5 Signs that You’ve Outgrown Your Configure Price Quote (CPQ) Software

As a company evolves, so do business needs. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure that your current Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solution keeps pace with the growth of your business operations. But how do you know if what you have is still serving you?

To help you answer that question, this post will look at certain aspects in which a company has outgrown their solution, and the business is suffering because of it.

We hope you use this post to not only gain valuable business insights, but to also determine if it’s time to upgrade your current CPQ technology with a better one.

1. Is the UI slowing down the speed of sales?

How many clicks does it take to configure a product or complete an order, get the correct price, and generate a quote? The user interface (UI) of Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) software plays a crucial role in quick time-to-value, user adoption, enhancing sales experts’ productivity and accelerating the sales process. If users find it difficult to navigate the CPQ UI and cannot select the right products and services to generate a quote, this could lead to slower sales cycles and missed opportunities. In general, a modern and intuitive CPQ UI allows businesses and their sales teams to see time-to-value in 3 months and sometimes as little as 2 weeks.

A cumbersome, clunky UI extends the sellers’ learning curve, impeding users from adopting the software in their daily sales activities and eventually negatively affecting buyer experience, revenues, and profits. All too often companies invest in technology not properly used, so the business does not recognize the investment's value.

Furthermore, a poor UI impacts not only the win rates and velocity of sales workflows, but it also increases errors in configurations and price agreements and slows down sales teams’ responses to buyers. So, instead of providing an accurate quote in minutes that makes your customers happy, sales reps could spend days generating the right offer. Meanwhile, the buyer is searching for a faster, more responsive supplier.

The right CPQ software should make sales lives easier—not more difficult— enabling quick and easy product configurations, efficiency in quote creation and management and visibility into deal performance. It should allow your sales teams to do what they do best—sell—by allowing them to focus their time and efforts on value-added tasks and revenue-generating activities. Please do not underestimate the business impact of a great UI.

2. Are you launching secure, digital selling portals or an eCommerce site?

Maybe you are trying to get out ahead of the competition – or catch up. If your competitors are already providing their buyers with user-friendly digital portals for self-service configurations and quoting, it is time to make a similar move. Does your current CPQ solution power different channels effectively, not just direct sales? While each channel—direct sales, partners, eCommerce, marketplaces, customer portals, etc.—has unique needs, the experience must be consistent and personalized for your buyers.

If you plan to expand your go-to-market strategy to digital commerce, how will you manage price lists, catalogs, product configurations and quotes for your customers outside the direct sales motion with the existing CPQ system? Does it fully integrate with digital self-service platforms and support selling workflows that require real-time interactions with buyers and deliver personalized pricing? If not, you may have to consider changing your current selling software with a solution fit for modern buyers in a digital world.

3. What is on your list of “must-haves”?

There’s a difference between must-have and nice-to-have capabilities, and if a CPQ solution can offer both, then it’s leaps and bounds ahead of other tools. Let’s look at a few essential ones now:

• Managing proposals with 5 to 10,000 lines: If you don’t have the ability to support both simple and large quotes, and price agreements with the same speed and precision, you won’t be able to respond quickly and accurately to customers. This often results in losing the deal. Efficient scaling without compromising system performance saves time and effort for your team, eliminating frustration.
• Self-serve or Collaborative CX: If buyers are not participating in configuration and quoting process or cannot initiate it themselves, you will lose out on a crucial opportunity to build trust and underscore transparency. In a buyer-led digital world to empower your digital customers with the ability to communicate with you as a seller easily is a necessity, not a nice-to-have option.
• Guided Selling: Your sellers should be able to create an offer and provide value in the process such as recommending product enhancements or incentives tailored to your buyers’ preferences and agreements. If they cannot, they might be leaving money on the table or worse, applying unnecessary discounts. Or even worse, overcharging your customers. The lack of simplified product navigation and personalized offers can also negatively impact customer experience and business competitiveness, leading to fewer closed deals and customers turning to competitors.
• Usage and Adoption Analysis: If you don’t have access to sales-focused analytics you will not have visibility into your deal performance and sales results. This means you will not know what’s working and what is not for your business, to take relevant and timely action.
• Price agreements: If you don’t have the ability to efficiently create and manage price agreements and execute quick updates to more than one when the price strategy changes, you will not be able to maintain long-term profitability for the business.
• Dynamic pricing: If you don’t have an AI-powered pricing feature integrated with your CPQ solution, you won’t be able to keep up with market dynamics and offer competitive prices in real time, especially if you are managing sales agreements for your distribution business.

4. But will it scale?

Is your CPQ solution able to handle competitive pressures and scale with your business as it grows? Can you update your product catalogs and bring more products to the market or launch a new product offering that requires more complex configurations? Do you need to transform your business model and incorporate recurring services into your existing product offerings? Can you launch and effectively manage the lifecycle of subscription-based customers?

If you can’t grow your business with new customers, products, services, or sales channels, or expand your business model to meet new customer demands all because of CPQ system limitations, this will prove detrimental to your market position and competitiveness. And ultimately your bottom line will be affected negatively, challenging your survival on the market as a company.

5. Is it future proof?

Does your CPQ solution vendor offer a clear and transparent roadmap that is aligned to market trends and is built for future success? If there is not a clear vision and direction of how the CPQ technology will evolve over time, you won’t be able to understand how the software is adapting to the changing market, as well as how your sales division and strategy will be keeping up with the evolving industry, business, and customer needs over time. Additionally, if customers like yourself cannot influence the roadmap by suggesting necessary CPQ innovations that matter to their industry and business profile you cannot stay ahead of the competition and achieve your strategic goals.

What Comes Next

If you have found yourself nodding to some—if not all—of these points, maybe it’s time to consider making a change and upgrading your current CPQ solution. Don’t worry, in the next post in this series we will be covering what to consider when choosing a new CPQ solution, including the key aspects that are most important when evaluating your future CPQ software and how they align with your evolving business needs.

^*Source: Gartner Maturity Model for Quote-to-Cash Technology, Feb 2019, Mark Lewis

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