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Choosing the wrong solution? The risks are real
Choosing the wrong CPQ solution can lead to serious setbacks—cost overruns, low productivity, and frustrated customers. Even more costly is choosing not to implement configure price quote solutions at all. Without automation, your sales team will remain bogged down by manual administrative tasks, increasing the risk of errors and taking time away from building customer relationships and closing deals.
This article will help you choose the best CPQ platform for your business by exploring the key features, differences, and benefits of today’s leading CPQ software solutions.
What is CPQ?
CPQ stands for Configure, Price, Quote. It’s a system that helps sales teams create quotes faster by automating how products are selected, priced, and shared with customers. CPQ follows set business rules—like pricing rules, product options, and discounts—to reduce errors and speed up decisions.
A modern CPQ software solution handles everything from simple product selections to complex offers involving thousands of options, bundles, currencies, and bills of materials and routings. Its core functions include:
- Configure products with pre-defined options and dependencies
- Apply pricing rules to maintain margins and stay competitive
- Automate the quote generation process to save time
- Support for self-service portals and ecommerce quoting solutions
Most CPQ tools integrate with ERP systems and CRM platforms to eliminate data silos, reduce redundant effort, and improve visibility across the sales cycle.
Benefits of the Right CPQ Solution
In a fast-moving sales environment, the right CPQ solutions gives your business a measurable edge. It streamlines the quote generation process, supports upsells and cross sell opportunities, and frees your team to focus on what matters—customers.
Whether you're in capital goods, manufacturing, professional services, or renewables, CPQ helps you:
- Improve sales efficiency by automating repetitive tasks
- Ensure accuracy in configurations and pricing
- Increase productivity by eliminating manual quote entry
- Reduce costs by minimizing reliance on experts
- Increase deal size with built-in cross selling logic
- Enhance customer experience with faster, more consistent quoting
- Drive visibility and control across quoting workflows
- Scale your solution offering as complexity and demand grow
Key Differentiators with Quoting Solutions
Ready to unlock the benefits of CPQ? To choose the best configure price quote solution for your business, it’s essential to understand the differences between today’s CPQ software solutions and how they align with your sales strategy.
Here’s what to evaluate:
Industry Experience Over Industry-Specific Features
While sector familiarity can be helpful, it rarely creates lasting competitive advantage. Pricing and quoting are cross-industry challenges, and the core need—to configure products and generate accurate quotes efficiently—is shared across sectors.
Whether you're dealing with physical goods like machinery or intangible services like consulting, the quoting process often involves complex combinations of offerings, pricing rules, and workflows. In both cases, businesses require quoting solutions that can support intricate bundles, regional variations, and custom configurations.
Rather than seeking a solution offering industry-specific features, prioritize vendors with proven experience across diverse industries. These CPQ solution providers bring real-world insight and best practices that help you achieve faster time to value and a more scalable CPQ platform.
Handling Product and Pricing Complexity
When your product catalog includes hundreds or thousands of options, you need more than a basic quoting tool. A robust CPQ system must manage advanced configuration logic and dynamic pricing models—without slowing down the sales process.
Consider the difference between configuring a watch and a vehicle. The latter involves thousands of components, product dependencies, and pricing variables.
Multiply that by customer-specific pricing, multi-currency needs, discount thresholds, and regulatory requirements, and the case for a flexible CPQ platform becomes clear.
Your CPQ software should offer a powerful product configurator solution
The product configurator should enable you to:
- Define and update pricing rules easily
- Configure highly customized offers without manual work
- Recommend the most relevant products based on customer needs
- Eliminate the need for manual calculations and approvals
Make sure your chosen CPQ system is built to scale with increasing complexity—whether you're expanding into new markets, adopting subscription models, or bundling services and products together.
Feature and Functionality: Choosing Between All-in-One and Best-in-Class CPQ Software
Many CPQ software solutions describe themselves as “all-in-one platforms.” These typically include basic tools for customer relationship management, document generation, contract management, and quoting—all within a single system. However, while they offer convenience, these solutions could lack the capacity required for handling complex product configuration, pricing rules, and automated quote generation at scale.
On the other hand, specialized CPQ platforms focus on core configure price quote capabilities. Rather than building every feature in-house, they partner with best-in-class vendors to offer seamless integration with tools like eSignature platforms, CRMs, and ERP systems. This approach gives businesses the flexibility to adopt a quoting solution that meets their unique needs without sacrificing depth or performance.
When evaluating a CPQ solution, define your priorities:
Do you prefer a broader solution offering that integrates seamlessly with your existing CRM or ERP systems—for example, integrating with Salesforce or combining smoothly with your SAP environment?
Do you need a powerful CPQ platform focused on automation, accuracy, and scale?
For complex sales environments, look for features such as:
- Multi-currency support and localized tax handling
- Compliance and risk controls
- Discount thresholds and margin-based pricing models
- Support for ecommerce and mobile-ready quoting processes
- Guided selling tools to eliminate reliance on experts and reduce training time
These capabilities are essential if your team needs to configure products across varying markets, apply flexible pricing rules, or support upsells and cross sell opportunities.
Integration Capabilities That Eliminate Manual Effort
A CPQ system works best when it connects seamlessly to your existing tools. Most platforms act as the bridge between front-end CRM systems and back-end ERP systems—ensuring data consistency and reducing errors across the sales cycle.
Sales reps often juggle four to six different systems in a typical sales process. By integrating your CPQ with CRM, you can eliminate the need for manual quote entry and reduce administrative tasks. Meanwhile, syncing your ERP systems with CPQ enables real-time order information flow and faster fulfillment.
Key integration capabilities to look for include:
- Out-of-the-box connectors for CRM and ERP systems to reduce implementation time
- API flexibility to support custom workflows and future integrations
- Visibility into the entire quote generation process for more informed decisions
- Choosing a CPQ solution with strong integration capabilities ensures your quote-to-cash cycle is fast, accurate, and scalable.
Advanced Integration Capabilities for Future-Proofing Your CPQ Platform
Your CPQ needs today may not match your needs tomorrow. As markets evolve and sales strategies shift—particularly toward subscriptions, bundles, or digitally delivered services—your quoting solution must be flexible enough to scale with you.
For example, many businesses are now integrating their CPQ system with billing solutions, revenue recognition (RevRec) platforms, or advanced product visualization tools to support more interactive customer experiences. These capabilities are especially relevant in industries that sell complex or configurable products like cars, medical devices, or industrial equipment.
That’s where robust API integration becomes critical.
A future-ready CPQ platform should allow you to:
- Seamlessly connect to ERP systems, billing software, and CRM platforms
- Automate the quote generation process across multiple tools and departments
- Support ecommerce and guided selling use cases with enhanced product visualizations
- Scale configuration logic and pricing rules without over-reliance on IT
As you evaluate CPQ software solutions, look for a combination of out-of-the-box connectors and flexible APIs. This ensures your system adapts not only to current workflows but to your long-term goals—whether that’s cross selling new services, entering new markets, or automating the entire sales cycle.
Key Features to Look For When Choosing a CPQ Solution Provider
CPQ is a broad term that covers everything from simple quoting apps to sophisticated, enterprise-grade software solutions. Choosing the right CPQ platform begins with a fundamental question:
Is your CPQ system a strategic purchase or a quick fix?
If you're seeking a quick fix to solve short-term inefficiencies, a low-cost tool might seem appealing. But these options often fail to scale, and can’t adapt as product catalogs, pricing models, or buyer expectations evolve.
A strategic CPQ solution, on the other hand, aligns with your long-term business goals—whether you're expanding your product line, launching new services, or optimizing sales team performance. It handles growing complexity without requiring constant IT involvement and flexes with your organization over time.
When evaluating CPQ software solutions, don’t just focus on today’s needs. Ask whether the system can support:
- New revenue models (subscriptions, bundles, services)
- Advanced workflows and product rules
- Cross-functional teams (sales, product, finance)
- Must-Have Features in a CPQ Software Solution
A well-equipped CPQ system eliminates manual errors and inefficiencies while enabling your team to configure products and generate accurate price quotes faster. Key features to prioritize include:
- Product Configurations: Accurately configure products and eliminate quoting errors
- Pricing Calculations: Apply pricing rules to ensure consistent margins
- Quote Generation Process: Automate proposal creation to accelerate turnaround
- Workflow Automation: Reduce administrative tasks and free up sales reps
- Visualization: Support faster decisions by improving product understanding
- CRM/ERP Integration: Eliminate the need for manual data entry and sync key systems
- eCommerce Readiness: Enable digital self-service and reduce sales friction
- Guided Selling: Recommend the most relevant products, streamline onboarding, and support upsells and cross sell opportunities
Key Factors to Consider
With so many CPQ solution providers on the market, it’s essential to assess each option against your current processes, technical stack, and future growth. Important considerations include:
- Scalability: Can the CPQ platform grow with your business, product complexity, and sales volume?
- Integration Capabilities: Does it connect with your existing CRM, ERP systems, and other tools to automate the quoting process?
- Configuration Flexibility: Can it be tailored to fit your business workflows without requiring heavy customization?
- Experience and Expertise: Does the vendor understand your industry and business model?
- User Friendliness: Can your sales reps use it confidently without relying on IT?
- Total Cost of Ownership: Are licensing, implementation, and support costs transparent and manageable?
- Vendor Support: Is the provider responsive, helpful, and proactive when issues arise?
Choosing a CPQ system isn’t just about features—it’s about finding a solution offering the flexibility, reliability, and support your team needs to succeed long-term.
The Cost of Inaction: Why Delaying Might Hurt Growth
Choosing not to implement a CPQ solution can quietly drain your business of time, margin, and market share. While the status quo might feel “safe,” the reality is that manual processes are a liability in today’s competitive, fast-moving sales environment.
Without automation, your sales reps spend hours navigating disconnected systems, manually building quotes, and correcting pricing errors—all while your competitors use CPQ to respond faster and win more deals.
Here’s what’s at stake when you delay your investment:
- Increased Manual Labor: Sales teams are stuck with repetitive administrative tasks instead of selling. This inefficiency stretches the sales cycle and drains productivity.
- Errors and Inaccuracies: Manual configuration leads to pricing mistakes and product errors that require expert intervention to fix—driving up cost and time.
- Slow Quote Turnaround: Without workflow automation, quote delays frustrate buyers and reduce the likelihood of closing. Time-to-decision becomes a barrier instead of a strength.
- Inconsistent Branding: Disconnected tools produce inconsistent quote documents, weakening your customer experience and professional presentation.
- Limited Insights: Without an integrated CPQ system, data is scattered across spreadsheets. That makes it difficult to track trends, manage margins, or optimize pricing rules.
- Competitive Disadvantage: Competitors using a modern CPQ platform will automate the quoting process, generate accurate prices, and recommend the most relevant products in real time—leaving you behind.
For companies managing complex offerings, including those with extensive bills of materials and routings, the cost of inaction isn’t just operational—it’s strategic. Every manual quote represents lost time, risk, and opportunity.
By implementing a scalable CPQ solution, you not only eliminate the need for manual work but also enable a seamless, customer-centric quoting experience that drives faster decisions and higher deal values.
Reduce time to quote by up to 50%
XaitCPQ is a powerful Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solution that helps businesses speed up sales, reduce manual work, and improve the customer experience. It automates time-consuming tasks, cuts costs, and gives you clear insights.
- Robust rules engine: Many of our customers manage thousands of products, each with thousands of options. That adds up to millions of possible configurations. XaitCPQ handles this complexity with ease, thanks to its powerful rules engine.
- Extensive features and fast setup: Customers use a wide range of CPQ features to get up and running quickly. With XaitCPQ, configuration (not customization) keeps setup fast and ongoing costs low.
- Easy to use, no code needed: The platform is intuitive and user-friendly. Even non-technical users can set up or adjust product options without help from IT, thanks to our no-code/low-code design.
- Full visibility across the sales pipeline: XaitCPQ gives users a clear view of their sales pipeline—and their suppliers'. They can quickly find account details, track quotes, and manage opportunities in one place.
- Built to scale: Our customers process billions of rules every hour. They use batch edits, high-availability systems, and scalable environments to keep up with demand. With strong CRM and ERP integration, XaitCPQ becomes their single source of accurate sales and product data.
- Trusted experience and support: We support some of the world’s most complex industries, from industrial equipment and medical devices to IT services and ISO certification. Our CPQ experts know how to guide teams through complex quoting challenges.
- Efficiency that delivers results: XaitCPQ helps eliminate manual tasks and errors, protect margins, manage risk, and streamline pricing. It also enables bundling, upsells, and cross-selling. Sales teams onboard faster and track when customers open quotes—helping them lower costs and increase deal size.
- Real results: Don’t just take our word for it. Learn how Fabtek cut their quote time by up to 50 percent using XaitCPQ.
