Best CPQ Software

What Is CPQ Software?

CPQ stands for configure, price, and quote. This software helps businesses (especially sales teams) deliver accurate product alternatives and costs. Typically, salespeople generate quotes for products and services with many feature options. It is a customizable rule-based software to address multiple variables in the sales process.

To understand the CPQ meaning, consider it a sales quoting software helping companies accurately define product prices. It aggregates multiple variables affecting the sales process to help sales personnel configure products or services optimally.

This includes bundling products/services, upselling them according to costs, factoring in the competition, and local pricing. Based on all these, customers are provided with the best price possible.

The sales team can leverage CPQ to centralize, automate, and provide the correct information in real-time. CPQ solutions simplify the complex sales pipeline by meeting the configuring, pricing, and quoting needs to help generate a purchase order.

How Does CPQ Software Work?

CPQ software considers customer requirements and provides a product or service configuration matching their needs. It follows a unique pricing algorithm to generate accurate prices for the configuration while considering relevant product discounts.

CPQ is a solution designed for a comprehensive quoting process. It works as a proposed solution for customers. It includes product descriptions, pricing information, and delivery timelines for customers to make a purchase decision.

Moreover, its analytics and reporting capabilities help sales teams track product and pricing trends, enabling them to make data-driven decisions. 

A successful CPQ deployment focuses on simplifying the sales process in the following manner.

1. Guided Selling

   Sales teams can use CPQ solutions for the guided selling processes to better sell consumption-configured products and design new product bundles based on the customer’s purchasing history.

2. Smarter Approval Management

   A smart CPQ adheres to business rules, frameworks, and workflows to cut approval times and simplify the approval process.

3. Dynamic Pricing

   94% of B2B buyers research online before purchasing, making the sales cycle longer. Therefore, the right quotation by sales representatives can move things quickly. CPQ software helps tailor your company's pricing strategy to its ideal clientele. Personalized prices can turn difficult markets into profitable ones like the business hospitality sector (like airlines and hotels) leverage such dynamic pricing rules to generate more sales over time.

Key Benefits of Using CPQ Software

CPQ software offers a range of benefits to businesses looking to streamline the sales process by making it faster, more efficient, and offering accurate pricing.

Sales professionals can leverage CPQ tools to ensure that quotes are consistent, error-free, and address the client's pain points.

1. Sales Alignment

   A sales team can pivot to personalized prices using CPQ that align better with the business goals and objectives. They can generate accurate quotes and proposals to streamline the sales pipeline, ensuring each customer receives the best possible deal.

   Market regulations can hugely impact the configuration process. But, the sales team can use CPQ to ensure that their product, price, discount, and offer information is correct.

2. Better customer experience

   CPQ software uses customer data (requirements, budget, timeline, past adoption issues, etc.) to improve customer satisfaction through automated processes and improved communication. It helps customers access product configuration, price quotes, and availability.

3. Knowledge retention & productivity 

   The sales team leverages CPQ, providing access to customer information, pricing structures, and product details. This enables every team member to stay updated on customer information, reducing the time wasted during research.

4. Efficient sales cycles

   The business needs to know ways to maximize each sales cycle stage and push for sales. For example, if the team identifies lead qualification as its primary difficulty, it will allocate additional resources to the lead qualification phase in the sales pipeline.

   Here, choosing a sales quotation that is both precise and error-free is important.

   CPQ tool thrives in automating the most intricate aspects of proposal management, approval procedures, and discount criteria. This can bring down the manual work since the request for approval is triggered if an open quotation reaches a certain threshold.

   It is easy to generate estimates in a short amount of time. And this can unlock business growth since a 15% reduction in the sales cycle time may enhance revenue by 30%.

5. Speed up onboarding

   A CPQ system helps onboard new sales reps by providing the right training platform. It enables them to quickly generate quotes and proposals and drive productivity quickly. Usually, it takes 3 to 15 months to onboard an average sales representative. 

   Training costs range between $2,500 to $25,000 per day, depending on your company's size and the trainer's expertise. Instead, dynamic quoting and pricing tools help your sales managers onboard new sales reps 30% faster since fewer manual processes are needed to train them to start selling.

6. Reduce repetitive work

   Sales development representatives (SDRs), and account executives (AEs) can use CPQ as important automation and focus on selling rather than spending time on manual activities. Moreover, 66% of a salesperson's time is spent on non-sales activities like keeping up-to-date information in CRM systems, preparing quotations, invoicing, etc.

   Instead, CPQ software can double the speed of the quote-to-cash process, cut approval delays by 95%, and help close sales deals where 75% of B2B firms take an average of 4 months to gain a client.

Essential CPQ Software Features You Need to Consider

Here are some key features you should consider when choosing a CPQ tool.

1. Price adjustment

   CPQ tools help create sales quotes that follow predefined pricing rules applicable for scheduling automated discounting, analyzing profit margins, and computing prices. Customer data also help gauge their responses to such price adjustments and, accordingly, change the quotations using price quote CPQ software.

2. Order capturing

   Order capturing is one of the key features of the CPQ application that enables businesses to avail of customer orders quickly. It enables quick quote generation to close the lead and automate capturing customers' orders to your CRM, which helps manage such huge orders while reducing process time.

3. Reporting & analytics

   CPQ is a powerful sales tool that handles different functions like orders, customer data, pricing, costs, product quantities, etc. Businesses can unlock revenue growth by automating intelligence around customer data based on robust analysis.

   For instance, identify business bottlenecks by monitoring how much time approvers spend at various phases of a deal's lifecycle. Moreover, the sales team can access factors like win rates and realized prices to make informed pricing choices.

4. Excel integration

   Businesses often use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to customize and configure price quote CPQ. Therefore, when looking for CPQ software, look for Excel integration that streamlines sales operations and provides an easy way to create accurate quotes.

   Here, the CPQ software will use data stored in Excel spreadsheets to generate quotes and streamline the sales process quickly to help sales reps use the most up-to-date pricing and customer preferences information. They can create reports and analyze data to identify potential growth and improvement areas.

5. Quote sharing/sending

   Quote, sharing/sending is one of the key features of CPQ software, allowing users to quickly and easily email quotes to customers. This feature enables customizing the quote with branding and sending a PDF version for easy viewing and downloading. Such visibility ensures engaging customers and using quotation material to follow up.

6. Guided selling

   Guided selling is a feature of CPQ software that automates customer requirements analysis by asking simple questions to determine what consumers want. The sales team can use the CPQ system to avail suitable options based on customer responses. This is useful when there is a range of products to choose from, and you need a logical path that leads customers from their needs to a specific offering.

7. Configuration options

   Configuration options in CPQ software enable sales professionals to define the different variations of products they sell. Here, sales personnel can define a range of product attributes, pricing, and other features to personalize products for customers. 

   For instance, manufacturing companies can check for configurable options to create a range of sizes, colors, and content for a product. Such configuration options in CPQ software simplify the product configuration process by automating the custom product selection and pricing for customers.

8. Self-service CPQ

   Blend in the self-service with a customer community and showcase your CPQ interface there to offer self-service. There isn't a clean, streamlined "Customer Only" interface like a standard online shopping cart. Still, the CPQ solution with self-service enables consumers to have a "nearly" shopping cart using a highly personalized (Visual Force, APEX Code, javascript, and CSS) interface apart from Line Editor and the Configurator.

   Except that it's all Visual Force navigation. Make customer experience more immersive by making the product configuration process highly visual for self-service.

9. CRM integration

   A CPQ tool with CRM software can benefit a sales team since such integration allows for managing the entire sales process within a single system. It eliminates the need for separate software for data entry or cross references.

10. E-signature

    This important CPQ software feature provides an efficient, secure, and cost-effective way to complete the entire sales process. It allows customers to electronically sign necessary documents to streamline the sales process and lead to customer satisfaction.

How To Select the Right CPQ Software?

Choosing the right CPQ software requires analysis, an understanding of team strengths, and budget planning. Begin with empowering the sales process and updating your introduction to CPQ meaning and how it can help them stay competitive while meeting customer demands.

1. Identify your requirements

   Conduct quick research with your internal sales teams to identify which CPQ features would be most beneficial for them. Check with the sales reps and their need for product configurations, pricing adjustments, automated proposals, custom quotes, analytics, etc., to filter products.

2. Mobile-friendliness

   A mobile CPQ helps sales teams send quotes, configure pricing, view reports, and communicate with prospects on the go.
   It enables them to stay competitive in the digital marketplace by providing customers with a fast and convenient way to access essential documents.

3. Integration Levels

   An ideal CPQ platform offers crucial integration with other applications like Contracts, Billing, Order Management, finances, etc. Not only does it drives productivity, but it also acts as a key component of a comprehensive sales plan.

4. Integrations

   When looking for the best CPQ software, consider the type of integrations offered — product database, ERP system, and CRM system. Some CPQ vendors offer integrations with other marketing automation platforms, eCommerce platforms, and payment processing systems. Also, consider what is typically priced, customer support, system scalability, etc.

5. Ease of use

   CPQ solution simplifies the process for everyone. Therefore, prioritize ease of usability, less training needs, and decluttered UI that demonstrates user-friendliness.

6. Deployment type

   Compare various CPQ applications based on their deployment type — on-premise and cloud-based. On-premise needs installing and managing the software on computers, servers, or other hardware, making it an expensive option.

   Cloud-based CPQ solution is deployed with a minimal upfront cost and ongoing maintenance. The cloud-based configure price quote solutions help access their software online and pay a recurring subscription fee from any system.

7. Scalability

   Gauge your CPQ tool based on flexibility, scalability, enterprise readiness, and maintenance. This help make informed decisions capable of meeting the needs of your business, even as it scales if you increase the company size.

Top 5 CPQ Tools

SMEs and enterprises gradually shift to CPQ tools to streamline sales, configure complex products, and provide accurate pricing and discounts. While the global CPQ software market stood at $894.34 million in 2021, we'll look at some of the major players making the difference.

1. Oracle CPQ

Oracle CPQ is a cloud-based solution for CPQ software designed to help businesses efficiently generate quotes. This platform provides e-commerce support and offers actionable insights with reports and analytics.

Key features: 

• E-commerce support
• Approval workflow
• Analytics
• Catalog
• Guided selling
• Real-time quote collaboration
• Pricing and rating engine

Pros

• Easy to configure new products, and you can load products 
• Consistent UI
• More ability to customize and establish rules

Cons

• More training is required to explore it completely
• CRM of Oracle CX - Sales Cloud does not allow managing a volume of detailed information
• Not much cost-effective

Pricing

The pricing for Oracle CPQ starts at $240.0 per month.

2. Conga CPQ

Conga CPQ helps sales teams to create complex proposals, contracts, renewals, and other critical business documents, along with efficient quoting and pricing. This is one of the best CPQ software in the industry.

Key features

• Contract/License Management
• Discount Management
• Progress Tracking
• Proposal Generation
• Customizable Templates
• Document Automation
• Order Management

Pros

• Easy to merge documents
• Quick and simple to begin with
• Possible to constantly change and update it
• Enables adding more users quickly through CPQ licenses.

Cons

• Not user-friendly
• Lightning compatibility is still a challenge
• Pricing Callback needs expert APEX skill
• No UI for configuration items

Pricing

Entry-level pricing starts at $35 per month per user.

3. Pricefx

This CPQ solution, Pricefx, is tailored for those looking for a simple plug-and-play option. It allows the sales team to integrate easily with their existing systems, regardless of the business size.

Key features

• Configuration rules
• Approval workflow
• Pricing flexibility
• Integration API
• Reporting and dashboards

Pros

• Easy of use that requires less training
• Short time on ROI
• Better integration with existing systems
• Multi-agent AI approach to price optimization

Cons

• Inconsistent performance
• Performance issues
• Limited consultancy ability
• No free trials

Pricing

It begins at $2,495 per module/per month.

4. Tacton CPQ

A powerful CPQ tool that automates the design-to-sales process for industrial manufacturing with a reliable configuration system delivering a smooth digital experience.

Features

• ERP
• Multi-currency support
• Multi-lingual
• Proposal generation
• Real-time product visualizations
• Self-service portal

Pros

• Easy to deploy new versions
• Effortless product documentation maintenance
• Quick to create cost structures
• Armed with adding catalog items and filter options

Cons

• Inability to modify custom UI
• Difficult to implement at first
• Lacks tutorials for advanced projects and solutions
• Challenging to configure a product without passing through the customer

Pricing

Effectively offered per user after configuring pricing models.

5. DealHub CPQ

Get accurate quotes and proposals in a flash with DealHub's CPQ. Its collaborative sales-engagement platform streamlines the quotation process and provides real-time data on customer engagement to create quotations that drive conversions.

Features

• Configuration Management
• Batch Processing
• CRM
• Automated Quoting
• Knowledge Base Management
• RFP Management
• Sales Automation
• Template Management
• Third-Party Integrations

Pros

• Easy to simplify the quoting process
• Excellent support
• Collects digital signatures
• Easy contract creation

Cons

• Challenging backend
• Offers flexibility only if you have a tactically-brilliant customer service team
• Implementation takes a long time

Pricing

Starts from $50 depending on your requirements communicated to their sales reps.

Conclusion

CPQ applications help transform businesses through streamlined sales pipelines and configuring their products better. It simplifies the quoting process, increases accuracy, and reduces the time to close the lead.

The advantages, features, and top CPQ tools discussed above will help you make better choices. Moreover, small startups and large enterprises can use CPQ to maximize sales potential and provide top-notch customer experience.