Analyst Reports

NucleusResearch.com 2 Document Number: U128 September 2020 O V E R V I E W As both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) sales spaces optimize for e-commerce (necessitated by COVID-19 shutdowns and ensuing changes to buyer behavior), buyers' demand for speed and flexibility over their ordering activities have drastically increased the complexity of the sales process. Enterprise-scale organizations and even mid-sized corporations now have massive product catalogs with hundreds of thousands of SKUs. Compounded by potentially millions of customization options for services, discrete manufacturing, and consumer goods, pen and paper sales approaches are no longer an option. Sales teams must leverage software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology to manage their day-to-day activities to remain competitive in today's digital landscape. Configure, price, quote (CPQ) solutions originally started as digital catalogs to help salespersons search for products and track pricing. Within the last decade, vendors have rapidly increased the solution scope of their offerings. Users can leverage modern CPQ solutions to support the entire quote-to-cash process, establish more sales channels, and enable new payment methods to capitalize on multiple business models and deepen their market penetration. From the analyzed case studies conducted from 2015 to 2020, Nucleus determined the primary drivers for investing in CPQ software and the anticipated returns. Case studies were conducted over a range of markets, industries, and company sizes. Nucleus found that, on average, companies recouped $6.22 in benefits per $1 invested in CPQ deployments within the first three years. C P Q R E S P O N S E T O C O V I D - 1 9 With the pandemic shutting down brick-and-mortar locations earlier this year, consumers are forced to turn to e-commerce sales channels. Even as countries and states lift pandemic regulations, businesses must adjust to the new norm of an economy increasingly focused on online sales for the long-term. CPQ solutions enable all available sales channels, as well as subscription and usage-based billing options. Nucleus found that users leveraging dedicated CPQ solutions were able to mitigate the financial impact of COVID-19 best. Features such as self-service customer portals, third- party dealer portals, and extended reality (XR) customization and visualization tools greatly expanded the end user's selling power and supported customer base. Simplifying the sales process via guided workflows allows sales teams to remain effective while working from home. Industry emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics for continuous improvement has also increased sales margins as machine learning algorithms generate

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