Have you ever wondered how online platforms can quickly estimate prices for products or services? The answer is automatic price estimators. These price configuration tools provide website users with an easy way to build the product they want and provide them instantly with price estimates within seconds.
By entering their needs or desired configuration, they can get an immediate estimate, making informed decisions without back-and-forth communication. This saves time and money for your sales team while generating high-quality product-qualified leads.
In this article, we will look at how automatic price estimators work and the steps involved in generating quick and reliable estimates.
Understanding this technology can help businesses sell more through online channel and buyers make more informed buying decisions.
Understanding Automatic Price Estimators
The Basics of a Price Quote Calculator
A price quote calculator is a software tool on a company’s website designed to provide instant, customized pricing estimates to potential customers, enhancing their buying experience.
It serves as an effective lead generation and qualification tool by collecting user data for tailored sales follow-ups. Additionally, this calculator aids in streamlining sales processes, offering market insights, and establishing a competitive edge through pricing transparency and efficiency.
Why should I pay attention to this?
Enhanced Customer Experience: In today’s market, B2B buyers seek instant information.
A price quote calculator on your website allows potential customers to get immediate pricing estimates for your products or services. This instant access to information meets the modern buyer’s expectations for speed and convenience, significantly enhancing their experience.
Accurate and Customized Pricing: The calculator can be programmed to account for various factors like product configurations, service levels, and regional variations. This ensures that each customer receives a tailored quote that accurately reflects their specific needs and circumstances, fostering trust and credibility.
Let’s take an example: you sell a dental chair unit.
The price of your dental chair is influenced by several factors: the model of the chair, the material and color of the chair, whether the customer opts for a delivery unit, and if they choose to include shipping insurance.
Your product configurator could look something like this:
Lead Generation and Qualification: When customers use the calculator, they can be prompted to enter contact details to receive the pricing information (and then, if they wish, request a detailed quote).
This process serves as an effective lead-generation tool. The details customer provided during the product configuration process give you valuable insights into what the customer is looking for, allowing your sales team to personalize follow-up communications effectively.
>> Further reading: How Täsmä Työterveys used HeadQ Product configurator to boost the sales
Increased Efficiency: By automating the initial quote process, your sales team can save time and resources. This automation allows them to focus on nurturing qualified leads and closing sales, rather than spending time on preliminary inquiries that may not convert into sales.
Product configurators are often the most interesting content on the manufacturing brands’ website. It’s also a best practice to include the Price calculator / Product configurator links in your main navigation and main call to action areas to ensure customers find it easily.
Data Collection and Analysis: The usage data from the calculator can provide insights into market trends, popular products or services, and pricing sensitivity. This data is invaluable for strategic decision-making and can help in refining sales strategies, product development, and marketing efforts.
Modern visual CPQ tools such as HeadQ provide integration to the Data layer, which will give you more insight into the customers’ use of price calculator.
Competitive Advantage: Offering a price quote calculator can differentiate your company in the market. It demonstrates a commitment to transparency and customer service, setting you apart from competitors who may not offer similar tools.
⚠️ Including words like Price calculator, Instant quote or Product configurator in your ads copy can also boost your click through rates (CTR) and conversion rate’s by even 59%.
What should you consider when using a product configurator / price estimator?
When customizing a price quote calculator for your website, factors such as user-friendliness, understandability, and integration with other systems should be considered.
Nowadays big chunk of the website traffic comes from mobile devices, so brand may want to make sure their calculators are accessible on both mobile devices and desktop computers.
Although it’s possible to create a custom-built configurator or calculator using specific coding, it’s usually not the most advantageous approach. This is primarily because the structure of products, additional features, and even the pricing of fundamental items tend to evolve over time. These changes can lead to a higher overall cost of ownership compared to utilizing best CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) tools.
What types of price estimators there are?
There are different types of automatic price estimators in the market. Some of the tools are simple calculators that you can embed to your website while other visual product configurators provide users instant visual representation of the product configuration and the associated price.
It’s very important to note that many tools don’t offer many options to control how price is presented. Even for one company, there might be a need to display pricing information in different ways for different products or services.
Advanced product configuration tools like HeadQ provide users total flexibility to control how the price information is presented.
- Exact price: the exact price is based on the customer’s configuration of what they have done with your product price calculator. It’s 100% correct always and reduces the need for the involvement of sales reps.
- Price estimate by price range: In some cases, you want to give your customers a quick price estimate instead of an exact price. This might be due to very high competitive situation in the industry you’re in or just simply by wanting to keep the exact pricing to yourself. Customers can configure the product they want and receive a price range for the desired product (e.g $12 500 – 13 900). If the customer wants a binding quote from your company, they can request the exact price with a push of a button.
- Visual price estimate: Visual price estimation is a great way to show price information in product configurators as customers is configuring the product they want. The visual price estimate is updated live as the customer inserts the required information.
Automatic Price Estimator in Action
Businesses like manufacturing companies, brands and other product companies can make sales easier by adding an automatic price estimator to their website. This tool lets customers quickly get a quote for products or services they want to buy, making the buying process faster and simpler.
Using an automatic price estimator has several benefits:
- It reduces the need for manual sales
- It gives customers clear pricing information and builds trust
- It boosts overall sales conversion rates and improves sales efficiency
Businesses can also customize the price estimator whenever their prices change, making sure it accurately reflects their pricing.
This customization can include different pricing models, variables, and input fields tailored to their specific needs and the needs of their customers. By having an accurate and user-friendly pricing tool on their website, businesses can make sales smoother and improve the customer experience.
Automatic price estimators improve website conversion rates
Automatic price estimators are a powerful tool for increasing sales. They provide potential customers with immediate and accurate cost estimates. Using automatic price estimators engages potential customers and improves the overall user experience. This makes the purchasing process more efficient and convenient.
One key benefit is the ability to provide personalized quotes in real-time. This saves time and creates a sense of transparency and trust. And like we all know, having clear pricing information available builds trust like nothing else.
Customizing and optimizing automatic price estimators to generate and send quotes ensures accurate and relevant pricing information is available for your customers 24/7/365, even when your sales reps are not online. This leads to increased sales and a more efficient conversion funnel.
Engaging Potential Customers
An automatic price estimator can help businesses attract and keep potential customers. It provides quick and accurate cost estimates, which catches the eye of people looking for products or services within their budget. It’s no wonder that price calculators and visual product configurators are most viewed parts of the websites.
FAQs About the Automatic Price Estimator
Automatic price estimators give quick and accurate cost estimates based on input information. These systems can be tailored to a business’s specific needs, including unique variables.
Using automatic price estimators can streamline the sales process, save time for both the business and the customer, enhance customer engagement, and increase transparency and trust.
It’s a valuable tool for businesses aiming to improve efficiency and customer experience.
FAQ
Q: How does an automatic price estimator gather pricing data?
A: You insert your company’s product data into the tool, with all the product information like product options, product variations and add-ons etc. Once you have created the product in the CPQ tool, you visualize the questions that help customers to choose between the product options. After this, you build the logic of how you want to present the pricing information.
Q: What factors does a price estimator consider when estimating pricing?
A: A price estimator considers all of the factors that you put in to the system. We call these factors “Product options”. A product option can have a positive or negative impact on the product total price.
Q: Can an price estimator account for market fluctuations?
A: Yes, an price estimator can account for market fluctuations, if you integrate it to real-time market data and adjusting product pricing accordingly. For example, if your ERP has a live feed of parts cost, you can update the price information through the ERP integration.
Q: How do you insert product price estimator / configurator to your website?
A: HeadQ product configurator and visual CPQ can be easily embedded into your website. This embedding takes less than one minute of time and can be done via any CMS that allows your to insert custom html.
Q: How do automatic price estimators integrate with existing CRM or ERP systems?
A: Automatic price estimators can be integrated with existing CRM or ERP systems using APIs or middleware solutions that facilitate data exchange and functionality sharing between the systems.
Q: Can automatic price estimators be customized for services or subscription-based pricing models?
A: These tools can indeed be customized for services or subscription-based pricing models, with configurations that account for the recurring nature of payments, the variability of service offerings, and customer usage patterns, ensuring accurate and dynamic pricing strategies tailored to the business model.