As per the Time Management for Sales study, only 37% of sales reps’ time is spent on revenue-generating activities. The rest of the time is spent on admin activities, generating quotes, proposals, and gaining approvals.
Adding to this, when your services grow in complexity, have customization, and consist of a dynamic pricing structure, they become tough to handle. When your sales team cannot keep a track record of these complexities, it leads to mistakes, confusion, and dissatisfied customers.
For most organizations, this is a disconnected and siloed cycle that ends up in manual and inefficient internal efforts. Manual intervention can lead to errors in pricing. Service quoting helps businesses quickly and accurately respond to customer needs for services that accelerate the time to value for products.
While the quote-to-cash process for products can be automated with CPQ, the same level of efficiency for dynamic service requirements needs manual configuration steps for added complexities of selling services.
And that’s where service quoting can drive revenue maximization in the sales process.
What is service quoting?
Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) applications were originally developed for configuring, pricing, and quoting products. However, CPQ tools do not help you scope and price services. Here, service quoting comes to aid.
Simply put, service quoting software for managed service providers removes the most error-prone steps of the presales process. This includes eliminating the use of Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and other tools the sales team had to prepare to scope and price services.
The benefits of optimizing service quoting include improving the speed of your sales cycle, revenue maximization, reducing the efforts of your sales teams to acquire customers, margin optimization, and improved compliance and customer expectations.
Why do modern sales teams need service quoting?
Evolving customer expectations – While making a purchase, your customers want to view the implementation scope, know the ways to leverage their resource pool, manage cost and timelines and understand the implementation process.
Scope accuracy – Scoping a services project involves maintaining multiple variables affecting the scope. Tracking complex macros in Excel is painful. Additionally, real-time changes affecting the cost, resources, and revenue maximization cannot be tracked automatically.
Scalability – As your sales team grows, without understanding historic data, it becomes challenging to achieve repeatability in quotes. Quotes produced on a fly are not necessarily optimized for a winning sales deal.
Here’s how services quoting cloud solutions like Provus accelerate your sales strategy, regardless of the complexity of the quoting process.
How can you use service quoting to maximize revenue?
#1. More efficient pre-sales process – By offering pre-sales reps an easily repeatable platform to scope and price services, service quoting makes the entire process more efficient. The result is that everyone uses the same language and pricing. Also, any deviation is approved before it goes to the client.
An accurate and automatically generated scope of work reduces the average turnaround time.
#2. Optimal resource utilization – Service quoting is critical for resource forecasting, resource planning, and utilization. The limitation of Excel sheets is that they do not have a detailed view of hundreds of deals going in parallel. Users may not know about resource availability vs resource utilization and the ideal resource mix for quotes.
Provus Services CPQ Platform brings together all the data over a single dashboard, allowing businesses to know the best options for driving margins, revenue, and resource utilization.
#3. Control revenue leakage – Research by MGI estimates nearly 42% of companies experience some form of revenue leakage. EY highlights that every company should expect to lose 1-5% of its EBITA to leakage.
Provus’s AI-guided selling approach offers recommendations that provide scenarios, win/loss probabilities, and risk analysis by analyzing historical data and/or organizational guidelines. Intelligent “what-if” scenarios and rule-based configuration engines ensure services are not dependent on any individual’s tribal knowledge.
#4. Margin optimization – Margin optimization is becoming a norm for B2B service businesses. When businesses have multiple price lists based on geography, channel partner pricing, or volume, the pricing process gets complicated with discounting rules. You may not have a sophisticated way to understand the real-time impact of discounts on margins through negotiation.
While Excel sheets with complex macros provide users with gross margin data as a snapshot, it cannot keep track of ever-changing data of costs, bill rates, resource locations, and related rate cards.
Provus’s cloud-based services quote allows one-click scenario modeling for sales teams to comply with organizational guidelines. You can create scenarios for revenue and margin goals and the rule-based AI-led engine builds scenarios to maximize revenue and optimize margins.
#5. Improved customer experience – Modern organizations do not leave profitability to chance. Provus cloud services quote’s unique approval process and approver views allow for fast and accurate actions from leaders.
Equipped with Provus’s one-click document generation, you can put the right proposal or SOW in front of your customers quickly. The collaboration in real-time between sales, pre-sales, engineering, human resource, finance, and legal teams results in significant improvement in customer experience. Automating services quoting is the way ahead for service businesses.
Get started with Provus services quote platform
Naturally, you want to give your sales teams the best tools to minimize errors and drive revenue maximization. Provus Services CPQ Platform accelerates sales performance. We have a proven track record of delivering long-term value to a wide range of companies with an unmatched customer satisfaction rate.
