After designing and refining a product with other company stakeholders, it’s time to generate sales to recoup your investment. However, the sales process for customizable products like heavy machinery, fluid handling equipment, and other industrial solutions, is more complex than simple, off-the-shelf products. That’s because customers need help identifying and configuring products to meet their needs — and sales needs to facilitate this quickly or risk losing business.
Here’s what to watch out for in this leg of the journey:
Specialty manufacturers can’t rely on spreadsheets anymore to handle their configurations — they need configure, price, quote (CPQ) software. In part one of this series, we discussed how CPQ can help engineers automate configurability during the design phase, but the technology also has a customer-facing side. Here’s how it works:
PLM remains useful throughout the sales process as well. The software can integrate directly with the CPQ platform to automatically update inventory. If a particular quote does require feedback from engineers, the sales team can facilitate and document the communication through the PLM. All of the sales data the PLM collects from CPQ could inform future product development decisions. For example, if a particular configuration proves to be especially popular, designers may consider creating it as an off-the-shelf solution and reach a bigger market.
Revalize offers an entire suite of solutions that can aid manufacturers throughout every stage of the idea-to-cash journey. Users can choose to leverage PLM, computer-aided design (CAD), CPQ, and other solutions independently to refine specific parts of their operation, or combine them as a complete end-to-end platform.
Schedule a product demo to see what our technology can do for you. Or, read our PLM roadmap to learn more.
