Analyst Reports

NucleusResearch.com 4 Document Number: U128 September 2020 employees can be diverted to other value-add tasks, such as lead generation and relationship management. Additionally, integration with ERP and billing systems reduces invoice management functions and eliminates the number of reconciliations to expedite the monthly close process. ▪ Faster time-to-close. CPQ solutions help expedite one of the most time-consuming manual processes in sales, quote generation. Traditionally, sales reps would refer to a pricing guide to search the required items and build a spreadsheet with the product configuration and pricing. This could take over two weeks in some cases, creating a bottleneck in the sales pipeline. By leveraging a CPQ solution, this process can be expedited by over 90 percent to take less than an hour (in virtually all cases) and remove any potential human error from the process. This gets a quote to the customer faster and eliminates any lag time that existed when the process was done by hand. ▪ Improved customer satisfaction. Anywhere friction can be removed from a sales process, customer satisfaction is improved. By substantially reducing wait time, the most common source of frustration can be easily mitigated. Additionally, self-service configuration options and XR capabilities allow buyers to fully customize their orders and increases their trust in the ordering process. Since human error is removed from the quote building process, customers can be assured that what they are quoted for is what will be delivered, ensuring long-term satisfaction and reducing costs incurred from incorrect orders. L O O K I N G A H E A D It is well-documented that more companies than ever before are looking to modernize their IT stacks; those that have not already are migrating applications and workloads to the cloud. Those that have already begun cloud transformation journeys have rapidly accelerated the timelines, looking to bring more business units and departments to a unified cloud platform. The benefits of breaking down data silos for cross-departmental analytics and 360-degree visibility to the health and state of the business are well-known; additionally, the cloud allows users to access the solutions from anywhere, on any device, which is vital for enabling productive remote working. CRM and ERP are two of the largest and most complex applications that a company can operate; they are typically kept separate as they involve different business units and different data. However, as more companies are looking to centralize to a single platform, connecting sales processes with billing and reconciliation (or CRM and ERP) to enable true lead-to-cash is an increasingly common goal. Since CPQ is naturally positioned between

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