How Artificial Intelligence is Reshaping the Future of CPQ

Ever since its evolution, Artificial Intelligence has been creating some buzz. In fact, PWC’s global artificial intelligence study reveals that artificial intelligence has a potential contribution of $15.7 trillion to the world by 2030.

 

Actionable business decisions leading to boost in sales volume, improved deal closure rates, revenue growth, and improved sales productivity all are now easily possible. This is all thanks to Artificial Intelligence!

 

In a recent study conducted by Harvard Business Review, sales teams that adopt AI and machine learning are seeing:

 

• 50% increase in leads and appointments
• 40–60% cost reductions
• 60–70% call time reductions

 

More & more companies are now switching to CPQ which allows sales team to organize their work and finalize the contracts with a snap of their fingertips. Gartner predicts CPQ will continue to be one of the hottest enterprise apps for the foreseeable future, predicting a 20% annual growth rate through 2020 – with the majority being from cloud-based solutions. With this, it is but obvious that CPQ is moving towards AI.

 

The AI based platforms are now defining the future of CPQ selling by providing real-time insights applicable to every sales cycle, from the initial quote to contracts and renewals.

 

CPQ is setting an amazing example in which AI and the subsequent machine learning can be merged. While it of course cannot replace the value of human interaction when it comes to building relationships with customers, it can make sales representatives smarter and more productive through guided selling and automating the day to day process, allowing them to focus on delivering more value to customers and building loyalty.

 

Now let’s have a look at some of the aspects in sales which drives Artificial Intelligence:

White Spaces are untapped business opportunities; machine learning techniques analyse the existing install-base and find these customer-specific untapped opportunities. Yagna iQ platform acknowledges this by discovering a specific relationship between customers, their vertical, their region, their existing products and finding the probability of them buying the new products.

 

It is crucial for sales rep to know how white space analysis can be leveraged to boost top line revenue growth for the company. This can also provide a jumpstart that can put sales rep on the field early in the game to win more deals.

Recommendation of products is something that is typically designed to facilitate purchase decisions by helping customers easily identify products that match their requirement.

 

A vivid example to consider here is “Amazon” product recommendations with its “Customer who bought this item also bought …” feature. Statistics shows that 35% of Amazon’s revenue comes from the usage of recommendation engines.

 

With the new digital era and competitive market to get more efficient customers, it is crucial for companies to scan, search, filter and provide useful information to the customers according to their requirement.

 

Yagna iQ recognizes this and utilizes these product recommendations in their CPQ platform to simplify customers search of products and narrow down the variety of choices, resulting in many benefits, some of which are listed below:

 

• Improved user experience
• Increased sales
• Higher retention rate

Companies can achieve success in today’s competitive market, with a price optimisation strategy that not only quickly deliver the right price, but also cultivates a simple, customer-empowered buying experience.

 

The process of setting prices driven by AI/ML to maximize profits, increase market share, or reach other business goals that maximize value for customers and profit for the company signifies need of price optimisation.

 

It has never been easy to find the right price for customers especially when many data points have to be considered. And this problem is intensified when sales teams need to optimise many prices for multiple products in a single quote.

 

Price optimization fuelled by AI can help businesses determine initial pricing, promotional pricing and even discount pricing.

 

This in combination with smart selling using Yagna iQ’s, CPQ solution improves the chances of selling a product profitably.

Yagna iQ’s CPQ platform utilizes AI/ML algorithms to predict and identify that a customer is at a high risk of churning, helping sales reps prioritize the accounts which are due for renewals.

 

This also represents a great opportunity to address the situation proactively, increasing customer loyalty and therefore, avoiding loss of revenue.

According to research by McKinsey, organizations that leverage customer behaviour data to generate behavioural insights outperform peers by 85% in sales growth and more than 25% in gross margin.

 

Right from customer acquisition, expansion, and retention until relationship building, most of the businesses today leverage Customer Behaviour Analytics. Yagna iQ is one of the many that use Customer Behaviour Analytics in their CPQ platform to help identify customers to target Cross-sell / Upsell based on this data.

 

In this segment, the customers are based on their buying patterns, geography and transactions using enhanced machine learning clustering techniques.

Businesses today are changing the way of interaction with its customers. As messaging apps like WhatsApp, Slack, Skype are becoming more popular, businesses are also moving to these apps to conduct their businesses. One of the growing trends for businesses is to use these messaging apps as Chatbots since they are being considered as the next wave in digital communication for businesses.

 

YANA Chatbot powered by Yagna iQ is an AI/ML driven Virtual Assistant built on Yagna iQ CPQ. If you want to get a quote or some statistics, you can simply chat with the YANA virtual agent to get it done.

 

The state of technology is moving fast, and your current sales process needs to be keep up with the pace so that customers are left with a great experience. With AI ML based selling experience, Yagna iQ is well equipped for the future. To know more, contact us on customer.success@yagnaiq.com.