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3 Tips on How to Avoid CPQ Adoption Failure

The goal of every business is growth. Choosing the right tools to empower that growth is critical. Failing to do so can lead to lost opportunities and unhappy customers, not to mention wasted time and money. 

Done right, a good CPQ solution can drive sales performance and empower sales teams to better manage the overall customer experience. It can also remove friction from the selling process, boost productivity, and even create new revenue streams.

CPQ is potentially a great tech tool, but like any tool, it needs to be used to be effective. Considering the long process required to acquire and implement cross-organizational solutions, the stakes are high. Avoiding potential pitfalls can pave the road to success in CPQ adoption

Here is a list of the top 3 most common reasons why CPQ projects fail and how to avoid them.

Price Over Product

In many cases, organizations will favor the solution that offers the lowest licensing cost. Of course, the CPQ budget should be top of mind during the decision-making process, but it shouldn’t override the functional suitability of the business. As the saying goes, what’s cheap is expensive, going for the lowest cost can actually cost a lot more. 

What separates a good CPQ solution from a great one is usability. If the price tag is the only guiding principle, then organizations run the risk of procuring and implementing the wrong solution. The problem in failure to adopt is retrospective. Looking back it may be easy to see why adoption failed, but the challenge is to see it well before it happens. 

Ideally, the aim is for a 100% adoption rate, or as close to it as possible. Going through the process of seeking, researching, and acquiring a solution requires time, effort, and resources. It would be a poor investment if the tool procured at the end of this long process isn’t used. 

Your CPQ, and any other tech solutions, should be customized to your specifications. It should also be easy to learn and maintain, removing blocks in adoption. 

Choose an experienced and reliable vendor to captain your CPQ journey and lead you to success, by offering exceptional support before, during, and after implementation.

Process Before Product 

CPQ can be a great tool for streamlining an organization’s sales processes. But it also has the potential to cause disruptions to ongoing business during the implementation period. 

You will want to minimize the change management that comes with implementing new software.

Recognize that technology can’t solve all problems, but it can certainly enhance and streamline processes. If those processes are poor to begin with, it’s unlikely that any new technology will improve things. It could even make things worse.

By looking at internal structures from a holistic point of view, examine how processes may need to be redesigned, or even removed, in order to reduce unnecessary or redundant non-value-added steps prior to CPQ implementation

This goes for processes like optimizing the sales and quoting processes or simplifying contract management processes. 

Implementing a new tech solution is rarely smooth sailing. Invest a good amount of time and effort into creating processes that work for those who are using them.

All-inclusive Decisions 

If you’re shopping for pan-organizational tech tools, be sure to include stakeholders from various departments in the discussion. Overlooking the importance of cross-team communication can lead to frivolous tools and unnecessary costs. 

Identify the key players that will help lead each team through the implementation phase and get them involved. This includes stakeholders like the Sales team, Legal and Finance departments, as well as RevOps and IT. 

Opening the lines of communication and collaboration between stakeholders ensures that business efficiencies are met, challenges are addressed, and teams are in sync with one another, enabling balanced and beneficial decision-making. 

The Future is Agile

CPQ can have a huge impact on organizations’ revenue growth. When implementing a CPQ solution, it’s vital that essential integrations are taken into consideration. 

First and foremost, a CPQ must integrate with the organization’s CRM system. Having a thorough knowledge of how your organization’s software solutions interact with one another is vital to the integration process. 

Failing this, organizations run the risk of using a disjointed sales stack, outdated solutions, or incomplete data across systems. This hinders process efficiency, by negatively affecting quote accuracy, contract management, and customer experience. It also directly impacts the bottom line. 

It’s critical to evaluate the cost and efficacy of your entire sales stack. If you’re using multiple tools that don’t integrate and create gaps in your sales process, consider consolidating your sales stack with a solution that serves each stage of the sales process.

List all major platforms the CPQ solution needs to communicate with ahead of time. Patch-fixing issues after the fact can solve one problem while creating many others.  

An Agile CPQ can provide an all-in-one solution that integrates with existing platforms and consolidates tech stacks. 

Consider the following capabilities to get the most out of your Agile CPQ:

Flexibility:  Full alignment with any pricing structure and scalability (up or down) at a moment’s notice.

Efficiency: Automated cross-team workflows to drive efficient, streamlined, lean processes in which stakeholders are synced and teams have a shared objective.

Agility: Fast implementation and easy management. If you’ve read this far, you know. 
Control: Visibility and governance that ensure compliance and accurate forecasting; keeping data hygiene, and tying back to a single source of truth and fully integrated with CRMs and other solutions.

To learn more about Agile CPQ and how to avoid adoption failure, click here!

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