Agile CPQ

What is Agile CPQ?

CPQ stands for Configure, Price, Quote, and refers to the process sales representatives follow to produce a proposal for customers. Using CPQ technology simplifies the sales process, empowering sales teams to quickly create accurate quotes perfectly tailored to customers’ needs and specifications. CPQ is important because it simplifies the quoting process for configurable products.

Legacy CPQs are fragmented and difficult to manage, requiring heavy code and admin resources. They take away some of the sales process burden, but any changes, updates, or guardrails require new code and can take weeks or months to update. 

Agile CPQ solutions are low-code solutions, on the other hand, making them quick to implement and easy to maintain. Agile CPQ is a self-sufficient, automated solution that eliminates the need for Ops, IT, and third-party admins. Agile CPQ keeps up with the pace of business with real-time updates and adjustments, and drives revenue growth through its always-current pricing, products, and subscription management.

Synonyms

• Modern CPQ
• Next-Gen CPQ
• Fast-moving CPQ
• Customizable CPQ
• Agile CPQ implementation
• Flexible CPQ
• DealHub CPQ

Legacy CPQ vs. Agile CPQ

As companies grow so does their need for unified, automated, and Agile CPQ solutions. It is not uncommon for even large sales organizations to use general, undedicated solutions like Microsoft Excel and Google Docs to create their quotes, which are then shared via email or regular mail for approval and signatures.  

These methods are outdated and cumbersome. They require manual data input and updates, and are prone to errors, which cost time and money. 

As they seek to create more efficient sales processes, companies adopt various CPQ solutions. These Legacy CPQs offer limited relief, mainly because they require a choice between heavy-coded customized solutions and low-code, non-customized, and unscalable ones. 

Heavy-code solutions require long implementation periods, ranging from 6-9 months. They are also complicated to manage and maintain, and are regularly outdated, as changes to products or pricing take weeks to update. 

Other solutions are limited by design-they are easier to manage, but they are not customizable. Since they are a one-size-fits-all solution, they aren’t flexible enough to scale up with business, and organizations outgrow them and are back seeking a viable solution to drive their sales process forward. 

An Agile CPQ offers a winning combination of a low-code, fully automated solution. Agile CPQ is quick to implement (weeks rather than months) and easy to manage, with updates and changes showing in real time. Thanks to these combined capabilities, the Agile CPQ is a self-sufficient solution which requires no admin or IT resources, and provides sales reps with autonomy in the sales process. 

The table below compares Legacy and Agile CPQ capabilities:

An Agile CPQ brings transparency, urgency, and collaboration to deal management. It provides a single quote-to-cash solution that eliminates the need for multiple disparate applications. Agile CPQ empowers its customers with a solution that is both low-code and fully automated and customizable. This sales-tech innovation drives efficiency, increases revenue, ensures control, and transforms customer experience. 

Top 5 Traits of Agile CPQ

How to Drive Deal Desk Efficiency with Agile CPQ

B2B sales processes are notoriously long and complex. That’s why many companies establish Deal Desks, dedicated, cross-functional teams that manage high-value, complex deals. Deal Desks are involved in all aspects of these deals, including contract management, compliance, and approval workflows. Agile CPQ can boost Deal Desk efficiency, serving as a transformative tool in refining and expediting these comprehensive sales operations.

Leveraging Agile CPQ systems offers significant strategic advantages in several critical areas:

• Guided Selling Playbooks: Facilitating a more structured and effective sales approach with adaptive guidelines tailored to various customer needs.
• Pricing Guardrails and Always Current Policies: Maintaining pricing integrity and compliance with real-time updates to align with evolving policies and regulations.
• Process Transparency and Version Control: Enhancing oversight on document management and sales workflows, thus minimizing errors and ensuring consistency.
• Increased Communication and Collaboration: Promoting a cohesive work environment that enhances teamwork and streamlines the decision-making process in complex deal negotiations.

How Agile CPQ Empowers RevOps

Revenue Operations, or RevOps for short, is a business unit whose goal is to maximize revenue potential. RevOps aligns Marketing, Sales, and Service throughout the sales process, driving deals to the finish line.  Using an Agile CPQ, RevOps can improve sales efficiency and move sales forward, increasing revenue potential. Here are main factors:

• An agile CPQ promotes communication and collaboration between developers, marketing, and sales. This transparency and alignment leads to better efficiency throughout the process, and ultimately generating higher revenue. 
• Agile CPQ enables localization and customization of products at scale. This expands the Total Addressable Market (TAM) and can lead to revenue growth, as Agile CPQ simplified the product configuration management.
• Agile CPQ also makes it possible to shorten sales cycles by utilizing real-time workflows and marketing strategies. Agile CPQ enables using CRM systems to ensure sales processes are reduced and deal potential is increased. 
• An Agile CPQ enables RevOps to respond quickly and accurately. This, in turn, creates more opportunities and leads to increased revenue potential.
• RevOps focuses on sales and selling products. An Agile CPQ can enhance RevOps abilities by enabling product and pricing updates without interrupting existing workflows and ongoing sales processes.  
• Agile CPQ’s guided selling empowers sales reps to create accurate quotes quickly, sticking to a precise pricing policy by using guardrails. This capability makes Sales more self-sufficient, and the sales process more efficient, leading to higher revenue potential. 

Testaments to the Power of DealHub’s Agile CPQ

Marty Chang, Director of Business Operating Systems & Strategy at Drift, shared, “We faced challenges, like any growing business. But it was our commitment to innovation and truly understanding our clients’ needs that propelled us forward. Today, our solutions not only address our pain points but set a benchmark for sales operations everywhere. We did this with DealHub CPQ.”

Inefficient processes cause revenue leakage. Andy Schneider, Director of Sales-America at Grote, says, “There might only be a couple hundred dollars here, a couple hundred dollars there, $1,000 here, but our system didn’t allow us to easily configure it. Whereas now, we can just go in and we can add those options.” Easy money!

Bruce Harris, former Director of IT and Enterprise Business Apps at Asure agrees; “If you ask 10 reps to sell the same mix of products, you’re guaranteed they would come up with 10 different mixes of products. So there was no consistency. We’re losing revenue opportunities. There was true revenue leakage.” 

Jonathan Cohen, Salesforce & Delivery Team Leader at Yotpo shared that “Implementing DealHub has transformed our revenue management across the entire customer lifecycle by streamlining the quoting and proposal process, reducing manual errors, and accelerating deal cycles. The data from the platform also provides valuable insights, enhancing our ability to make data-driven decisions and optimize revenue strategies.”

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