Keeping up with product and pricing complexity becomes more complicated as your business scales – many startups realize this too late.
If you haven't used a CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) solution before, you might not fully grasp its potential benefits.
This article can help you find the best CPQ software for your sales process. Your sales team can be more efficient and accurate with the right system. That means you can close more deals than you are closing today.
Configure Price Quote (CPQ) software is designed to generate accurate quotes for customized sales orders.
It considers the constraints, configurations, pricing, and other factors to provide a quote (commonly referred to as a “proposal” too).
With a 20% to 80% cut in the time spent preparing quotes, CPQ software has served 83% of software, financial, food, beverage, telecommunication, and many other industries as a productive tool.
CPQ solutions guide sales reps in preparing quotes quickly while considering significant and changing variables.
CPQ software can be categorized into legacy CPQs and modern CPQs. Modern CPQs offer more personalization options and self-service capabilities to cater to changing business requirements. Coupled with seamless data synchronization tools, they provide a customer-focused selling experience and create a clean flow of revenue data.
Many solutions are in the market, but not all offer equal value. We have cut it down to the eight best CPQ software tools to make finding the best option for your sales requirements easier.
Cacheflow is one of the best CPQ software and deal-closing platforms that automates your quote-to-revenue process. You can configure customized SaaS quotes in minutes and build SKUs with any pricing model. It also gives insights into your customer journey so you can implement better strategies to close the deal much faster.
Above all, you can integrate your billing and CRM with Cacheflow to make deal expansions and renewals just as seamless.
You can give your customers a B2C-style checkout experience with embedded e-signature and payment capture.
Cacheflow pulls billing, pricing, and payments into one platform while reducing the work for the sales, revenue operations, and finance teams.
It has an intuitive, user-friendly interface that also enables cross-functional collaboration for every team to work seamlessly. You don’t have to worry about how it will fit with your existing stack, as implementation is designed to be fast and easy.
With the multi-currency and tax support, you can expand the geographies you sell into without hiring expensive consultants. You can also send automated reminders to customers for renewals.
Cacheflow is best suited for SaaS companies and has three types of plans and respective pricing, for which you can request a quote. The plans are sales flow, finance flow, and enterprise plans.
A legacy platform known for its market leadership in CRM solutions also has a CPQ product. It has a guided selling feature, which helps sales reps make accurate quotes by suggesting the right products for the customer.
Salesforce CPQ software can adapt to various pricing models, and you can categorize it according to various customer segments. Salesforce CPQ can be easily integrated with other Salesforce products. To speed up the quote process, it has professional templates for quoting. The product modeling option and service model are missing features in this software.
There are four types of software plans, and the pricing varies for each. CPQ, which is $75 per month; CPQ+, which is $150; CPQ and billing growth; and CPQ and billing plus both have custom prices where you need to request a quote. If you have thousands of SKUs with complicated billing and are a native Salesforce product user, Salesforce CPQ could be right for you.
Oracle CPQ is software that adapts quickly to handle all the demands and complex product configurations. From quote to approval, you get an advanced approval workflow. It provides analytics and reporting on the quote performance so you can make decisions based on it. You can integrate ERP and CRM with the Oracle Cloud.
It has AI-based price optimization with an intuitive drag-and-drop UI. Building reports using this software is more straightforward, but the data visualization is weaker. The other hindrance is the mobile view, which complicates approvals due to the unoptimized version for mobile devices.
The pricing of the Oracle CPQ must be requested. Their platform is ideal for larger enterprises.
This legacy CPQ is built with customization in mind, and the platform lets you nurture your digital relationships.
Having only a subscription management tool isn't enough. Zuora understands this and has placed itself as an intelligent hub for the complete quote to cash and revenue recognition processes at scale.
Thinking globally, Zuora CPQ handles multiple currencies. This is especially useful for businesses looking to expand territories. When managing and optimizing accounting, Zuora's revenue recognition is a unique attribute that sets it apart.
While all this makes Zuora sound like the perfect solution, the enhanced financial feature integrations make this a challenging software with a steep learning curve. Moreover, when you interact with the Zuora UI during the initial phases, knowing what's going on with this elaborate tool is very challenging.
Zuora offers custom pricing, and you need to speak to their team about the charges.
This is a CPQ solution that is primarily built for enterprise companies. While it helps a business generate quotes quicker, it also has analytics and reporting capabilities that allow your sales and RevOps teams to understand the performance of their sales process.
It can break down the complex order flow process into simple operations. In this software, you can view the revenue granularly, giving you more clarity.
A common problem users may encounter are delays during order processing and errors with the reporting feature.
You need to connect with them to learn about pricing. It suits industries like telecom, MSPs, tech companies, publishers, and media companies.
It has a robust suite for enterprise-level organizations, a cloud-based platform with easy customizations that supports multichannel engagements, direct sales, partner service, or customer service sales. With it, you can localize the price engines to support different geographies.
The interface is easy to use and has self-explanatory functionalities, which would help you use the software without any hassle, and with the data security feature, it’s meant to secure your data while using their software.
Regardless, the overall opinion about the software is that it has a lot of hiccups such as long reboot times, which isn’t a good experience.
The pricing of the platform needs to be requested.
Previously known as Apttus CPQ, Conga B2B CPQ software solution accelerates sales throughout the revenue lifecycle. You can configure pricing, discounts, carts, and more to build out complex proposals, contracts, renewals, and other critical business documents through this CPQ.
Although it is a legacy software, it is extremely configurable and handles all the aspects of the CPQ seamlessly. It also supports most pricing models.
A lot of users face integration issues with Conga CPQ and customization is also difficult. Some customers have also reported serious support problems with the platform.
Conga provides a range of products, each priced based on headcounts. For example, Conga Composer's contract pricing ranges from $14,300 to $97,000, while Conga Grid ranges from $11,900 to $114,700.
It is compatible with SAP ERP and e-commerce solutions. The focus is less on direct sales, which is more effective for those who are into e-commerce sales. The configurator engine is scalable and has an intuitive interface to work with. If you are expecting a mobile presence, then it isn’t available. It offers cost-effective strategies for the supply chain based on assessing multiple criteria. It also makes future predictions based on historical data for accurate inventory management.
You get to explore the visually appealing quotes on this platform, where you can also optimize the prices based on individual customers. You also get AI-based recommendations if you want to cross-sell a product, helping you with guided selling.
The drawback is in the sandbox for production deployment, which is not so user-friendly and has very limited reporting features. Upon this, the software sometimes gets slower.
The pricing for the SAP CPQ software must be requested, and it is best suited for businesses that are primarily data-driven and have complex product pricing, especially for those who use the SAP cloud.
While legacy CPQs have been widely used and tested, new-age solutions like Cacheflow have agility and flexibility baked in. Cacheflow is explicitly designed for SaaS businesses and empowers sales and RevOps teams to work smarter, not harder.
Today’s buyers want a simplified, seamless experience at every step of their buying journey. Cacheflow exceeds these customer expectations with sales while increasing overall satisfaction and delivering efficiency.
Experience it yourself by booking a demo with us!
