Excel as a CPQ Tool: Streamline Quoting to Win Business

While CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) software is popular among businesses that seek to streamline and standardize their sales quoting process, many find these solutions to be overly complex and expensive. Instead, sales representatives tend to create and manage Excel workbooks with the information they require to develop quotes that win business.

If you use Excel throughout the workday alongside your ERP to configure unique quotes for your prospective customers, we are excited to introduce you to Velixo, our Excel add-in that transforms your worksheets with a series of functions built to provide live connectivity with your ERP system.

In this post, we will explore why you should consider Excel (with Velixo) to fulfill your Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) needs.

Simplified Approach

There’s always a risk when you implement an additional software solution. Will your team be able to learn and utilize the product? Will your business processes need to change, or can you continue to operate as usual? Will the benefits outweigh the costs?

Excel is a widely used program globally, supporting users from every industry imaginable. But its familiarity does not diminish its capabilities. Microsoft has made significant investments into the product over the years, enabling you to create impressive visuals and perform highly complex calculations.

One benefit of Velixo is that if you know Excel, you already know how to use Velixo. Once Velixo is downloaded (a process that only takes about 30 seconds), anybody familiar with Excel can start building professional reports with live Acumatica data by using the tools and additional functions that Velixo provides. Spare yourself the learning curve of a new CPQ tool!

Seamless Connectivity

A common critique of Excel for CPQ is the lack of connectivity between your workbooks and your CRM or ERP. It’s great to use Excel to build out a quote, but much less exciting when someone needs to constantly update price lists and product offerings. Then, once your quote is built and approved, someone still needs to manually create the sales order in your ERP.

Velixo solves both of these problems by fully eliminating the need for manual updates. Since your worksheets are connected to your ERP and pulling in live data, any changes in your ERP will reflect in your Excel files. For instance, you might have a price list sheet that is built with one of the functions that Velixo adds to Excel. Click here to see an example of how we can keep your worksheet figures up to date.

When it is time to create the customer record, project, and sales order from the quote, all you need to do is click one button! Thanks to Velixo’s Generic Writeback functionality, you can leverage the active import scenarios in your ERP right from your spreadsheet. Imagine being able to create opportunities, quotes, sales orders, customer records, and projects without ever needing to leave Excel! Watch our video below to see this in action.

Would you like access to the sample workbook, as well as the necessary inquiries and import scenarios used in the video above? See our Help Article here!

Cost-Effective

CPQ tool subscriptions (and implementations) can be expensive, while Velixo tends to be a small fraction of the overall cost of an ERP system. Even better, your business growth isn’t penalized with per-user pricing. You can rest assured knowing that your costs won’t rise as you add more sales representatives.

While Velixo is an excellent tool for CPQ, we support all kinds of use cases with robust functionality for financial and project reporting. Some of our users are building complex financial packages for multi-entity organizations, while others are managing project budgets and tasks. See our blog for more information, or check out our YouTube page.

Closing:

If you are interested in using Velixo alongside your ERP to solve your unique CPQ needs, please contact us to learn more, or click here to schedule a demo.

This content was prepared by Presales Leader. Our team creates product marketing content including blog posts, videos, and click-through demonstrations that are tailored to your specific vertical market. We also offer subscription-based presales support for the entire presales process. We work closely with your sales team to provide maximum results and support throughout the entire sales cycle. If you would like to explore how we can help your business grow with high-quality product marketing content and/or strong end-to-end presales support, visit our website at Presalesleader.com.