Pharma Distributor Boosts Sales 27% with Personalized CPQ+
Alexander Shlimakov specializes in Salesforce, Tableau, Mulesoft, and Slack consulting for enterprise clients across the CIS region. With a proven track record in technical sales leadership and a results-oriented approach, he focuses on the financial services, high-tech, and pharma/CPG segments. Known for his out-of-the-box thinking and strong presentation skills, he brings extensive experience in solution sales and business development.
A Central Asian pharmaceutical distributor faced declining sales due to a rigid, onesizefitsall quoting system that produced frequent errors. By implementing a CPQ+ solution, they enabled personalized, automated pricing for each customer. This transformation empowered salespeople to generate accurate quotes faster, accelerate deal closures, and win more business by aligning offers with specific customer needs.
Challenge: One-Size-Fits-All Quotes Were Losing Deals
A Central Asian pharmaceutical distributor faced declining sales due to a rigid, one-size-fits-all quoting system that produced frequent errors. By implementing a CPQ+ solution, they enabled personalized, automated pricing for each customer. This transformation empowered salespeople to generate accurate quotes faster, accelerate deal closures, and win more business by aligning offers with specific customer needs.
How did a pharmaceutical distributor increase sales win rate and deal size with personalized quoting?
This case study details how a pharma distributor boosts sales and profitability by implementing personalized CPQ+. The move away from manual spreadsheets to an automated system increased its sales win rate from 18% to 27% and grew average deal size by 27% in just 90 days.
In early 2024, a Central Asian pharmaceutical distributor struggled with a stagnant 18% win rate. Its manual, spreadsheet-based quoting process could not meet diverse customer demands, such as volume-based bundles for hospitals or loyalty-tiered discounts for pharmacies. This inefficiency led to critical business challenges: 42% of quotes required finance overrides, approvals averaged 4.7 days, and pricing errors forced post-sale credits averaging USD 11,300 each.
Solution Design: Make the Product Catalog Speak the Customer's Language
By implementing a personalized CPQ+ solution, the distributor automated its quoting process. The new system introduced dynamic pricing, guided selling workflows, an attribute-driven product catalog, and risk-aware approvals. This combination directly addressed the speed and accuracy issues that were hindering sales performance and profitability.
In collaboration with a local Salesforce integrator, the distributor designed the new solution around four core personalization pillars:
| Pillar | What Changed | CPQ+ Feature Used |
|---|---|---|
| Attribute-driven products | Every SKU tagged with therapy area, pack size, shelf life, storage class | Product Rules |
| Guided selling flow | Six-question wizard surfaces only valid combinations (tender vs. retail, cold chain vs. ambient) | Smart Configuration |
| Dynamic pricing matrix | 1,200 price lists replaced by one formula reading customer segment, region, volume, expiry proximity | Price Rules |
| Risk-aware approvals | Auto-escalation when margin < 12 % or discount > 18 % | Approval Matrix |
The system centralized templates for contracts, appendices, and labels. This allowed sales reps to generate a Kazakh-language proposal for a state hospital or a Russian-language invoice for a private pharmacy chain from the same quote data in seconds.
Implementation: From Pilot to Full Roll-out in 14 Weeks
The project was executed in a 14-week timeline from pilot to full deployment:
- Weeks 1-3 - Data Foundation: Cleansed 18,000 SKU records by deduplicating entries and archiving 3,700 obsolete items.
- Weeks 4-6 - Configuration: Built and tested 450 product rules, 97 price rules, and 23 approval thresholds in a sandbox environment.
- Weeks 7-8 - User Acceptance Testing: Conducted workshops where 28 sales reps stress-tested the system with complex quote scenarios, enabling nightly refinements.
- Weeks 9-10 - Pilot Program: Deployed a pilot with the 8-person Astana sales team, which successfully generated 213 quotes.
- Weeks 11-14 - Full Rollout: Executed a phased go-live, concluding with the Almaty headquarters.
A MuleSoft integration with the company’s SAP ERP ensured that inventory levels and customer credit limits were refreshed every 15 minutes, maintaining data integrity across systems.
Results: Faster, Cleaner, Bigger
Within 90 days of full implementation, the CPQ+ system delivered measurable improvements across all key performance indicators:
| Metric | Before CPQ+ | 90 Days After | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average time-to-quote | 14.2 h | 2.9 h | - 79 % |
| Quotes requiring override | 42 % | 4 % | - 90 % |
| Pricing accuracy | 94 % | 99.2 % | +5.2 pp |
| Win rate | 18 % | 27 % | +50 % |
| Average deal size | USD 48 k | USD 61 k | +27 % |
| Post-sale credits | 2 per month | 0 in 90 days | - 100 % |
Sales reps now utilize a "Today's Best Opportunities" dashboard that ranks deals by their probability of closing. The system also suggests targeted micro-discounts to secure wins while protecting the required 12% margin floor.
"The system tells me which hospital tender can still take a 3 % volume rebate and stay compliant - I don't guess anymore," says one senior sales executive.
Lessons Learned
- Prioritize Data Hygiene: A ten-day pause to cleanse and merge customer records prevented an estimated 200 hours of future rework, proving that clean data is the foundation of successful automation.
- Calibrate Approvals to Market Reality: Initial approval thresholds were too restrictive, flagging 60% of quotes for review. Adjusting the maximum discount to 18% cut manual escalations in half without eroding profit margins.
- Localize Early and Completely: Delaying the implementation of Kazakh-language templates until phase two frustrated key public-sector clients and caused a temporary 4-point drop in the pilot win rate.
- Track Both Speed and Accuracy: Focusing only on pricing errors was insufficient. Adding “quote-to-customer-response time” as a key metric revealed that deal velocity was just as critical as accuracy for winning competitive tenders.
The success of this architecture has prompted its extension to Revenue Cloud to future-proof subscription sales of digital health services. This project proves that personalized, data-driven quoting is essential in the modern pharmaceutical market. By transforming each quote into an intelligent conversation, the distributor cut turnaround time by nearly 80% and increased revenue per deal by 27% in a single quarter.