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. ”
