NetSuite CPQ: An Advantage You Won't Want to Sleep On

In today's fast-paced business landscape, staying competitive means constantly transforming business processes, streamlining operations and keeping pace with evolving technology.

And when it comes to growth and profitability, the sales process is critical. Tools and techniques that streamline the sales process and improve efficiency can make all the difference between winning and losing a deal.

NetSuite CPQ is emerging as a game-changer in improving sales efficiency. It automates and optimizes every step of the sales process—from configuring complex products, establishing pricing rules and applying discounts, to generating professional quotes and proposals.

In this article, we look at the advantages of using NetSuite CPQ and how ProjectLine helps your sales team tackle real-life business challenges with its powerful integration to NetSuite ERP.

What is NetSuite CPQ?

CPQ stands for 'Configure, Price, Quote.' NetSuite CPQ is a cloud-based software solution from Oracle, built on the NetSuite platform and works seamlessly with NetSuite ERP, CRM and eCommerce modules.

NetSuite CPQ has revolutionized the sales quoting and proposal process, empowering businesses like yours to transform their sales operations. It saves significant time and effort for sales teams, enables them to become customer-centric and offers a great customer experience.

Evan Goldberg, founder and EVP for Oracle NetSuite, says, "Empowering sales organizations with the right tools is essential to closing deals faster and meeting ever-increasing customer expectations."

NetSuite CPQ’s integration with NetSuite ERP and CRM provides sales teams with a unified single view and real-time visibility, improving collaboration across departments, increasing the efficiency of sales operations and providing impetus for growth.

Ultimately, it enables your business to save costs throughout the quote-to-cash cycle.

What are the advantages of implementing NetSuite CPQ?

Let's look at how your sales team can benefit from the most prominent features of NetSuite CPQ.

Streamlined sales process

NetSuite CPQ helps you configure complex products, customize pricing strategies, generate accurate quotes and speed up the sales cycle.

It helps your sales reps create and manage complex product configurations by finding the right combination of products, features and options based on customer requirements. It can automatically calculate the right price for complex product configurations and quickly generate a quote in minutes. Further, NetSuite CPQ also automates approval workflows, speeding up response times and improving overall customer satisfaction.

Enhanced sales efficiency

NetSuite CPQ features a Guided Selling experience, providing your sales teams with a product catalogue (similar to an eCommerce catalogue) that has powerful filtering tools. Sales reps can easily sort through large numbers of SKUs to quickly find products and services that will best fit the customer's needs.

This saves your sales team time and effort while reducing product or service recommendation errors.

Improved pricing accuracy

NetSuite CPQ provides pre-defined pricing rules and logic for price calculations, taking into consideration discounts, promotions, volume-based pricing and taxes. This eliminates common errors that come with manual price calculations. Using NetSuite CPQ with NetSuite ERP gives you real-time visibility into inventory, product availability and pricing. So your sales team can prepare accurate quotes based on the latest stock levels with the most up-to-date promotions and discounts. Additionally, your sales team can maintain consistent pricing and discounting across quotes.

Seamless connections

A significant advantage of NetSuite CPQ is that it’s connected to NetSuite CRM, ERP and SuiteCommerce, resulting in a seamless flow of information that eliminates duplication and provides real-time visibility across departments.

For example, you can easily pull customer information from the CRM into a sales quote created using NetSuite CPQ.

Your company has a centralized platform to manage all information on pricing, terms and products, to speed up workflows.

For instance, here's what a complete workflow would look like, from quote to delivery:

1. Your sales rep uses CPQ to configure and price the product, then sends a quote to the customer.
2. Once your customer approves the quotation, a sales order is created in your ERP, which you can easily access from the CRM customer record.
3. From an approved sales order, you can easily create a work order. This includes both a dynamic Bill of Materials (BOM) with the items needed for production and dynamic routings.
4. This information feeds directly into your procurement and production scheduling workflows.
5. Once production begins, NetSuite ERP provides complete real-time visibility of order progress and delivery.

This automatic, seamless flow of information eliminates the need for manual data entry, reduces errors and ensures an efficient order-to-delivery cycle.

Scalability and flexibility

NetSuite CPQ is flexible and can be customized to suit the unique requirements of your business. You can define the pricing rules, discount structures and quote templates that match your needs. NetSuite CPQ is also scalable and can adapt to changing business needs—it can scale up to manage expanding product catalogues, larger sales teams and increased sales volumes efficiently and accurately.

NetSuite CPQ & ProjectLine: Solving real-life business challenges

Here are some typical real-life challenges that NetSuite CPQ solves in your sales processes.

Quote generation time

NetSuite CPQ transforms the time-consuming manual process of gathering accurate information from multiple spreadsheets and collaborating with various teams into an effortless experience. You can literally generate a quote at the click of a button!

Inaccurate quotes and orders

NetSuite CPQ applies dynamic, rules-based pricing based on the configuration options selected. These dynamic prices are then used to generate the quote, ensuring accuracy and eliminating product configuration errors or pricing inconsistencies. Accurate quotes minimize the need for verification or rework and result in accurate work orders further downstream.

Inefficient order-to-delivery processes

The seamless connection between NetSuite CPQ and ERP modules ensures a smooth transition from the sales quotation to production and delivery. The automatic flow-through of approved sales orders to production work orders eliminates inefficient manual handoffs, reduces data entry errors, minimizes production delays and accelerates the order fulfillment process.

Over-discounting and margin loss

Does your sales team get pressured into giving out big discounts in order to submit the best possible quote? NetSuite CPQ gives you visibility and control on quotes with pre-defined pricing rules and consistent discounting structures so your sales team can always offer the best possible price while ensuring your margins are protected.

Working with ProjectLine as your implementation partner

When you work with ProjectLine for your NetSuite CPQ and ERP implementation, we work closely with your team to understand your requirements, configure the system and ensure a smooth and successful implementation.

We go the extra mile to understand your processes and build out your NetSuite solution to suit your processes—instead of your company adapting your processes to fit the software.

With ProjectLine and NetSuite, your business can gain the competitive advantage you need to deliver exceptional customer experiences and achieve long-term success. Moreover, we support your team every step of the way, giving you technical support to ensure your system is working as expected and helping your team troubleshoot any issues. And as your business grows and adapts to changes, we help you find new solutions that enable you to thrive.

It’s an advantage you won't want to sleep on!