Analyst Reports

NucleusResearch.com 3 Document Number: U128 September 2020 pricing recommendations to maximize profit and identify cross and up-sell opportunities. Leading CPQ solutions even enable AI suggestions to guide sales conversations in real- time. As businesses leverage modern CPQ solutions to accelerate sales cycles, they further reduce the need for customer support and relevant positions. K E Y B E N E F I T S An analysis of Nucleus ROI case studies shows that CPQ delivers business value in all use cases. Nucleus attributes the low cost to benefit ratio of 1:6.22 over a three-year period to five primary value drivers of a modern CPQ implementation. ▪ Increased revenue. Businesses leveraging CPQ solutions to enable new sales channels and payment methods see the greatest returns to their investments as they attract new customers and support new business models. Incorporating current and historical data including customer buying behavior, forecasted demand, and inventory levels, among others, AI features optimize pricing to maximize the return on closed deals and generate product mix suggestions for cross and up-sell opportunities. Analytics surrounding the sales process can also be used to evaluate the performance of products, sales personnel, and promotional events for informed decision-making. ▪ Reduced operational costs. The CPQ provides accurate and up-to-date pricing and product options to reduce quoting errors. Furthermore, configurable controls allow managers to eliminate over-discounting by their sales teams. As software vendors grant both users and their customers greater control over the configuration process, human error is significantly reduced on the seller's side, thus eliminating returns and re-work costs. Integration with CRM, project management, and ERP solutions allows users to feed CPQ generated product configurations to the manufacturing team directly. This further reduces manufacturing errors and the associated downstream costs. ▪ Increased sales employee productivity. Self-service portals reduce touchpoints along the sales process reducing the labor requirements for sales teams. Guided workflows and automatically generated pricing and product mixes streamline the sales process. Time saved by sales For every dollar spent on a CPQ deployment, businesses receive an average of $6.22 in returns within 3 years.

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