Updates

Attracting customers is essential for the growth of your B2B or Business-to-Business company. The best way of doing so is by meeting their needs. For years, B2B customers have been distinguished from B2C target audiences. However, in the most recent years, we have been noticing a shift, initiated by the changing behavior and needs of B2B customers.

Are you losing sales because it takes too long to make a quote? Long sales cycles kill deals. It slows down your manufacturing business on its way to growth and holds sales back. Are you also looking out for a shorter sales cycle to be able to move faster and grow? A CPQ can assist you with this process. But what exactly is CPQ? And how does it drive sales? That’s what we will be figuring out in this article.

Quotes are formal documents sent to your clients to offer goods or services at the indicated price. A good and winning quote includes accurate prices and product information, and has proven to be a method to grow your business even further. However, if you are selling configurable products, writing quotes is usually a long and dreadful process. The complexity of the products and prices slows down the workflow, resulting in an enormous backlog of quote requests that are not followed up quickly enough to keep the customers interested.

The idea behind the job of a sales representative is simple: help your customer find the best solution that fits their needs. However this task is a lot harder in a B2B environment in which companies are often struggling to explain complex products. This is where guided selling comes into play, a powerful strategy to regain control over your solution offering.

The alignment of marketing and sales is a key component for your company’s growth. You can no longer afford a misalignment of the two departments to meet the buyer’s needs at every interaction. However, companies often forget to use sales as a marketing channel. Let’s take a look at why it pays off to get the teams to work together.

How can you stay ahead as a modern sales professional? The B2B sales landscape has evolved rapidly, shaped by digital transformation, higher buyer expectations, and more complex decision-making processes. Today’s buyers are more informed, more independent, and expect seamless, value-driven interactions at every stage of their journey. Here are five essential strategies to help you adapt and grow your B2B sales performance.

Keep your customers happy. That is up to this day the main thing account managers focus on. That is why, after its massive success, a lot of B2B companies have followed the B2C trend of eCommerce. Digital tools have proven to be highly effective, in case companies know how to implement them correctly. If done wrong, it creates a bad customer experience, which remains a main strategic point for any manufacturer: around 9 out of 10 buyers would turn to a competitor if their current supplier could not keep up with their needs (Avionos, 2020).

The current situation of the manufacturing industry is very complex, as companies evolve in a very competitive environment. But competition is not the only challenge manufacturers face, as product life cycles have been growing shorter and customers are demanding customized products more and more. The arrival of 5G will ease these challenges, but it is important to be prepared, by investing in the right software today.

COVID-19 has left nothing unaffected. While the pandemic is lasting a lot longer than we all thought/hoped, it is important to identify the ways it has impacted us. In this short article, we will briefly discuss how B2B sales have been redefined since the start of the outbreak, and how CPQ can answer the (new) needs.

Complex and powerful product configurators are often the backbone of a manufacturers organisation. It is an engine to validate input and generate crucial output information like pricing, bill of materials, bill of labour, complex calculations and more. However, lots of configurators no longer meet today's market standards. Let's take a look. 

Hive CPQ is the next generation quotation tool. Why? We take the quotation process out of your current CRM or ERP environment. Quotations can be made by any stakeholder (Sales, backoffice, engineering and your customers). The user interface is fast, clean and simple. Hive CPQ speeds up the quotation process. Hive CPQ supports complex products and pricing, but manages to hide the complexity to the users.