Configure, price, quote (CPQ) software helps companies automate the lifecycle of the quoting and proposal process, starting with the moment a customer supplies their needs in a company’s offering and ending with sending a detailed quote to the customer or prospect. CPQ software is used in sales departments to accelerate the sales process while improving quote accuracy and customer relations. These software products allow companies to determine a customer’s needs and provide them with custom quotes that best fit those specific needs. Products are typically built on an existing CRM software product or designed to integrate with one (or more) CRM tools.
To qualify for inclusion in the CPQ category, a product must:
Include features for the basic activities that are part of the configure, price, quote lifecycle: configuration logic for the offering, standard and custom pricing, and quote tracking
Provide information that salespeople can use to quickly create offers that are beneficial for both the customer and the company
Offer workflows for users to create, modify, send, and track quote documents in different formats
Allow the use of CRM software,
ERP systems, and other enterprise software data to define and manage product catalogs including pricing and bundling for hundreds or thousands of products
Evaluate the profitability of each offering based on financial rules, customer pricing, costs, and external factors like competitors, market changes, or laws and regulations
Integrate with other solutions downstream (to gather and analyze data for better quoting) and upstream (to propagate new pricing into other solutions such as e-commerce)
Assist users with analytics and reporting during the entire quoting process, and provide data and suggestions to improve the process
