Looking more closely at advanced 3D CPQ systems shows that we’ve entered a new era of sales and configuration. These systems make it possible to visualize products in immersive, real-time 3D, enhancing more accurate decision making with unparalleled detail.
By integrating customization options fluidly into the purchasing process, businesses create a more engaging customer experience while improving operational efficiencies. The technology is designed to integrate with platforms currently in use, allowing for seamless transitions and heightened productivity.
This cutting-edge innovation provides a compelling advantage in hyper-competitive markets, cutting through the ambiguity and eliminating costly configuration mistakes to deliver sharpened product specifications.
- Key Takeaways
- What is an Advanced 3D CPQ System?
- Benefits of 3D CPQ Systems
- Boosting Sales with 3D CPQ
- Speed and Efficiency Advantages
- Importance of Single Data Source
- Future of Visual Configuration
- Personalized Customer Engagement
- Conclusion
- Frequently Asked Questions
- What is an advanced 3D CPQ system?
- How do 3D CPQ systems benefit businesses?
- How can a 3D CPQ system boost sales?
- What speed and efficiency advantages do 3D CPQ systems offer?
- Why is a single data source important in 3D CPQ?
- What is the future of visual configuration?
- How does 3D CPQ improve personalized customer engagement?
Key Takeaways
- Smart, advanced 3D CPQ systems empower sales teams with new ways to engage and inspire. They combine product configuration, pricing, and quoting on a single platform to increase efficiency and accuracy.
- These systems take advantage of real-time data synchronization and 3D visual configurators. In doing so, they deliver a more interactive and tailored customer journey that increases customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Advanced 3D CPQ systems automatically calculate complicated pricing structures and create accurate quotes. This minimizes mistakes and produces fast, precise quotations, building customer confidence and increasing sales conversion rates.
- These disruptive technologies—augmented reality (AR) and dynamic, predictive analytics tools—make CPQ systems even more powerful. Combined, they power better informed decision making and more immersive, interactive, engaging shopping experiences.
- Centralizing data management within these systems enhances collaboration, standardizes operations, and minimizes training duration, ensuring consistency and accuracy across sales teams.
- Future trends in visual configuration, such as the increased adoption of AR and VR, are shaking up the market. These recent advances continue to power intelligent automation while enhancing customer experience, setting new benchmarks for sales productivity and innovation.
What is an Advanced 3D CPQ System?
Definition and Overview
Advanced 3D CPQ systems simplify the entire process of product configuration, pricing and quoting. These advanced solutions integrate all three components into one, easy-to-use, end-to-end platform.
These advanced 3D CPQ systems help accelerate sales by empowering users to visualize and configure products, resulting in higher levels of accuracy and efficiency. Constant, real-time data synchronization gives both your sales team and the customers you serve access to the most up-to-date information available.
This level of access reduces errors and dramatically increases sales productivity. This level of integration is absolutely necessary for a holistic view of the sales process. It makes integration easy, with CRM, ERP and e-commerce solutions.
Pre-built connectors for popular applications such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 further improve speed of integration. Plus, APIs are included for building personalized integrations.
Key Features Summary
Advanced 3D CPQ systems come packed with features that support sales, such as visual configurators, automated quote creation, and real-time price calculations. More importantly, these features come together to make the customer experience intuitive, engaging, and easy to navigate.
Intuitive interfaces are important because they’re the key to enabling the end consumer—the car buyer, for example—to easily configure and quote products, like cars, on their own. In reality, as many as 82% of buyers today prefer using self-service product configurations prior to purchasing.
These systems come with advanced analytics capabilities that empower organizations to make data-driven decisions regarding their product catalogs and pricing plans. This powerful capability allows them to develop highly customized solutions that directly meet unique customer demands.
This intelligent, guided selling capability empowers sales teams with rich, contextual assistance and supports customers to effortlessly navigate the configuration process. This way, they’re guaranteed to pick the appropriate products.
How Visual CPQ Functions
Visual CPQ systems work by enabling customers to engage with products in real time using immersive, high-fidelity 3D models. These interactive models allow customers to configure and personalize products to their liking, customizing everything from color choices and materials to features and accessories.
Augmented reality (AR) adds to a more interactive shopping experience. This technology lets customers visualize how a product will fit and look in their own environment. These systems are fast to pivot to new technology trends.
They future-proof against market changes, making them essential to any sales organization. They’re omnichannel too, supporting any and all selling channels, an essential capability in our digital-first, omnichannel reality today.
It’s important to note that integrating these systems into the sales process significantly increases customer engagement. It provides deep visibility into production pipelines.
With this visibility, sales teams can proactively address issues before they become supply chain disruptions. With ERP integration, they’re able to stay on top of on-time delivery. Advanced 3D CPQ systems are at the forefront of this trend.
They enable organizations to remain agile and continue delivering to customer expectations.
Benefits of 3D CPQ Systems
In our increasingly competitive global economy, cutting-edge 3D CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) systems offer significant advantages. Companies who do take advantage of these systems can significantly improve and simplify their sales processes.
These systems improve sales efficiency, creating a visually rich, interactive platform that revolutionizes the customer journey. Organizations can leverage 3D visualization to present their products in an engaging manner. This strategy fosters greater empathy and relationship with buyers.
This intuitive, drag-and-drop visual process minimizes operations and maximizes productivity. Additionally, it increases sales revenue by an average of 40% due to fostering more powerful customer interactions.
Visual Experience for Complex Products
3D CPQ systems excel at simplifying complex products, offering customers an immersive experience with several key features:
- Customers can see their products in full three-dimensional view, providing clarity on what they are purchasing.
- The ability to tailor products to specific needs helps customers make informed decisions.
- Offering comprehensive views of product specs reduces confusion and increases confidence in the purchase.
These immersive 3D experiences are redefining how today’s enterprises work. Today, they’re able to zero in on products that can be configured and sold like never before.
Transform Sales Processes
Traditional sales workflows are dramatically changed with 3D CPQ systems integrated as a core aspect of the sales process. As these systems eliminate administrative burdens, sales teams are able to spend more time focused on developing customer relationships.
The more efficient process speeds up the creation of quotes, which is important in today’s market where time is of the essence. Increased speed of quote generation not only shortens the sales cycle, but makes closing deals more efficient and likely.
Even more so, recently up to 70% of complex products are being configured online with web-based CPQ configurators. This change greatly minimizes the dependency on constant sales rep input, allowing for an overall smoother sales process.
Enhanced Accuracy in Sales
Perhaps the most prominent advantage of sophisticated 3D CPQ systems is the elimination of quoting and pricing errors. These systems leverage data-driven insights to produce highly accurate quotes, so customers always get accurate pricing information right away.
3D CPQ systems save time and money. This precision is provided in an even more dynamic way, with real-time updates keeping every price consistent and dependable.
By reducing mistakes and delivering precise quotes, companies can earn the confidence of their clients, leading to lasting satisfaction and loyalty. This reliability — the kind that can be a game-changer, providing a true immersive experience — is what distinguishes businesses from competitors in a crowded market.
Boosting Sales with 3D CPQ
Here’s how a 3D CPQ system can positively impact sales effectiveness. This makes it a win-win by not only improving the customer journey, but optimizing sales operations. By integrating these systems with your existing sales tools, you can supercharge your sales processes. Taking this approach will increase your sales and improve your customers’ experience.
Training sales teams to effectively utilize CPQ features will help them gain the most out of this technology and its capabilities.
1. Provide Smart Visual Configuration
Smart visual configuration tools go a long way toward improving the overall purchasing experience. Second, they let customers experience products in an immersive and interactive way, bringing products to life and creating a more engaging shopping experience.
With 95% of respondents saying they felt more confident purchasing e-commerce items that feature 3D visualization, this is one feature you can’t afford to pass up. By showcasing multiple product variations, you allow customers to better visualize their options.
This powerful visual aid increases upselling and cross-selling potential. An individual customer shopping for a custom-built guitar can browse different woods and finishes. That irresistible collection may encourage them to go for high-end options.
2. Generate Quick and Accurate Quotes
3D CPQ systems are unrivaled at producing fast, precise quotations. This accelerated pace is much faster than older approaches, allowing your sales teams to respond to RFQs in no time.
The precision of these quotes is paramount in fostering trust with potential customers, and increased customer trust translates to improved conversion rates. In fact, adopters of this technology are seeing as much as a 40% increase in conversion rates.
A speedy quote system ensures prospective buyers get price quotes in near real-time, eliminating obstacles to purchase.
3. Offer Real-Time Pricing
In today’s hyper-competitive environment, real-time pricing updates are essential to stay competitive and let businesses respond to shifts in the market in real-time. This dynamic pricing capability helps ensure that customers get consistent, real-time pricing information, increasing transparency and trust.
When you give customers real-time pricing info, they’re able to see everything they want and get all the information required to make an informed decision. This is critical for today’s quick-turnaround digital commerce age, where 83% of B2B buyers would rather purchase online.
4. Simplify Complex Purchases
Streamline the selection process for customers. Provide clear visualizations of product configurations. Offer guided selling features to assist customers.
Even better, the 3D configurator enables them to design fully customized assemblies in minutes, not weeks. This simplification gives customers the confidence to move forward with their decisions.
This way, they can easily see their options and the future results.
5. Improve Customer Interaction
Improved customer engagement is directly tied to increased sales performance. These visual solutions create a more engaging and persuasive dialogue between sales representatives and their customers, building a stronger relationship.
Better experiences increase customer loyalty levels. Organizations that adopt 3D visualization and CPQ solutions can experience an increase in sales revenue of up to 25%.
By bridging these systems, manufacturers can deliver immersive experiences that increase both satisfaction and loyalty. In fact, a whopping 71% of buyers are ready and willing to make big ticket purchases online.
This is just one example of how richer interactions can lead to big sales.
Speed and Efficiency Advantages
With advanced 3D product configurator software, the speed and efficiency advantages are significant. These visual CPQ solutions make a real impact on reducing the time and effort on tasks that previously required a very manual effort. By automating repetitive steps, they enhance productivity and minimize the time spent exchanging countless back-and-forth emails regarding product configurations.
Rather than sifting through stacks of Excel spreadsheets, sales teams today can have the power of automated, instant quoting right at their fingertips. This modification has simplified the bulk of the sales process. In doing so, it’s sped up the entire sales cycle by a whopping 38%!
Companies that leverage these ecommerce product configurators benefit from an average 36% decrease in sales cycle length. Additionally, thanks to the speed advantages of visual configurators, cart conversion rates can increase by as much as 50%.
Efficient Ordering Procedures
3D CPQ systems really dazzle when it comes to streamlining ordering processes. It makes it a much simpler and streamlined process for both sales teams and customers. With automation literally built-in, the order entry process reduces human error, providing the most customized configurations and up-to-the-minute pricing.
Assuming CPQ can be integrated with eCommerce platforms, smoother transactions can help close the sale. That smooth flow increases productivity and speeds up the transition from proposals to signed contracts.
With this integration, every industry sector can leverage streamlined CPQ quoting processes, providing an immediate ROI with speed and efficiency advantages.
Speedy Performance
The speedy performance of 3D product configurator software is fueled by a number of important factors. These visual CPQ solutions are built around speed of processing time, often with severe penalties that directly affect the customer experience. Our customers appreciate our fast turnaround times and the efficiency of our cpq solution.
They desire seamless access to the system, whether on a mobile device or a desktop. Responsive design is crucial, ensuring that regardless of the platform, the user’s experience is smooth and immediate, enhancing the overall ordering experience.
This rapid performance doesn’t just fulfill customer demands, it surpasses them, building trust and loyalty in the process.
Configuration Assistance
For configuration support, 3D CPQ systems provide a helping hand during the selection process. Using AI and machine learning, these systems recommend the best configurations, considering the customer’s needs and wants.
Having a virtual assistant to help improve the product selection process with intuitive features enhances the experience. This support helps seal the deal from first awareness to last mile.
It improves the customer experience and helps build confidence along the way.
Importance of Single Data Source
Maintaining a single source of truth for product data is crucial in the fast-paced world of advanced 3D CPQ systems. A unified, single source of data management platform provides reliable data. This ensures that the quotes provided to customers are accurate and trustworthy.
When data is forced to exist across several different sources, errors and inconsistencies can easily creep in. This leads to erroneous quotes that don’t really serve the customer’s requirements. CPQ systems, particularly Epicor, have changed these user experiences.
Many have seen a staggering 40% increase in conversion rates and have more than doubled their average deal sizes. It highlights the clear benefits of a single data source, including providing consistency, improving accuracy and building trust.
Centralize Data Management
Centralizing data management brings a host of advantages that can transform the way your team operates.
- Improve alignment & coordination. Improve collaboration between sales teams by delivering one easy-to-access source of information.
- Improve your reporting and analytics capabilities. Leverage unified data to better understand customer demand, sales trends, and product line performance to make better and faster decisions.
- Simplify product specification updates and revisions. Ensure that every department is operating off of a single, up to date, accurate source of truth data.
Eliminating data silos ensures that different departments can talk to each other, paving the way to a more unified strategy and execution. After the 2020 eCommerce explosion, competition became even fiercer.
Now, manufacturers that have centralized all their data are ready to pivot and come out ahead in this new marketplace.
Minimize Training Duration
The time needed to train new employees is greatly reduced by providing a single, unified data source. Sales teams succeed when information is readily available at their fingertips.
That access enables them to get quickly up to speed and answer customer questions with confidence. The easy-to-navigate interfaces of CPQ systems allow for more efficient onboarding.
New team members can jump right into the system without having to go through a long learning process. This simplicity increases sales teams’ productivity from the get-go. It’s just best practice to do that and what the highest-performing reps do without realizing it.
Standardized Operations Benefits
The benefits of standardized operations are manifold, especially when it comes to sales operations. Elimination of quoting and pricing errors not only instills customer confidence but makes your team more productive.
When all of your team is working off the same process, mistakes are less likely and quotes are more accurate. On its own, CPQ software automates, streamlines, and accelerates the entire revenue lifecycle, so you’re always quoting the right price at the right time.
This process automation makes customers happier and more efficient, producing quicker, more accurate quotes.
Future of Visual Configuration
Visual configuration technologies have created an architectural renaissance. Companies are creating new ways to engage customers by leveraging AR and VR. These macro trends are fundamentally changing the way we experience products and services.
Cloud-based CPQ systems are the most popular, pushing their fast-paced evolution. They’re forecast to increase at an eye-popping 17.8% CAGR over the next eight years. This drive for more interactive and immersive technologies is transforming how companies sell and configure their products.
3D visualization is a revolutionary technology in the realm of CPQ systems. It allows companies to present their products in an interactive way, increasing consumer engagement and retention.
AR for Engaging Experiences
Augmented reality is raising the bar on customer experience. It’s the glue between the digital and physical worlds, and it enables truly immersive experiences that attract customers and pull them inside.
AR gives customers the opportunity to visualize products in their own environment. This level of personalization makes their shopping experience more efficient and helps them make smarter choices. Just picture an online customer being able to visualize how a new sofa would look in their living room.
This type of immersive experience doesn’t just increase the consumer purchase path, it’s proven to dramatically increase revenue. Providing customers with an interactive, virtual experience boosts confidence and alleviates the fear of buying online products that many customers have.
Automate Design and Documentation
The automation that technology like generative design and smart documentation processes offer is a huge benefit to businesses. By automating these manual processes, companies can make themselves less error-prone, save time, and provide guaranteed accuracy.
Through improved analytics and data visualization, automation can help to ensure workflows are more easily compliant and increase the accuracy of documentation. This change minimizes the day-to-day manual burden and frees teams to spend their time on more strategic initiatives.
Automated documentation is a key pillar in ensuring we continue to maintain industry-leading standards. It guarantees that all required compliance measures are automatically satisfied, eliminating the burden of manual verification.
As a result, companies are able to run their operations more efficiently and in turn, offer their customers better, faster, and more reliable service.
Integrate Buying Processes Seamlessly
3D CPQ systems are particularly great at this, shining in their ability to integrate seamlessly with current buying processes. The journey from product configuration to product purchase feels natural and simple.
This seamless experience is key to increasing customer loyalty. By providing cohesive workflows, customers can have a seamless experience from beginning to end. This interconnected integration gives new meaning to an old vital convenience.
In reality, 80% of B2B customers prefer B2C-like buying experiences. Visual CPQ solutions, by decreasing the likelihood of expensive errors, are increasingly a strategic asset in the modern sales toolkit.
They give communities a competitive advantage for attracting new businesses. By eliminating unnecessary steps, they can speed sales cycles from weeks to mere minutes.
Personalized Customer Engagement
In the intervening years, personalized engagement has become a cornerstone of modern sales strategies. In today’s ever-changing marketplace, customers are looking for individualized solutions to meet their needs. They demand choice, flexibility, and speed, along with precision in terms of quote turnaround time, which is where a visual CPQ solution comes into play.
This change in customer expectations has triggered an increase in demand for Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solutions. These systems empower sales teams to personalize offerings, ensuring they’re always on target. With advanced 3D product configurators in place, companies can deliver personalized experiences that truly engage customers.
When combined with CPQ tools, 3D visualization empowers companies to present their products in a more exciting and immersive way. This strategy enhances the ordering experience and increases revenue.
Data analytics is an important part to understanding what customers want. The power to track trends and behaviors allows sales teams to predict what customers are looking for. Equipped with this information, businesses are able to better tailor their products and services to meet the needs of their target consumers.
This approach increases customer satisfaction while fostering brand loyalty. Our recent survey found that 95% of respondents have greater confidence when buying products in an e-commerce environment, especially when they can view them through a 3D product configurator.
This confidence carries through to the bottom line, with firms using these solutions experiencing more than 25% sales revenue uplift.
Omnichannel Selling Experience
In our hyper-connected world, offering an omnichannel selling experience isn’t just a bonus—it’s a necessity. It’s about the experience customers have the same journey, regardless of whether they are digital customers or retail customers.
3D CPQ systems especially excel here by helping you provide a uniform message no matter what channel your customers choose. They connect all of a company’s sales and marketing channels, online and offline, to deliver a seamless, omnichannel experience.
This integration streamlines the buying process while improving customer satisfaction and loyalty with a seamless brand experience.
Educational Resources Importance
Educational resources go a long way in building customer confidence. Through tutorials, product guides, and other educational resources, companies can provide the knowledge and experience their customers need to succeed.
This personalized customer engagement increases consumer confidence in their buying decisions, leaving shoppers feeling informed and empowered. How creating tutorials and guides improves user experience.
User experience is further improved by having step-by-step instructions that guide users through complicated products or services.
Enhance Team Collaboration
3D CPQ systems enhance communication across sales processes. By centralizing data and insights, these systems provide a single source of truth that helps keep everyone aligned.
This collective understanding is critical to fueling high-performing teams and creating impactful strategies. Collaborative features found in CPQ platforms streamline communication and project management, creating a more collaborative and productive environment.
This newfound collaborative spirit among teams is having an undeniable impact on customer engagement and sales performance.
Conclusion
With an advanced 3D CPQ system, you can upend the established, immune way of doing sales and connecting with customers. With this advanced 3D CPQ system you see quicker processes and greater efficacy. It increases your win rates and repeat business. Having one data source for everything helps centralize the process, increasing accuracy and saving time. This advanced 3D CPQ system changes the game in how customers experience and configure your products in a way that’s tailored to their individual needs.
The future of visual configuration looks very bright indeed, with many exciting opportunities for further innovation on the horizon. Now is the time to make sure you’re taking advantage of how this tech can power your business to success. Don’t skip the opportunity to take your sales to the next level.
Curious to see how an advanced 3D CPQ system can improve your bottom line and your customer experience? So, together, let’s take the plunge and do it!
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an advanced 3D CPQ system?
An advanced 3D CPQ solution is a software that integrates 3D product configurator capabilities into Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) workflows. This visual CPQ solution empowers manufacturers to simplify product configuration, pricing calculations, and quoting, driving new sales efficiencies.
How do 3D CPQ systems benefit businesses?
3D CPQ systems, particularly effective as a visual CPQ solution, enable companies to visualize their products in 3D during the configuration process. This enhanced product visualization not only improves accuracy but also reduces errors, ultimately accelerating the sales process and increasing customer satisfaction.
How can a 3D CPQ system boost sales?
An advanced 3D product configurator will increase sales by engaging buyers with realistic, manipulatable product visuals, enhancing the ordering experience, streamlining complex pricing scenarios, and leading to quicker, more confident decisions.
What speed and efficiency advantages do 3D CPQ systems offer?
Advanced 3D CPQ solutions shorten the sales cycle by automating product configuration and dynamic price calculations. These visual CPQ tools help you get accurate quotes out the door faster, cutting the paperwork time that sales reps need to spend.
Why is a single data source important in 3D CPQ?
With one data source, you’re guaranteed the same information no matter what channel your sale comes through, enhancing the functionality of your visual cpq solution. It breaks down data silos, prevents errors, and ensures sales teams and customers have access to correct, current information.
What is the future of visual configuration?
The future of visual cpq solutions will bring even more immersive experiences, such as augmented reality. These innovations will continue to deepen customer engagement and enhance the ecommerce ordering experience.
How does 3D CPQ improve personalized customer engagement?
Advanced 3D CPQ solutions create immersive environments where customers can manipulate and view product visuals from all angles in real-time. This level of personalization fosters a more meaningful ordering experience, addressing specific customer requirements and increasing overall customer satisfaction.
