administrative tasks, and get to what's really important for the business: your customers and getting precise spot quotes out the door quickly.
Our new Collaborative quoting capability is truly groundbreaking, transforming the B2B quote creation and management workflows. Instead of being led only by sellers, as it has been traditionally up to this point, collaborative quoting includes the buyer at the beginning of the workflow when the products are being selected, allowing them to add relevant feedback to the quote and make changes directly to it. This capability not only empowers B2B buyers to be more engaged with your business and the products and services it offers, but it also helps close deals more quickly.
How does it work?
Any distributor’s sales team can use the select-for-sale workflow in a digital environment like your eCommerce platform, microsite, or a web portal, to enable closer online interactions with buyers. This secure collaborative quoting portal will be part of your digital sales strategy, aligning to your selling motions and matching your company’s branding, styling, look and feel. Together, sellers and buyers will be able to select the right products and services, generate the correct quantities and market relevant prices, finalize the quote, and deliver the personalized offer to the buyer in real-time.
And the benefits don’t end there. Allowing B2B buyers to provide feedback and changes directly to quotes helps sales teams build trust and drive retention and higher transparency with their customers. This capability supports sales organizations’ goals of enabling seamless digital buying experiences to customers, shortening time-to-order significantly all while maximizing loyalty.
What’s next for B2B buying?
The latest summer enhancements in Collaborative quoting empower buyers to initiate and orchestrate the quoting workflow, allowing them to be in the driver’s seat. With these customer-centric innovations PROS is taking another step further in enabling that desired B2C experience in the B2B world. Using the new Collaboration Portal Dashboard buyers can now independently create and manage quotes, without the need for a sales expert to initiate the process. The quote interface has been enhanced to provide better structure and hierarchy, improving usability and the user experience so that buyers can navigate seamlessly through product folders, bundles and even more complex product structures. Furthermore, with simplified sharing and access management sales professionals can also easily invite customers, partners or distributors to collaborate on existing quotes and/or create new ones.
Your All-in-One CPQ Solution
Ultimately, PROS Smart CPQ is an intuitive AI-powered selling solution purpose-built for distributors looking to deliver quick, accurate and profitable quotes and increase their buyers’ engagement across all sales channels. Not only does it positively impact sales performance—allowing your salespeople to say goodbye to complicated workflows and repetitive administrative tasks that take time and effort and cause frustration—but it also impacts business results. And those results are tangible. In fact, you can learn more about how the PROS Platform drove $74M in revenue uplift for an office supply distributor here.
Yes, there is a SaaS solution that is designed for organizations like yours, and it's evolving its capabilities to solve your business’s selling challenges not only today, but tomorrow too. Not only can PROS Smart CPQ ensure you're equipped to handle any sales problem more efficiently, but it will also ensure your customers won’t churn, all while making your sales team and your eCommerce platform more competitive and profitable.
Ready to learn more? Check out how to accelerate your sales cycle and increase buyer engagement with Smart CPQ .