8 Things to Look for in Configure Price Quote (CPQ) Software

March 17, 2022

At a time when B2B buying behavior is changing rapidly—spanning where, when, and how buyers do business—sellers must evolve the way they sell.

For example, take the quoting process. Most B2B customers now do their own research and request quotes from several vendors. They expect accurate, same-day responses. Yet many businesses struggle to quickly create large quotes for customers with many products and configuration options, or where the information needed for the quote is siloed across several systems.

Another bottleneck is pricing, which can be slow due to the complexity of pricing tiers, multi-year deals, contracts, and subscriptions. Salespeople also have to manage several pricing elements such as:

Price list administration
Real-time pricing methods
Scaled pricing
Currency conversion
Pricing thresholds
Approval workflows

And then there’s the quoting process itself, which can generate back-and-forth emails and phone calls, complex internal coordination, and lengthy approvals, leaving salespeople little time for anything else.

That’s why businesses are turning to high-performance configure price quote (CPQ) technology.

At its core, this game-changing software automates and optimizes quote creation and order capturing. But that’s just the beginning. A smart CPQ solution enables businesses to embrace digital sales by synchronizing their selling, pricing, and eCommerce strategies on one platform. The advantages are huge for business performance: consistent pricing across channels, increased sales, stronger customer relationships, faster sales cycles, better internal collaboration with pricing teams, and increased sales predictability, to name a few.

So how do you choose the best CPQ tool for you and achieve these benefits in your organization?

Here are the top eight features to look for in a smart CPQ solution:

Flexible product catalog – Choose a tool that provides a digital catalog with intuitive guided selling questionnaires to help salespeople easily find the right products, even if your business handles tens of thousands of SKUs.
Error-free configurations at scale – You need a powerful AI driven configuration engine that enables even the newest sales hire to create complex, error-free configurations in minutes. When anyone on the sales team can effectively configure any product for any customer, sales teams not only win more deals, but can lean on AI to bundle the right products or services so each deal is fully maximized.
Advanced visualization capabilities – Multiple visualization and configuration techniques (2D, 3D) make it easy to configure the most complex products and provide an immersive way for customers to engage with products and services.
Ability to handle large bids or RFPs – How complex are your quotes? Look for the ability to create and manage quotes, bids, and RFPs efficiently, even those with thousands of line items.
Personalized recommendations – The tool you choose should use AI to analyze different buying behaviors—such as gap analysis, churn detection, inconsistent buying patterns—and provide tailored product recommendations for efficient cross-sell and upsell.
Dynamic AI price optimization – A best-in-class tool integrates AI-based price recommendations to accelerate close rates without leaking revenue or margin. When salespeople have access to the right pricing for every deal, they can easily create and manage quotes on their own for all selling scenarios—spot orders, subscription orders, and sales agreements—bypassing sales operations or the pricing deal desk, which can dramatically speed up the quoting process.
Regional localization – The ability to leverage the same tool across multiple global sites with regional catalogs and the right currencies is important, so you can scale with your business needs. To realize ROI quickly, you might choose to deliver across a certain geography or business unit, enabling your business to transform for global sales.
Streamlined sales agreements – This feature enables you to easily create, amend, renew, and extend agreements with real-time insights of agreement changes during the process. Ideally this feature should be available for mass price changes, enabling companies to quickly react to market changes and new strategic directives.

Ready to learn more?

We can help. In fact, recently PROS was named a Leader in three CPQ analyst evaluations: Gartner® Magic Quadrant™, The Forrester Wave™: Configure, Price, Quote Solutions, Q1 2025, and IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Configure Price Quote Applications for Commerce 2024-2025 Vendor Assessment.

If your business is impacted by Salesforce’s exit from CPQ and you’re searching for a replacement, PROS Smart CPQ may be exactly what you’re looking for.