Users of modern CPQ (Configure Price Quote) solutions have a lot of challenges to deal with. Many of their key business assets, which need to be manipulated by numerous business people including product experts, pricing experts, channel managers, translators, multimedia managers, project managers, etc. are fragmented into different systems: Excel or Word files, document management systems, homemade applications, etc.
Most custom selling solutions or even current CPQ solutions are not providing marketing people with a comprehensive application to manage and distribute the numerous tasks needed to build or maintain models. If they do exist, tools to build rules or complex pricing are made for IT people not business users because programming is necessary to manage product or pricing complexity.
So, marketing and product teams have very limited autonomy to create or maintain models.
Selling solutions developed for internal use are not suitable for Internet deployment and do not manage multichannel as a native feature.
What about a Next-Gen Product Configurator to help companies selling complex products and services?
A Next-Gen solution must include core functionalities like an electronic catalog, a product and services configurator, a quoting tool and a proposal generator. More importantly, it must enable users to build, deploy and execute these core features through different applications built around the same repository:
- for the marketing team and the product experts: an application to design models and manage the company’s key business assets
- for the channel manager: a multichannel one-click deployment
- for the sales team: application modules to help them sell products and services as solutions
