What are the differences between CRM and CPQ?

What are the differences between CRM and CPQ?

Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) software are both essential tools for many businesses. They serve different purposes and can work together at the same time. Not every company using Salesforce CRM needs to implement Salesforce CPQ technology.

To decide whether or not to integrate Salesforce Industries CPQ into your Salesforce CRM system, evaluate your company's needs and determine whether CPQ will benefit your sales team.

What is CRM?

CRM software helps companies improve the customer experience in several ways. It enables easy management of customer relationships throughout the customer lifecycle.

It provides a central repository for customer information. This allows companies to track customer interactions, identify trends and improve communication between customers, support and sales teams. CRM allows companies to automate repetitive tasks, such as emailing marketing materials or following up on customer inquiries. This frees up time for teams to focus on more important tasks, such as developing relationships with customers.

A customizable dashboard collects customer information, making it easier to identify connections and understand correlations. This data can lead to finding ways to form a stronger bond with the customer. This helps ensure they return again and again. From there, developing a more efficient workflow becomes much easier.

Salesforce CRM also provides analytics and dynamic reporting that can help companies understand what customers want and how they interact with the organization, including through social media. By understanding these patterns, companies can make changes to improve the overall customer experience.

CRM helps companies increase satisfaction, which improves retention by clarifying communications, automating tasks and providing insight into customer behavior. As a result, companies using Salesforce CRM are seeing an increase in customer satisfaction.

What is CPQ?

Salespeople become more productive and save time by using CPQ systems, which dynamically price highly customized products and services. Traditionally, producing quotes was a time-consuming and labor-intensive task. Your sales team are ready to move on to the next deal, so they rush through paperwork to get the quote together. During the process, they tend to make mistakes by offering discontinued products, incompatible add-ons, incorrect pricing or just missing or forgetting something important.

This is where CPQ shines above traditional quotations. Correctly configured and implemented CPQ does the hard work for your sales teams. It uses smart rules to make sure your reps are selling the right products together and not pairing incompatible products. It also excels at offering them products they hadn't yet thought of, whether it's online checkout, automated email follow-up or more traditional means.

When it comes to pricing, CPQ systems are much more flexible than CRM software. With CPQ, you can create custom pricing models to fit your unique products and services. This flexibility allows you to respond quickly to changes in the market and keep your prices competitive.

Key differences between CRM and CPQ

Both Salesforce CRM and CPQ have powerful features for sending quotes and closing sales, but each has its own strengths and limitations.

Price Agility

When it comes to pricing, CPQ systems are much more flexible than stand alone CRM software. With CPQ, you can create custom pricing models to fit your unique products and services. This flexibility allows you to react quickly to changes in the market and keep your pricing competitive. If you sell a product with many configuration options, Salesforce CPQ can help you create a pricing model that reflects the different combinations.

With a CRM system, on the other hand, you have to create a separate price for each combination of options. This can lead to a lot of duplicate data. It is also a huge waste of resources and makes it difficult to maintain an accurate pricing structure.

Custom reporting

CPQ software offers more robust reporting and analysis tools designed for delivering quotes and closing deals. So you can better understand your pricing strategy and adjust it as needed. Overall, the flexibility of CPQ systems makes them an advantageous addition for companies that need to update their prices regularly, offer different prices for the same products and have configuration options.

CRM systems have in-depth reporting configured for customer interactions and communications while also tracking their life cycle. While CRM reporting is excellent, it is not as detailed or capable when it comes directly to sales and quotations.

Dynamic Quoting

CPQ quotes are dynamic. If your quote requires special terms, customizations, add-ons, payment options, etc., they appear automatically. Again, this increases efficiency. You can even easily integrate e-signature software directly into your quotes.

Standard Quotes in Salesforce can ... quote things. Static. In a sense, in one dimension. You get a few stock templates and layouts that don't automatically update or get changes made by administrators or sales teams. Integrating an app for e-signatures is possible, but much more challenging than with CPQ.

Salesforce is the leader in both CRM and CPQ technology. Proper implementation is essential to harness the true power of these tools.
Implementing a CPQ solution can be a complex and daunting task, especially for large organizations.
At CaeNine, We specialize in creating CPQ solutions for energy, utility and telecom companies.
By integrating Salesforce CPQ with your existing Salesforce Industries organization, CaseNine can help you build a robust customer relationship management and sales solution that meets all your needs. This integration boosts conversions and enhances customer satisfaction.

Colin Hammer

Colin Hamer is a Software Engineer at CaseNine. He is responsible for various Salesforce projects at clients.