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Collaborative Quoting Transforms the CPQ Experience for B2B Buyers and Sellers

Published Date

Explore Collaborative Quoting, the innovative new capability of PROS Smart CPQ, that enhances and simplifies the selling experience. Meet your customers in the channel of their choice and empower them to self-serve but get assistance when they need it.


CPQ has grown so much over the last few decades. What was once a back-office ERP tool primarily for engineers to configure complex products has become a mainstay of digital selling—with features like AI-powered price optimization and cross-sell/upsell functionality.

Now, there’s a new wave of experiences shaping CPQ and the buyer journey today. And it's driven by the evolving expectations of B2B buyers to have an easy, effective, accurate, and consistent buying experience across sales channels. That new functionality is Collaborative Quoting.

What is Collaborative Quoting?

Collaborative Quoting modernizes the buying journey through an integrated, digital environment that promotes stronger interaction between buyers and sellers.

This new functionality of CPQ provides a secure digital portal that empowers your buyers to work the way they want, whether it’s initiating quotes on their own, making changes directly to a quote initiated by the salesperson or working together with their salesperson on a live quote.

It’s perfect for businesses that are looking to take that leap toward eCommerce and digital selling but realize that there is still a need for assistance during the quoting process, given the complexity of commercial agreements, product configurations, and pricing structures.

How Does it Work?

If a buyer wants to see changes to a proposal or add or remove items in a quote, instead of having to wait for a salesperson to make those changes and resend the proposal, the buyer can make the changes himself in the sales portal from CPQ. And if he has questions, he can easily reach out to the salesperson to view the proposal and get answers. You can even set it up so that the buyer can accept the quote in the portal and skip the proposal generation process altogether.

CQ invite, screenshot

This is faster than the current CPQ process, where a salesperson starts the quote in CRM by going into an account, creating an opportunity, working through the quote, adding the products to the quote, pricing it, and then emailing the proposal to the customer. In this scenario, the buyer and seller still need to get on a call or email to address feedback. The salesperson then must make these changes, and possibly get caught up in a new round of pricing approvals, before sending the new proposal to the customer. Meanwhile, other things may have changed like the terms of the deal. As you can see, there’s a lot of back-and-forth aligning schedules, time wasted making even simple changes, and no self-serve capability.

Collaborative Quoting cuts through all this, providing an easy and effortless digital environment that reduces the sales cycle, streamlines the process, and engages your buyers the way they want to be engaged.

  • Live quote collaboration between buyer and seller
  • Works on any device
  • Accelerates deals
  • Provides a great customer experience

CQ side by side, screenshot

How Do Your Customers Want to Interact with You?

Every customer is different and with Collaborative Quoting in CPQ you can give your customer the sales experience that aligns with the way they want to interact with you—whether it’s a full turnkey, salesperson-driven process or collaborative, interactive process.

If you’re a current customer of PROS Smart Configure Price Quote, Collaborative Quoting is available now and takes just a few days to configure and deploy to your teams.

Watch the Demo

Watch the webinar to see the Collaboration Quoting process between sellers and buyers leveraging PROS.

Learn more

Reach out to your sales CSM or contact PROS today to get started transforming the quoting experience and buyer journey for your sales organization. Empower them with digital collaboration tools that will drive efficiency and modernize the customer experience.

About the Authors

Jon Moeller Headshot

Jon Moeller is a Global Senior Strategic Consultant where he guides pricing and sales teams through critical digital transformation initiatives. He works with customers across the phases of discovery, identifying value drivers, aligning to PROS solutions, building the business case, mobilizing cross-functional teams, and preparing our team to deliver the 2-5% revenue uplift results. During his 14 years at PROS, he spent 8 years architecting and delivering our solutions in Professional Services and prior to PROS led a $1B Business Unit building pricing processes from the ground up while delivering on key margin growth initiatives.

Sujit Bhavsar Headshot

Sujit Bhavsar serves as a Senior Product Manager leading the Collaborative Quoting and CPQ product strategy and roadmap. With 14+ years of experience developing product strategy and leading SaaS products to market across Conversational Commerce, eCommerce platforms, and Infrastructure as a Service, he brings extensive experience leading product teams through market and product discovery and PLG motions. Prior to PROS, Sujit spent 2 years working at LivePerson on their Conversational AI platform and integrations with B2C eCommerce platforms that delivered innovative customer experiences and features to SMBs that drive better outcomes through the power of AI.