A few weeks ago, Box hosted an event for the Quote to Cash Community where we discussed renewal process and other aspects of CPQ. CPQ customers were in attendance and they shared war stories and frustrations with their recent or current CPQ implementations.
There was one point everyone agreed on: no one is happy with their CPQ. They struggle with implementation. It’s expensive and takes many months to go live.
- Performance is poor.
- User experience is inflexible.
- Personalization is out of the question.
One customer asked his vendor for a simple progress bar so CPQ users know where they are in the process. The vendor told him that isn’t on their product roadmap and he should make the most of what he has.
One CPQ customer wondered why he’d even bothered with a CPQ vendor since his solution runs almost entirely on custom code written by the systems integrator. He suspected it would have been easier to simply write a custom application. I couldn’t disagree.
The most poignant comment of the night: one frustrated CPQ customer said his CEO voiced dismay and frustration with the snail pace of their CPQ deployment.
His CEO couldn’t believe CPQ was “so difficult, so expensive and took so long to deploy.” The customer reassured his perplexed CEO: yes, CPQ really is that difficult, expensive, and really takes that long.
Yet, in that comment, I felt the customer couldn’t say why or how CPQ is so difficult. By repeating his CEO’s question he was really posing the question himself.
To me, the answer is obvious. The problem is not CPQ. CPQ is great and the concept makes perfect sense. CPQ can transform your business and your bottom line by influencing better sales. The problem is the technology. For these unfortunate customers, working with these CPQ technologies has been like trying to eat soup with chopsticks. It doesn’t work and you feel pretty dumb while doing it. You want to grab the bowl and drink but your CPQ vendor tells you to be patient. This is just the way CPQ is.
These customers got stuck with immature CPQ technology that doesn’t do what it should. And they just spent at least a year trying to eat soup with chopsticks. No wonder they’re upset, not to mention hungry.
Veloce takes a completely different approach to CPQ. We have a CPQ system that is fast, flexible, and personalizable to solve any CPQ problem. We can get you up and running in no time.
If your CPQ experience has felt like eating soup with chopsticks for a year (or more), we want to hear your story. Let us peek at your data. We have an automatic migration tool that enables us to run your existing CPQ in Veloce with no effort whatsoever. We will show you what CPQ should be. I guarantee you will see a huge difference.
