While Dreamforce itself is growing every year the number of Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) Vendors is growing as well. In addition to the CPQ vendors who have a booth at the Expo in the Moscone Center there are more CPQ vendors meeting with customers around the actual Dreamforce event. This is good news for all CPQ customers since it should mean more competition, more capabilities and more options to optimize your Sales Processes and Systems with different Solutions. From CPQ solutions for small customers who look at standalone systems for maybe 10 Users all the way to “Enterprise” solutions that can address many thousand users there is a system solution for almost all use cases.

Here are some of the “buzz” words I heard (again) and my take on it

• Artificial Intelligence: While different vendors may use different words the customer objective should be to determine how they can use these technologies to reach real, measurable business outcomes (e.g. move from manual maintenance to automated maintenance of cross and up-sell options) . While AI has been around for quite some time in CPQ it is still very early and so there is plenty of time for customers to learn more about these opportunities. I expect more vendors to start development activities in this area in the next 1-2 years. So stay tuned for more interesting developments in this area.
• Platform Offerings: More vendors collaborate to offer broader solutions for their customers. One example of this could be the Salesforce CPQ – Tacton collaboration for complex manufacturing. This could help customers to get more functionality from multiple vendors on one platform. This allows Salesforce Customers to use solutions they could not use without additional integration investments. As you probably know the Integration work is usually challenging, time-consuming and expensive. So this should be a good development for CPQ customers who use a Salesforce CRM solution. While I write about Dreamforce this is based on Salesforce but this is valid for all other platforms (e.g. MS Dynamics CRM, SAP, Oracle) too!

In addition to that there was also talk about adding more features and expanding beyond CPQ and covering additional areas like Contract Lifecycle Management and Billing (so the typical Quote-to-Cash capabilities). This is as expected and hence I did not add it to the “Buzz words” section. Here two more things I noticed

• Excel is and remains a tool that is used for configuration and pricing purposes and more vendors allow to do certain steps in it. Check it out when you look at different CPQ vendors. While I have mixed feelings about this I recognize that customers ask for it and hence it is available. Make sure though that you use it in such a way that it enhances your CPQ experience and does not try to replace CPQ functionality!!
• Virtual Reality (VR) headsets were not used: I knew from multiple 3D CPQ Vendors that they had plans to use VR headsets to showcase capabilities where a user can build a configuration and then “walk thru” it. I thought that would have been fun and was looking forward to do that. Unfortunately that did not happen due to security regulations (as far as I understood). In any case I think this is another area where the business value still has to be determined. While it is cool for a customer it should also translate into a real, measurable business benefit. If you are interested in this you should check the Novus CPQ event website to see when 3D CPQ vendors showcase this at other events.

Anyway, all in all, a good event again where you could learn many interesting things about CPQ.