10 Needs from a Modern CPQ

Gone are the days when CPQ tools were considered as mere replacement of Excel sheets. CPQ is becoming an inevitable part of organization’s sales process and playing key role in meeting the sales targets. Modern CPQ solutions, hence need to be equipped with much more advanced capabilities and features to serve the augmenting expectations.

This short article in not a list of core CPQ capabilities, like product configuration, pricing, quote life cycle, constraint/rules etc, but this is a concise list of the advance needs from a modern CPQ solution.

1. Intuitive User Experience – Think of CPQ as a driving software for salesrep, rather than yet-another application to be learned. Screens should intuitively present the needs of the users through messages, hover-effects, collapsible blocks, popups etc. Avoid user navigation to multiple screens for the simpler cases. Present all information upfront – recommendation rules, promotions, net pricing, outdated options etc.
2. One-click Configurations – Modern CPQs are now expected to know the frequent salable versions of product and facilitate minimal selections to configure the same. System should be self-learner and intelligent to help user quickly configures the products.
3. Favorite and Shareable Configurations – Another need is to make your configuration as favourite and save those as template during configuration process. Similarly there should be a comprehensive configuration sharing mechanism to allow other salesrep in organization to leverage each other’s experience and selling capabilities.
4. Collaborative Quoting Mechanism – For many big Enterprises, quoting is not single person’s job. It’s a teamwork. For e.g. Salesrep creates the 1st level of configuration and pass on to product specialist or Engg manager for configuration refinement. As 3rd step, configuration is then passed to pricing team for financial verification and so on. This way a complete quote is the outcome of collaborative efforts from multiple teams. Only few CPQ systems in market today, including Apttus, supports Quote collaboration to a full extent.
5. Pricing Analytics – Modern CPQ doesn’t appreciate static pricing mechanism but seek more dynamic and analytical pricing methods like predictive and prescriptive algorithms.
6. Enterprise Integrations – In the enterprise software landscape, modern CPQs are placed at a very strategic position. And hence they can’t exist alone, but need smooth integrations with many other software including CRM, ERP, e-signature tools, Product Life Cycle Management (PLM) tools, external pricing/configuration engines, Order Management, Contract Management and many more.
7. Internationalization & Localization – For global enterprises, I18n & L10n are simply unavoidable. They expect modern CPQ to support multiple currencies, dates/text localization and I18N to support product information, quote output templates in multiple languages and so on.
8. Ease of Data Management – Salesreps today want to spend more time in selling rather than managing applications and data, isn’t it? Modern CPQs are expected to provide simple mechanism to export/import and update data like price lists, rules, products, attributes etc. As a simple example, updating price of a product across multiple price lists, should be a simple one- click task for admin users.
9. Stop Outdated Configurations – Many times the quoting/configuration is a longer process and meanwhile the product models or prices may change in the background. Modern CPQs are expected to stop users from making mistake of working on out-dated configurations and prices, and avoid issues in later stages of sales process.
10. Intelligent Deal Guidance – Every sale is independent, but play a cumulative role in the organization’s financial targets. Modern CPQs are expected to be embedded with intelligent deal guidance algorithms to help salesrep indicates the margins and probability of the deal.