Forbes: What’s Hot In CRM Applications, 2015 – Why CPQ Continues To Accelerate

By Louis Columbus

Lead management and configure, price and quote (CPQ) are the hottest technologies sales are relying on in 2015.

Marketing analytics, digital marketing hubs, and marketing performance management lead the hottest marketing technologies for 2015 according to Gartner.

Customer self-service, SaaS-based customer service and support (CSS) and customer engagement centers are the three hottest customer service technologies for 2015.

Cloud is now mainstream across all areas of CRM, and Gartner predicts that SaaS or cloud-based deployments will reach 50% of all CRM deployments by 2016. The most common deployment model in 2015 is a combination of cloud and on-premises CRM applications.

These and other key take-aways are from the Gartner report, What’s Hot in CRM Applications in 2015 published April 10, 2015, written Ed Thompson, Kimberly Collins, David Kohler, Brian Manusama, & Tad Travis. Gartner is advising clients that if they don’t have any of these technologies on their roadmap they may be playing it too safe. The CRM technologies mentioned are those that Gartner clients have shown the highest interest during late 2014 and since the beginning of 2015, and are exploring today.

Five Reasons Why CPQ Continues To Accelerate

Configure, price and quote (CPQ) continues to be one of the hottest CRM technologies that Gartner clients are evaluating and adopting to gain greater business value from their selling strategies. Leading CPQ providers include Apttus, CallidusCloud, Cincom, FPX, Oracle CPQ (formerly Big Machines),PROS Cameleon CPQ, SteelBrick and others.  CPQ’s staying power as a hot technology can be attributed to many factors, five of which are briefly defined here.

• CPQ’s global scalability across channels, industries, selling strategies and pricing scenarios continues to accelerate its adoption. Cloud platforms including Salesforce1 are making it possible for enterprises across a wide spectrum of industries to scale their selling, pricing, service and fulfillment strategies in a fraction of the time it took with on-premise applications. Add to this the increasingly complex nature of new product configurations and integrating service bundles for specific markets, and the value of CPQ increases. Manufacturers I’ve spoken with using cloud-based CPQ systems are finding the most value in changing pricing, bundling and product catalog entries just once, reducing quoting, pricing and order errors on a global scale. Cloud-based CPQ systems continue to improve user interface navigation and customization as well, further enhancing their global scalability.

• Delivering measurable sales effectiveness improvements that improve deal size, cross-sell & up-sell while reducing order errors.  Being able to isolate the contributions of any enterprise-wide system is difficult. Legacy system integration, change management challenges, product and pricing data inconsistencies are just a few of the many factors that make measuring system effectiveness a challenge. Companies choosing to replace multiple and often competing manual CPQ systems with a single enterprise-wide system are seeing a reduction in sales cycle times and an increase in win rates. They are also seeing average deal sizes, contract and renewal revenue levels increase. Manufacturers I’ve spoken with who are using cloud-based CPQ systems enterprise-wide often have dashboards that track quoting accuracy, lead-to-sale analytics on configurable products, reduction in order cycle times, increase in up-sell and cross-sells, increase in manufacturing utilization rate, perfect order performance, order completion cost, special pricing request (SPR) performance in addition to many other metrics as well.

• Generating quotes on smartphones and tablets from anywhere, anytime, and delivering them to prospects immediately is paying off. Shortening sales cycles by giving sales reps the flexibility of creating, editing, checking and sending a quote from their tablets or smartphones is another reason why CPQ continues to accelerate. Being able to create quotes only for configurable, profitable products is now possible entirely on mobile devices running CPQ apps.

• Quoting and deal intelligence adoption is growing. Knowing which deals are the most profitable and why, gaining greater insights into how proposed discounts, contract conditions and how revenue schedules impact profitability are just a few of the factors driving quoting and deal intelligence adoption. Companies are also finding new ways to improve their overall selling process based on the lessons learned from using quoting and deal intelligence apps as well.

• Launching customizable products and services across multiple channels and geographies becomes possible on a global scale.  For many companies, their new product launches generate a large percentage of their new revenue.  Product launches also bring an added level of complexity and need for coordination to their core teams that ongoing business doesn’t.  This makes cross-functional coordination to the market level extremely important for a launch to succeed.  Several manufacturers I’ve spoken with are using cloud-based CPQ systems combined with content management systems to roll out new product lines across multiple geographies at the same time. The cloud-based CPQ system they are using supports fourteen languages and was quickly configured to reflect individual market preferences. The result was one of the most successful launches this manufacturer ever had.