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The Future of CPQ—Trends Report 2025

As B2B selling continues to evolve, sales organizations are looking for creative ways to scale the efficiency and efficacy of their sales channels. So, it’s not surprising that Configure Price Quote (CPQ) software is hotter than ever. With significant advances in just the last few years, CPQ has become the go-to technology for businesses to modernize their sales processes—reducing errors, accelerating sales cycle, and enhancing the customer experience with quick, personalized quotes.

The demand for CPQ platforms has grown rapidly in recent years, and the market for cloud CPQ tools among publicly traded companies is projected to reach nearly $5.8 billion in 2026.

Read on to discover how the CPQ landscape is evolving and the trends that will impact businesses and their future profitability.

5 CPQ Trends for 2025

Discover 5 CPQ Trends for 2025

1. Integrated Data and Systems

One of the most important trends today is to integrate it all—CRMs, ERPs, customer-facing portals, and eCommerce platforms—to provide smarter decision-making capabilities and a unified experience for customers, partners, and sales teams. Because CPQ sits in the middle of key technologies, it’s the perfect utility for aligning and integrating data across multiple technologies. As businesses are shifting to multi-cloud architectures for more flexibility and scalability, CPQs that are “agnostic” and offer full integration capabilities with not one, but multiple different back-end systems, including a large variety of pre-built connectors for common data sources and formats, make IT’s job easier and deliver quicker time-to-value.

2. Hybrid Selling

Hybrid selling is set to become a dominant B2B sales strategy, and CPQ facilitates this approach by bridging the gap between direct sales and eCommerce, providing customers with an easy, accurate, and consistent buying experience across sales channels. By enabling real-time interactions between buyers and sellers and allowing customers to explore and select the products they need through self-service portals, businesses can use their CPQ solution to allow closer collaboration with sales experts and synchronization of quote changes in real time. This collaborative quoting approach offers higher convenience and speed for online buyers and helps avoid errors in complex purchases, while fostering customer trust and quoting transparency.

3. Simplified Product Configurations

Many B2B products require assembling or configuring products and services, which can be complicated and cumbersome. One important trend is to leverage CPQ software with a constraints-based configuration engine that walks salespeople through all the required options for a product or service. This not only improves the time it takes to make a quote but also eliminates errors in the configuration process. CPQs vary when it comes to configuration firepower though. Some CPQs only support quotes with up to 100 products, while others can scale easily and handle quotes of up to 10,000 line items or more, which is ideal for businesses that manage long price agreements when selling complex products or solutions like machinery, technology, software, or telecommunications.

4. Automated Quote Approvals

Another trend is to overhaul the approval process to eliminate long, manual approval cycles that can cause unnecessary delays and leave customers frustrated, or worse, seeking service elsewhere. Approvals can be automatically greenlighted based on the specific guidelines of a business, such as those under a certain price threshold. Some of the biggest companies have gone from zero self-service capabilities to processing most of their quotes with no intervention, which has proven to be game-changing.

5.Pricing Powered by AI

One of the biggest breakthroughs is CPQ’s pricing intelligence. When powered by AI, CPQ enables businesses to deliver fast, tailored, and more personalized offers for every selling interaction, across all channels. A CPQ solution fueled with AI-powered price recommendations can surface insights and analytics about market and buying behaviors and create offers with the right product mix and price point. CPQ solutions are revolutionizing selling by helping salespeople:

  • Identify opportunities on a customer and product level for revenue or margin improvement
  • Provide personalized price recommendations at which customers are most likely to buy specific products
  • Make fast and sound decisions by aggregating and surfacing analytical insights about customer preferences and behavior

Best Practices for Selecting and Implementing CPQ

If you’re CPQ shopping, follow these three important tips:

  • Conduct a thorough needs assessment to ensure that the CPQ supports your business needs now and your growth strategy into the future.
  • Analyze the CPQ’s sophistication, including all the technology integrations to connect to your existing systems like CRM and ERP with less work and faster time-to-value.
  • Select an experienced CPQ partner to help lead your digital selling transformation, whether it’s enhancing CPQ further with optimized pricing for more personalized offerings to customers, driving CPQ adoption among your salesforce, or defining and measuring KPIs to track performance.

How Companies are Outperforming With PROS Smart Configure Price Quote

  • Groupe DEYA, a French manufacturer of wooden and metal products including door blocks and scaffolding platforms, needed to simplify a highly complex configuration and ordering process that was slow and cumbersome. With PROS Smart Configure Price Quote, the company can now provide immediate responses for every customer request, with automated quote approvals that accelerate the sales cycle. They’ve also automated production times for every configuration, fully integrated with their CRM and ERP, ensuring that their catalogs are now immediately updated, which also lessens the burden on their IT teams. Recently, they started using the PROS Collaboration Portal to interact with their end users to further streamline their overall quoting process.
  • Manitou Group, a French manufacturer that makes forklifts, cherry pickers, and other heavy equipment, experienced selling issues because sales agents were using a bulky paper catalog to communicate options to customers and place orders. Reps placed orders or gave information verbally or by email. These non-digital processes introduced a multitude of problems as the company grew. PROS Smart Configure Price Quote provides a common selling and ordering solution for sales teams and dealers, so salespeople can sit with customers and configure Manitou Group’s 400 product selections in an online portal instead of thumbing through a catalog that might not be up to date. They’ve reduced the average time to configure and place orders from 30 days to a few hours. More than 95% of orders are now entered through the online dealer portal, and more than 60% of orders are directly submitted by the dealers. Today, Manitou Group can distribute its sales catalog to all channels consistently and in real time and has increased the average revenue of each order.
  • A €12B European telecommunications company was facing several issues operating in a fierce consumer market. The provider struggled to quickly respond to competitors’ offerings directed at its existing customer base. New product launches were slow and customers experienced inconsistency in product offers between channels. PROS Smart Configure Price Quote provides a single, centralized quoting platform that allows them to establish a reliable, multichannel platform that supports 2,000 users, meets performance targets, and maintains 99.9% uptime. They also reduced new product launch time by up to 75%. And they captured significant savings in maintenance and updates of their product catalog, which includes 166,000 configurable software objects for 250 price plans.

Discover the Exciting Possibilities of Next-Gen CPQ

B2B buyers are clear about what they want: an easy, convenient, and personalized sales experience in the channel of their choice—whether that’s in person, remote via phone, eCommerce, or a hybrid mix. Businesses that modernize their selling to the way their customers want to purchase from them using CPQ technology not only create happy customers but are better positioned to outperform their competitors and cut through ever-increasing market complexities.

At PROS, we are consistently recognized for being at the forefront of CPQ technology. We are committed to empowering businesses with innovative capabilities that accelerate sales and enhance precision. With a growing focus on AI and machine learning, analytics, and advanced functionality, the PROS Smart Configure Price Quote solution, part of the PROS Platform, continues to deliver substantial value while driving customer success.

Get in touch with us to learn how PROS Smart CPQ can help you outperform.