CPQ: A Back Office Capability Becomes a Front Office Mainstay
Before the explosion of the CRM — led by sales tools — to a $70B+ market, product configuration lived as a module like SAP’s Variant Configurator or Oracle Configurator within ERP solutions. As sales software and SaaS applications began to take off in the early 2000s, CPQ became a standalone solution aimed at helping businesses more easily sell complex products. The efficiencies gained were immediately noticeable, and the aperture quickly expanded from complex products to products and services of all types. These quoting solutions now shifted their attention to integrations with CRM and Salesforce automation solutions, largely reflecting the market today.
In the 2010s, this momentum caught the attention of large CRM vendors like Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP, all making acquisitions of independent CPQ vendors during the decade. While on the surface these seemed to create a lot of synergies with their CRM offerings, the results were underwhelming. Lofty expectations were met with new pain points, stifled innovation, and newly frustrated customers.
Fast forward to 2025, Salesforce has stopped selling Salesforce CPQ, and product innovations and enhancements have all but halted in favor of a brand-new product: Salesforce Revenue Cloud. Let’s take a clearer look at the market to avoid repeating the same missteps of the past decade.
How we got here: a Chronology of CPQ at Salesforce
In order to be clear-eyed about Salesforce’s new offering, it’s important to understand how we got here. Salesforce’s (checkered) past with CPQ can be broken down into 4 distinct phases.
Phase 1 (2015) – A Tale of 2 CPQs
Watching Oracle’s acquisition of BigMachines two years prior, Salesforce got very active in the CPQ space in 2015 with two of its partners. First, Salesforce announced a $41M investment in Apttus (now Conga), its go-to-market partner for the enterprise business unit. Then after getting closer to the Apttus/Conga business for a few months, Salesforce went a different direction and announced the acquisition of SteelBrick, its go-to-market partner for their commercial business unit (smaller and midsize businesses). These moves ultimately threw Conga’s CPQ business into a tailspin and raised questions about the viability of Salesforce CPQ in the enterprise space.
Phase 2 (2020) – A Tale of 3 CPQs?
While Salesforce was years into bringing Salesforce CPQ to market and simultaneously retaining a partner friendly approach, they made the curious decision to also acquire Vlocity, an industry-focused solution with its own CPQ capabilities. The presence of two solutions in the market from the same vendor has raised more questions than it has answered, with “which solution is right for me?” and “which solution is Salesforce actually showing me?” being the most common.
Phase 3 – The Great CPQ Reset Part 1: Back to 2 CPQs… kind of
Plagued by issues around product performance and an over reliance on heavy customizations, Salesforce had to do something with Salesforce CPQ. Their decision surprised many: abandon Salesforce CPQ and the customers on it, and work on something new. It’s been widely reported that Salesforce has stopped selling Salesforce CPQ customers. Customers have lamented the lack of product innovations, let alone any enhancements.
This is where the promise of SaaS solutions — ongoing innovation delivered like clockwork — meets its end. Customers are left on an island getting no new capabilities, while still paying their ongoing subscriptions. The market is now asking new questions of Salesforce, like “when are they going to announce a formal end of life or end of support?”
Phase 4 – The Great CPQ Reset Part 2: A (more expensive) rose by any other name
In 2024, Salesforce started communicating a new concept to the market: revenue lifecycle management. It was a way to communicate the value of getting customers into more formal recurring commercial relationships, with an overt slant towards subscriptions. The messaging would lead one to believe this was a new and novel concept. The reality is an architecture of existing functionality to address the pains around poor performance and the additional disconnects between Salesforce CPQ and Sales Cloud.
So, if the functionality isn’t new or innovative, it begs the question “what is new?” There are a few new things that come with Revenue Cloud:
- A new price tag: the per user per month fee is going up from $150 to $200.
- A brand-new implementation: there are no streamlined migration paths, and customers need to start over.
- New training and enablement: there are different concepts — both technical and business — that users need to ramp up on to get the most out of Revenue Cloud.
What remains missing in all of this is a compelling reason to switch from Salesforce CPQ to Revenue Cloud.
Where do we go from here?
All of this reminds me of the quote from George Bush: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me… you can’t get fooled again. You gotta understand the nature of the regime we’re dealing with.”
Since 2013, all of the major CRM vendors, from Oracle to Salesforce to SAP, have acquired CPQ solutions. Promises were made around easier integration, more product investment and innovation, and better contract economics by single sourcing software. The reality could not be further from the truth. These products were not fully integrated, innovation got stifled due to priorities being placed in other areas, and those beneficial contract economics were replaced with aggressive renewal increases due to the leverage of vendor lock-in. The best predictor of future behavior is past performance.
While all of this was happening, independent CPQ vendors have upped the ante. Amongst independent vendors, we’ve seen a more complete and robust approach to integration, because their customers have more diversity in core technology systems. We’ve seen more innovation as more of their R&D spend gets applied directly to CPQ and related functionality. We’ve seen AI introduced with much more domain expertise and precision. And we’ve seen more customer friendly commercials, because the product — not the suite — needs to drive the investment decision. The result: independent CPQ vendors architect their solutions to perform, design them to integrate into all of your front- and back-office systems, create purpose-built innovations and experiences, and provide more domain-focused AI capabilities.
Even though you are hearing more of the same from the market, maybe there actually is a great CPQ reset occurring. If you want to understand where the rest is happening, consider asking yourself the following questions:
- Will this CPQ solution scale and perform to support my channel strategy today and tomorrow?
- What capabilities does this CPQ solution provide to quantifiably add more top line revenue?
- How will this CPQ solution provide support for alternative commercial models, like creating customer specific price agreements, subscription plans, or rebate programs?
Ask yourself whether your current situation lived up to your expectations, and if you are willing to go through the same process for the same results. Use this opportunity to take a closer look and evaluate the CPQ market with your sales and revenue goals in mind.
Fortunately for you, industry analysts have collectively felt it to be the right time to look at the CPQ market, and an abundance of independent research is available to you. Have a look at what each of the leading independent analyst firms have to say.
If you’re a Salesforce CPQ customer and interested in exploring leading alternatives, connect with a PROS expert to see how PROS Smart CPQ compares to Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce Revenue Cloud.
Frequently Asked Questions
The “Great CPQ Reset” refers to Salesforce stopping the sale of its original CPQ product and shifting its focus to a new offering, Revenue Cloud. For businesses using Salesforce CPQ, this means a lack of new features and enhancements, raising questions about future support. It presents an important moment to re-evaluate your current CPQ solution and explore alternatives that better align with your long-term revenue goals.
Salesforce Revenue Cloud is positioned as a new solution for managing revenue lifecycles, particularly for subscription-based models. However, it is largely an architectural update of existing functionality. Key differences for customers include a higher price tag, the need for a brand-new implementation with no streamlined migration path from Salesforce CPQ, and additional user training on new concepts.
While large CRM vendors promised seamless integration and innovation with their acquired CPQ products, many customers have experienced the opposite. Independent CPQ vendors often provide more robust solutions, because their focus is entirely on CPQ. They typically offer better performance, deeper integrations with various systems (not just one CRM), more domain-specific AI and innovation, and more customer-friendly commercial terms without the risk of vendor lock-in.
Migrating to Revenue Cloud involves more than just a simple upgrade. The process requires a full reimplementation, which means more time, resources, and costs. You will also face a higher subscription fee and the need to retrain your entire team. Given the history of underwhelming performance from CRM-suite CPQ products, you risk going through another costly implementation for potentially similar results.
As you consider your options, it’s a good opportunity to ask some critical questions about any CPQ solution.
Will it scale to support your sales channels now and in the future?
Does it offer features that can quantifiably increase your revenue?
Can it support diverse commercial models, including customer-specific pricing, subscriptions, and rebate programs?
Asking these questions will help you look beyond the marketing and choose a solution that truly meets your sales and revenue objectives.
PROS Smart CPQ is an independent, AI-powered solution designed for performance and scalability. Unlike suite-based products, it is architected to integrate with all your front- and back-office systems. It delivers purpose-built innovations and domain-focused AI to help you create account-specific price agreements, manage complex commercial models, and ultimately drive more revenue.
About the Authors
 |
John Bruno John Bruno, VP of Strategy at PROS, leads the analyst relations, competitive intelligence, and strategy teams at PROS. He is responsible for go-to-market strategies across PROS travel and B2B solutions. John has more than 15 years of B2B software experience, and has formerly served as the head of product at an enterprise eCommerce platform and as a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research. |
 |
Jordan Jewell Jordan Jewell, Sr. Director, Analyst in Residence at VTEX, where he leads VTEX’s U.S. content strategy and authors research-backed thought leadership on the ecommerce market. Before joining VTEX, he was an industry analyst at International Data Corporation (IDC). At IDC, Jordan launched and ran the Digital Commerce research practice, where he analyzed technology markets, including digital commerce platforms, PIM, and CPQ. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, TechTarget, Adweek, and more. |