Some 75 years ago, the need for automation was realized; but that was for engines and motors – today, all industries ranging from welding, to medical, to electronic manufacturing, are wanting to automate most, if not all, organizational procedures. This is in the interest of efficiently utilizing the major essential resources; human, financial, physical, and information.
In a report published by Jay McBain of Forrester, he drew attention to how manual, human-centric processes are no longer beneficial for channel leaders and B2B marketers. While people love talking to people and human interaction is undeniably the preferable way to go for obvious reasons, it is still very expensive. There is now also a high demand for people to be able to self serve without having someone trying to sell to them. Neither can B2B marketers rely on spreadsheets to manage their partner programs. With the trifurcation of partners into influencer, transactional, and retention categories, they wrote, dealing with the many activities on scale, without sufficient automation is no longer possible.
Industries all over the globe are abuzz with the concept of automation – and here is why;
Another notable development has been the rise of Ecosystems, which will in the next five years be considered mission critical. Jay McBain, Principal Analyst, Channel Partnerships & Alliances has also, in his Forrester article, mentioned how in an Accenture survey, majority of the business leaders concluded that current business models will no longer be recognizable in the coming five years. He went on to state that “delivering automation of indirect sales processes, workflows, and partner programs, channel software is becoming increasingly critical to a brand’s ability to win, serve, and retain its customers and partners. It’s a fast-growing market, with 8.9% growth during COVID-19-impacted 2020, as measured by employee hiring through LinkedIn.”
Many things continue to change; businesses like Cisco, Dell Technologies, IBM and HPE all have shifted to 100% subscription/consumption business models. This ground-breaking development translated to subscription/consumption based pricing being adopted by 41% SaaS companies; previously this number was quite low.
Here are some statistics to help you contextualize the relevance of CPQ:
In 2017, CPQ revenue estimates were as much as $1.1 billion with a projected future increase of 25% annually through 2020, according to the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Configure, Price, and Quote Application Suites. Also, in 2017, CPQ grew to $42.1 billion. Much of this growth is attributed to the cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) market. Read more
Global Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) Market was expected to reach the CAGR of 19.23% over the forecast period. –
In 2019, the CPQ application market grew by 15.5% to an estimated $1.42 billion. (Gartner). The CPQ market will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20% through 2020. – https://www.cloudsense.com/cpq-stats/
What does having a CPQ in 2021 mean for you in times of such revolutionary changes?
*Lots of CPQ systems struggle to work with such rapid rate of change and subscription models while many rise to the challenge. Many CPQ systems focus on discreet manufacturing and simple pricing models and in addition struggle with global deployments and issues related to multiple currency inputs etc. If your CPQ is designed to embrace the constant changes and it seems to be easy for people to use, you have nothing to worry about – if that is not the case, you may consider changing. This is because the technical or deployment debt of an inflexible CPQ or QTC can ultimately be damaging to the organization. Continuous increasing technical debt will slower your rate of adoption and innovation with your customers and products.
Implementing a flexible CPQ solution within your sales team means by and large flexibility and automation within your sales process. What this does is it arms your sales people with the ability to spend more time and energy in getting to know your customer’s needs and delivering superlative customer experience; wherever they are buying from.
At servicePath, we believe in empowering the end-user with a codeless approach to enable them with flexibility to modify the system easily to keep up with changes in market conditions; and while at the same time, powerful analysis tools and strong governance to drive good revenue faster.
The right CPQ makes more sense than ever.
Click here to learn more about what CPQ is.
