SAN MATEO, CA--(Marketwired) - Selectica (NASDAQ: SLTC), provider of software that accelerates sales cycles and streamlines contract processes, has announced the immediate availability of its Summer 2013 release, with major enhancements to Selectica CPQ that bring order to enterprise sales complexity.
"For most companies, especially those operating under an 'everything-as-a-service' model, the majority of revenue is tied to existing customers and existing contracts," said Kamal Ahluwalia, Chief Marketing Officer at Selectica. "We're excited to offer the technology that helps these companies facilitate profitable renewals, up-sell, and cross-sell opportunities, and provide dashboards that allow an executive bird's-eye view of where they are making money, where course correction is needed to remove bottlenecks, and where they can adjust their strategy to make direct and indirect channels more productive and valuable."
Selectica's summer release allows companies to reach a greater level of sales effectiveness by leveraging analytics dashboards to increase deal insight, speed and streamline quote and contract approvals, create guardrails that guide sales representatives and channel partners through deal configuration, and collaborate on deals as they progress from within the system.
"We have very specific, sensitive types of information we need to track and maintain with consistency," said Jim Burns, Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer at PSC, a provider of innovative environmental and industrial service solutions. "When we discovered that Selectica could deploy a solution that could consolidate and put guardrails around such complex processes as our estimation and quoting process, we were on board. We know that this will allow our company to be better aligned and respond to the needs of our customers."
According to a recent Gartner report, Configure, Price and Quote Tools Help Redefine the Sales Experience (written by Praveen Sengar, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner, July 12, 2012), "CPQ tools have moved beyond tactical internal sales-focused configuration solutions for salespeople to use for configuring a product and pricing, and quoting that information to the customer in response to a customer request. CPQ tools are being adapted to become an entire end-to-end process that empowers sales to adapt to changes easily, increasing win rates and the profitability of transactions."
Other features and functionality enhancements in the summer release include:
- Analytics in Salesforce: With the analytics dashboard, users have quick, at-a-glance access to critical sales insights, such as most and least popular products being sold, most discounted products, average effective price to list price, and quote status, including which quotes have been stalled or require action.
- A faster path from opportunity to contract: With an out-of-the-box integration to Selectica's industry-leading contract management, customers benefit from complete visibility into and control of the entire sales process--from opportunity to contract renewal. The integrated workflow for quotes, proposals, and contracts decreases the time it takes to go from initial quote to contract execution, and enables sales representatives to find growth opportunities within their accounts.
- Easier, more configurable approval workflows: Workflows can be changed and dictated based on deal attributes like product price or geography. Individuals who need to approve quotes or contracts can quickly be added to approval workflows based on name, role, job level, or organization.
- In-system collaboration: Users can attach related files or documents to quotes, proposals, and contracts, create documents for the next step in the sales process, and request additional information or feedback from other users involved in the deal.
- Updates to modeling environment: Selectica's unique rule-modeling interface, Selectica Playbook, now includes features such as universal login, the ability to set pre-defined business conditions for proposal routing, and automatic product catalog comparison, to ensure that quote information corresponds with the most current business rules and product catalog information.
- Additional product configuration capabilities: Sales reps and channel partners can construct deals that include multiple configurations of the same product in a single quote.
- Built in HTML5: Leveraging the HTML5 interface, Selectica CPQ is mobile ready and more responsive, dramatically improving the user experience on a variety of devices.
Interested parties can learn more about Selectica Configure Price Quote as well as Selectica Contract Lifecycle Management at www.selectica.com.