What is CPQ?

We are living through an era of accelerated commercial reinvention, with companies, industries - and even entire economies - locked in a global race to adapt and thrive in a digital-first future.

Meanwhile digital disruptors are busy reshaping the Telecommunications, Media and other sectors with services designed to satisfy the evolving needs and preferences of today’s digitally native consumer, both in B2B and B2C environments.



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Is your business keeping up?

Many companies score poorly on customer experience precisely because their sales operations haven’t kept up.

Today's ambitious businesses need to transform their end-to-end buyer journey all the way from initial contact, quoting and negotiation, through to order management and fulfilment.

In short, they need CPQ - but what exactly is it?

Why CloudSense?

Have questions? Contact our experts to learn more

Ambitious businesses rely on CloudSense for transformation

What is CPQ?

Whether your preferred term is Configure Price Quote, Quote-to-Cash (QTC), Order Management (OMS) or Product & Pricing or Concept-to-Cash, CPQ is a vital sales tool for any business with a complex and configurable product set. So let’s start with the basics.

Configure Price Quote (CPQ) software allow businesses to configure a product bundle, calculate their price and subsequently generate a quote.

So far, so simple. But by automating and optimizing this process, CPQ solutions help your sales team sell faster and more accurately.

What does this mean in practice?

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Configure

Combine products and services - from simple to complex - into commercial offerings within predefined rules

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Price

Ensure accurate pricing, considering offers, discounting and other rules, no matter the product configuration

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Quote

Generate quotes quickly with prices that are both fair to the customer and profitable for your business

In short, CPQ lets you create bespoke product and service bundles to suit all of your customers’ needs, quickly and at the right price.

 

Learn more about CPQ in our in-depth guide, "CPQ: The definitive guide"

Read now

Why is CPQ important?

In an era of accelerated commercial reinvention, companies, industries - and even entire economies - are in a global race to adapt and thrive in a digital-first future. 

As we move to a digital-first world, and technology and customer expectations evolve, businesses need to operate at unprecedented levels of scale and complexity.

The arrival and growth of technologies such as 5G, IoT and Machine Learning means that businesses will easily find themselves left behind, unless they have true freedom to innovate and evolve their product offering quickly.

 

 

To learn more about how scale is impacting the telecommunications landscape, watch our webinar “Are you ready for scale in the world of 5G?”, in which CloudSense’s VP Industry Solutions Vish Kumar discusses the impact of 5G on scale and complexity with Infosys Industry Principal Consultant, Shri Krishan.


In response to these changes, CPQ solutions have moved beyond their classic definition. Modern Configure Price Quote solutions have evolved from a sales transaction solution, to one that powers a more holistic sale.

In fact, by incorporating things like self-service, bundling, discounting and invoicing, as well as services and subscriptions, CPQ solutions can now provide the basis of an Amazon-like buying experience for your customers.

The market for CPQ software is enjoying a boom period, with analysts predicting it to grow by US$1.65bn to US$3.8bn between 2022 and 2026.

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Does my business need a CPQ solution?

Businesses of all kinds implement CPQ solutions in order to streamline and future-proof their end-to-end sales process and deliver sales transformation. If your business is suffering from any of the following critical issues, it may be time to consider implementing a CPQ solution:

Quote & order issues

  • Slow quotes
  • Errors across quotes and orders
  • Inconsistent pricing
  • Time consuming manual processes
  • Complex sales and order processes

Sales productivity & profit problems

  • Low sales rep productivity
  • High sales rep turnover
  • Low revenues from cross or up-sells
  • Heavy discounting
  • Falling profit margins
  • Lack of clarity on how to bundle options

Limited commercial innovation

  • Poor visibility of customer and commercial data - no single source of truth
  • Product SKUs are limited and not configurable
  • Fragmentation of commercial options across different sales teams and channels
  • Slow time to market
  • Lackluster customer experiences

These aren’t minor issues, and all of them directly impact your bottom line. They also mostly have the same root cause: legacy systems that obstruct the path to monetizing opportunities in the digital-first economy.

Read more in our article “9 signs you need CPQ”

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What problems does CPQ help address?

The principle challenges include, but are not limited to:

Managing the underlying complexity of new digital offerings

Products and services are becoming increasingly complex and difficult to deliver, price and sell.

Operating efficiently within new eco-systems

Both technology and customer expectations are evolving faster than ever, and businesses cannot afford to fall behind.

Maintaining strong customer relationships across digital channels

How to maintain a strong relationship with their customers across digital channels as we move to more digital contact (and away from human contact).

Acting at speed to capture demand

Speed is the currency of the digital economy. Businesses have to be able to execute at speed, as well as react and seize opportunity at speed.

Capitalizing on digital insights

As businesses move to digitize everything, they need to be able to mine information, process it and use it to their advantage, otherwise they will lose out to their competitors.

Solving these problems leads to sales transformation

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  • 59% reduction in order entry and quotation time
  • 45% reduction in quote to cash time
  • 42% reduction in fulfilment turnaround time

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  • 12 weeks delivered 4 B2B Enterprise journeys 
  • 3x faster to configure orders up to 1,000 line-items and sites for MPLS solutions
  • 50% reduction in product attributes

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  • Costs reduced by at least 25%

  • Product launch cut from two weeks to an hour

  • Reducing friction for customers and employees with self-service

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  • 75% reduction in lead-to-order time for marketing promotions
  • 70% reduction in lead-to-order time for à la carte products
  • 70% reduction in order errors

What is the future of CPQ?

Although they have been around for some time, CPQ solutions have moved beyond the classic definition of allowing businesses to configure a product bundle, calculate their price and subsequently generate a quote.

Advanced Configure Price Quote solutions have evolved from being focused on sales transactions, to one that is more holistic in its scope.

By incorporating the management things like contracts and invoicing, as well as services and subscriptions, CPQ can now form the basis of an Amazon-like buying experience for your customers.

CPQ lifecycle

 

Learn more about the Modern CPQ: The key to accelerating digital transformation

Read about modern CPQ

What kinds of businesses can benefit from CPQ?

Any business with a highly configurable product set, that needs to handle high levels of scale and complexity, can achieve business and sales transformation by implementing CPQ technology.

 

 

 

Explore businesses that have also benefited from CloudSense’s CPQ solution

See our customers

Why CloudSense is different

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Sell anything, everywhere

CloudSense CPQ powers all your channels, from self-service and direct sales, to partners and beyond. Maximize growth across your business with one engine and one agile product catalog.

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Reduce costs across sales & delivery

CloudSense CPQ automates orders for completion, change and renewal. Simplified integration gives you a single place to manage orders and subscriptions, no matter how complex.

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Gain competitive advantage

From large baskets to high volumes, our CPQ is built to scale the most complex business models. Get the edge over your competition with unrivalled speed and convenient experiences.

Unlike other offerings, CloudSense is built to manage the demands of the fast-moving, digital-first publishing, advertising and subscription landscape. We take pride in enabling the kinds of complex use cases and scale that other providers shy away from. We don’t place limitations on your ideas and box you in; instead our versatile solution gives product, sales and marketing teams the freedom to continually innovate, grow revenue and reduce cost.

If you challenge our competitors to support the requirements that CloudSense can handle, you’ll soon find that they struggle to absorb the demands on their systems. Whether your are a small, medium or large publisher, extend beyond the simplest of portfolio offerings and you’ll see performance levels drop to well beneath the requirements for a digital-first user experience.

CloudSense has a clear vision of a future for commercial operations that truly support digital-first businesses. These are key principles that can be applied to any industry.

Real time clarity and control

  • Access to data, insights and dashboards that clarify customer status, customer segment behaviors, sales and margin success of product portfolios
  • End-to-end connectivity of data that gives businesses visibility of the entire revenue operations process to make sure it’s flowing smoothly

Cost and time efficiency

  • An easy-to-manage sales execution toolset with workflows connecting every point in the sales cycle, and controls to adjust solution offers and pricing in real time
  • Automation at scale is what we're striving for here. You can't get hyper-efficient execution without automation, because it gives you much simpler and faster digital workflows

Freedom to innovate

  • However well your software architecture works, if it can’t respond quickly to changing markets and new opportunities because it is too rigid, it is not fit for purpose
  • Businesses need fully flexible commercial operations systems and processes that allow them to view the real time status of sales progress accurately and give them freedom to innovate when necessary
  • The agility and flexibility to update their product set for complex offerings and channels at scale

See what our customer think of us by reading the CloudSense CPQ buyer experience report, by the Info-Tech Research Group

Read now

Glossary of terms

Applications & Technology

What is an Order Management System (OMS)?

Order Management refers to the series of actions a business undertakes from when a potential order is first created, to the moment a customer receives their desired product or service to the customer.

An Order Management System is a platform used to fulfill orders and navigate order changes accurately and efficiently. 

From order entry and inventory management to fulfillment and the post-sale experience – an OMS helps you manage the end-to-end customer journey.  

Read our guide, Order Management explained in 8 steps


Product Catalog

A Product Catalog should hold all the commercial product information your teams need to build, define and map new product offerings, while understanding business rules and interdependent products.

It gives you a centralized view of your products, empowering you to easily configure, deploy and manage products, services and commercial offerings.

Want to learn more? Check out our guide 4 reasons your organization needs a unified commercial product catalog


What is Quote-to-Cash (Q2C / QTC)?

Quote-to-Cash refers to the management of the end-to-end customer lifecycle. Right from a prospect showing intent to buy, to a business collecting the revenue. 

The process covers the multiple steps between generating a quote, with Configure Price Quote software, to accepting and recognizing a customer's money in your billing system. 


Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Relationship Management is a technology used to manage interactions with customers and prospects. A CRM helps build and nurture customer relationships and streamlines processes to boost sales, improve customer service and increase profitability.

Businesses often extend the functionality of their CRM with complementary technology that can better fulfill specific needs. 

Salesforce is the world’s leading CRM – you can read why our platform is Salesforce native here


Digital Commerce vs eCommerce

Digital Commerce is the buying and selling of products and services using the internet including all of the marketing activities involved in the transactions. 

eCommerce is online selling. 

For more on Digital Commerce, check out these 37 Digital Commerce statistics worth knowing


SFDC

SFDC stands for "Sales Force Dot Com". Salesforce is a software company that specializes in Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

It offers a host of cloud-based business applications for companies to use to stay connected to their customers, partners and prospects. 

Read why CloudSense is Salesforce native


API

API stands for Application Programming Interface.

APIs let different applications connect, interact and exchange data.



Project Delivery

MVP

MVP is the acronym for Minimum Viable Product. An MVP takes a product to market with basic features, but enough to be usable by customers. Feedback can then be collected to inform the rest of the product development. This approach saves time working on features that may not turn out to be useful.

We cover the importance of an MVP and working iteratively in our guide, The principles of a successful digital reinvention


FTE

FTE or Full Time-Equivalent is a unit used to measure the amount of hours an employee works full-time. FTE lets businesses compare part-time and full-time workers' hours and is often used to track costs.


UI

A UI, or User interface, refers to the way a person controls a piece of software or device. For example, a user-friendly UI means the user can interact with the software or device with ease.


UX

UX, or User Experience, is part of the overall customer experience that refers to the usability of the product.


CX

CX stands for customer experience. Customer experience is the perception customers have of your company. It’s a product of every interaction they have with your brand.


WOW

WOW is one of those acronyms that stands for all kinds of things, from World of Warcraft to Week over Week. 

But when we use it, we're talking about Ways of Working. 

Check out our free guide, The principles of a successful digital reinvention here


POC

In software, a POC, or proof of concept, shows whether a concept can be deployed successfully in a ‘real-world’ environment. POCs are often used to test whether a vendor can meet a customer’s needs.


MSA

MSA, or Master Service Agreement, is a contract between two parties that sets out the terms and expectations agreed for future work.

Speak to one of our experts

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