CPW. Steel brick

  • April 8, 2016
  • insyte-cpq-infographicVirtually every CPQ (Configuration, Price, and Quote) software vendor on the planet has a credible solution for the processes from which the category gets its name. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, the world has moved on. Most CPQ is effective for helping to promote transactions, especially the sales transaction, in which a buyer or buying entity makes a one-time purchase of a bill of goods. Typically, it’s so many from column A, a different number from column B, and something different from column C. It might be an annual order but you can bet that last year and next year’s manifests won’t look identical.

    CPQ is very useful when the vendor is in a competitive environment and the customer needs to iterate on the order. (Do we really need so many from column A?) The vendor wants to be as responsive as possible to drive the deal to close especially because experience shows that the first vendor with a revised or corrected quote often wins the business.

    What’s changing in the world of CPQ is that customers are in need of more than a single transaction today. The rise of subscriptions has meant that things change all the time now, or at least more frequently than they did a short time ago. So the business processes that CPQ needs to support are far more numerous than what supported the transaction.

    As subscriptions rise the vendor needs many more things from a CPQ system or whatever you call the software that oversees contracts, incentives, renewals, ecommerce and more. If you’re selling through an indirect channel your CPQ system might need to expose a PRM channel. Likewise, while you might have a billing system tied to your ERP and financials, your CPQ system is going to need at least lookup capability into orders and bills. Finally, your ability to be with customers in their moments of truth anytime and anywhere means you’ll need an ecommerce salient and a mobility capability that your sales people can use and soon, the same functionality for customers who’d rather just do it themselves.

    Does your company need all of this in a CPQ system today? Probably not but the writing is on the wall. As selling becomes more automated it will be increasingly important for vendors to have access to a broad solution set that goes well beyond what was adequate a few years ago, something for what’s needed down the road.

    As the IoT comes into its own we know that there will be machines communicating with machines—we’re already comfortable with the idea that sensors will report to other machines or even people that something needs attention. But take this a little further and you see that algorithmically driven businesses processes will take over some of the purchasing responsibilities. At that point having a CPQ system that can work through channels with other systems to identify needs and keep transactions within contractually agreed guidelines will be essential.

    As good as today’s CPQ might be there’s already room for improvement and that should inform anyone in the market for CPQ. So for the vast numbers of businesses that don’t yet have and use CPQ but who need it (not everyone does) there’s good and not so good news. The not so good news is that it’s getting late and you’ll fall behind if you’re using a combination of spreadsheets and Word to generate quotes—especially if they need an extra day for approvals. The good news is that there are credible products on the market to automate and take the friction out of much that is manual right now. Even better, getting started now with a clearer idea of where this is all heading means you can evaluate the players in the context of these future needs and make one decision that should stand the test of time.

     

    Published: 8 years ago