Our work lives have been changed, after the pandemic has started. While going through the 2nd wave and another partial lock-down, it seems to be that we need to just face the reality and prepare for the changes coming to our work lives. A few articles to highlight the changes we’ll see.
When I have realised the magnitude of Covid 19 globally, I have made a few predictions about CPQ market, including big investment in updating existing CPQ platforms, focusing more on self-serve options, and move away from on-premise solution to cloud-based CPQ solutions. Here’re are some articles about CPQ and other technical shift because of Covid 19.
COVID-19 and its impact on the market, how we are fighting back, how the emerging markets are being hit and new business opportunities.
Our world is changing, from education to grocery to how we work, all in response to the current pandemic. Ability to adapt to the changing market is key for our survival. Sharing 3 articles on how the businesses are adapting to the changing environment.
It is not a surprise anymore that our lives will be changed, and so will the job market and our career. We will see some industries to grow very fast post pandemic era, while some industries will have to go through major re-invention to be profitable again. I’ve collected 3 articles for you, 2 focus on job skills and one on Canada job market (might be similar for USA as well).
3 interesting items regarding COVID-19 pandemic, but let’s start with a cartoon that expresses the hardwork of our healthcare professionals.
For many professionals, because of current pandemic, working from home is the only option. For them, it might be the first time they are working from home, away from the office desk and the colleagues. For me, it is day as usual as I’ve been working from home for the last 15 years! My kids grew up expecting to find me in my office upstairs! There are lots of tips on how to work from home, I’ve shared three articles here. For me, I’ve kept a room as my office, and it has a nice desk, nice printer and I’ve kept it very tidy. It helps me focus on my work, without any distractions.
In Canada, it’s been 3 weeks already since the shutdown started. We are all seeing the effect of it on our economy, and it might get worse before it starts to get better. So, for the last few weeks, I have been focusing heavily on improving skills.
Source: unknown (apologies)
Two achievements so far, beyond my 8 to 5 work from home – I’ve got cpqworld.com website up and running and just finished an online certification from Coursera.org.
I encourage all the folks to take advantage of this downtime and get our skills sharpened!
CPQ, or software to Configure, Price and Quote a product, has been around for a while. I remember my first CPQ was built on VB platform, and used mostly to perform guided selling for very large projects (multi-million dollar). Later, when I started rolling out BigMachines back in 2009 (now, Oracle CPQ) to replace our home-grown software, we started the cloud-based CPQ journey. Over time, I got to work with many of such platforms, small niche players to mega enterprise software. Anyway, here is a brief history of CPQ.
“CPQ technology was born in the 1980s in the form of the “configurator,” a rules/logic-based system used to ensure customer specifications didn’t conflict with enterprise resource planning. Eventually, the use of the application shifted toward CRMs and became more of a front-office and sales application.
When ecommerce started to gain momentum, configurators became a part of interactive selling, and when a solution for the quote-to-cash problem was needed, a more modernized CPQ application started to come into its own.”
Source: https://www.fpx.com/what-is-cpq-configure-price-quote
“Come the early ’90s, sales force automation (SFA) was really starting to catch on. More and more companies were beginning to automate many of the arduous tasks that were once dependent on humans. At this point, configurators were being brought to the front office.
By the late ’90s, technology, in general, was advancing by leaps and bounds and eCommerce began gaining momentum. Configurators had grown to be a part of interactive selling.
When the early 2000s rolled around, many small to mid-sized sales organizations found themselves needing a solution for the quote-to-cash problem. At the time it was still fairly laborious and they needed a way to streamline and automate the process even more.”
The CPQ concept officially caught on and gained traction in 2010 when Gartner Research created a report where they stated that “CPQ systems typically include pricing engines, proposal generators, quoting systems and rules or constraint engines, and are complemented by approval and authorization workflows.”
Since then, CPQ continues to gain more and more attention – and there are no signs of it slowing down. Sales organizations understand the need to scale their sales processes and are using CPQ solutions to deliver a personalized sales experience while still controlling time and cost. ”
CPQ Roll-out: A Change Management Approach
CPQ, or Configure Price and Quote platform is a sales enablement tool, with the goal to help the companies create commercial offer of highly configured and complex products. In most cases, such platforms or tools incorporate complex product logic, pricing calculations, cost information and business rules in a centralized and automatic platform. The results of deploying such tools include improved productivity, better revenue, pricing accuracy and better sales effectiveness. CPQ also helps the sales and commercial team by guiding them with right questions and recommendations, which speeds up the commercial process itself.
After the roll-out of a CPQ program in the company, the first priority of the business leader or the program leader is to improve adoption. Adoption can be defined in many ways, mostly it refers to the % of the users using the platform; though, some would argue over entitlement, some would fuss over lower numbers. In the end, adoption, to its core meaning, answers the question: “Have my users started to use the CPQ platform yet?” After a few months of going live, the program leader or business leader also needs to prove that the CPQ program is actually adding value to the business. Sometimes, the journey towards acceptable (or, ‘good’) adoption or realization of business benefit (revenue, productivity, cycle time etc.) is a smooth one; more often than we hope for, the first journey does face with some roadblocks though the benefits of CPQ program are always accepted by all parties.
What can we do make the journey a bit smoother for all of us? That’s the question we always ask ourselves before go into the next CPQ project. There are always a lot of preparations needed, and we can discuss those at another time. When we look at the CPQ program from our user point of view, we are actually asking them to change something in their working days. For commercial team, it means they have to learn and use a new system, without their deadline for the work changing. For channel partners or external teams, it might mean going through a new route to get the quote. For our business stakeholders, it is also a change in roles & responsibilities, accountability and commercial deliverables. Consider such changes, let suggest an approach which might help us out a bit for sure. Let’s treat a CPQ program roll-out as an organizational change as well. It doesn’t impact other plans and deadlines of the project, but it better prepares our users so that they can accept the CPQ with open hands.
When leading a major change project, it is important for leaders to recognize that the change process goes through stages, each stage is important, and each may require a significant amount of time. Let’s use John Kotter’s framework for change to navigate the CPQ roll-out driven change process.
While each CPQ project is unique, and sometimes these stages of change process may overlap with each other, it is important for successful CPQ project to ensure the key steps are followed properly.