THE REALITY OF MODERN QUOTE-TO-CASH OPERATIONS
Insights from 50+ QTC Experts
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Purpose of the Study
Navigating the Evolving Landscape of Quote-to-Cash Operation
System integration experts know better than most the intricacies, advancements and shortcomings of modern quote-to-cash operations. So, who better to look toward for insight into the current state of the market?
With consumerized buyer preferences increasing, accelerated digital advancement, and ever-increasing product complexity, implementing a solid QTC strategy isn’t as straightforward as it once was.
Gerald Soto, CEO at PeakCommerce says that the path forward for both QTC and CPQ solutions “has to be uniquely simple. CPQ today is far too complex.”
Logik.io was founded on principles of innovation and adaptation – principles that have done us well. And to continue innovating and adapting our own commerce logic engine in line with these QTC and CPQ developments, we need data.
Thomas Dennis, Sr. Development Manager at ForeFront, says that the ultimate goal is to introduce “simple interfaces that are intuitive for configuring rules with a flow-like interface, and robust features for exposing configurators to customers.”
It’s clear that QTC is only increasing in complexity – but, most SI partners aren’t satisfied with where it stands. So, the question of the hour now becomes: what is the full reality of modern quote-to-cash, according to those closest to it, and how do businesses better architect their quote-to-cash strategies moving forward?
Chris Tytler, Director of Business Consulting at Zaelab, hypothesizes that “[o]nly those that transform their business to support self-service with robust guided selling will survive.“
The Growing Need for QTC-inclusive Tech Stacks
We proctored a multi-part survey, consisting of both multiple choice and free response prompts, to 50 quote to cash system integration partners from across the country to see just what they have to say about quoteto-cash. And, across the board, we found some striking consistencies:
Now, more than ever, shoppers are expecting elevated experiences when it comes to purchasing B2B products . Businesses are having more trouble with the configuration aspect of their CPQ solutions than anything else. Market demand for QTCinclusive tech stacks is only set to increase, as is pressure for sellers to increase sales efficiency.
Challenge of Managing Quote-to-Cash Process
The Rising Complexity of Quote-to-Cash (QTC)
It’s clear that QTC complexity is on the up, and business targets are set on accommodating such increases while balancing the value of a consumerized customer experience.
The vast majority of surveyed partners reported their clients experienced more difficulty managing their quote-to-cash experience this year as compared to last, with 50% reporting a slightly harder 2022, and 20.8% reporting a much more challenging 2022.
About one in five clients reported no increased complexity for their QTC management between 2021 and 2022 with a 20.8% response rate, but projections for 2023 don’t fall in favor of future stability. 85.5% of partners believe the quote-to-cash process will continue to increase in complexity throughout 2023, with only 12.5% anticipating neutral progression.
John Lehrkind, Director, Solutions Engineering at Pierce Washington, highlights the importance of such a balance, saying “[d]igital transformation is a companywide effort that should span multiple business units to be successful.”
As consumerized buyers lock into their expectations of dynamic, self-guided, speedy sales environments, SI partners as a whole agree on one thing – the importance of meeting those expectations through software solutions.
Three-quarters of responses classed the expansion of such self-service capacities as very important to overall QTC strategy for 2023 and beyond. And, not a single respondent found the prospect unimportant to any degree.
To facilitate such self-service options, Sonia Flamm, VP Alliances & IP at ATG/Cognizant says future solutions inarguably need the “ability to handle large volumes of records and complex calculations.”
In the words of Boaz Meridor, co-Founder of Uptima, Inc., “It has to be easy. Easy to sell, easy to buy & easy to do business.”
98% of people surveyed
reported that providing end users – aka consumerized buyers – with the ability to do more self-service quoting and transacting in coming years is of notable importance.
Quote-to-Cash Implementations
Navigating the Challenges of Meeting Consumerized Buyer Expectations and Implementing New Tech Solutions
While it’s widely understood that leveling up to meet consumerized buyers and their enhanced expectations is necessary, that knowledge doesn’t make the task any less daunting.
Sean Joyce, CTO of Navint, makes the point that “it has previously not been possible to deliver a consumer-like buying experience when there is also a complex assisted sales channel.”
This means that businesses who have not started on their journey to align with new non-negotiables are facing unexplored territory, which can come with some hesitation.
Nick Whaley, Practice Director at A5, has a positive outlook regarding implementation, saying that “implementing the ‘CPQ tool’ is usually the easiest part.” For him, convincing stakeholders to let go of the status quo is far more challenging.
For system administrators facing the prescription to make things easier, physically implementing the right software solutions and new tech stack support requires a certain amount of buy-in across the company.
With the right level of stakeholder understanding, Ingmar Hermans, Sr. Consultant at Walpole Partnership, says it becomes far easier to “drive change management from the very start of the project based on senior leadership sponsorship.”
And for those who anticipate pushback or initial skepticism from their teams in the face of change, Stephanie Viereckl, Principal Consultant at ATG, reminds us that “SI/Implementation partners can be an unbiased 3rd party to try to provide perspective and remind business teams of [the benefits.]”
Taking the time now to align with buyer expectations leaves you in prime position to scale with the market and remain future-proofed against upstream changes that may come in two, three, or ten years’ time.
Instead of relying on patchwork fixes that aren’t built to stand the test of time, you can create an architecture around your quote-to-cash process that leaves “potential to expand the engagement experience to channel, partners, and customers,” says Thanveer Nazeeb, VP, Delivery at Argano.
CPQ Market Demands and Insights
The Role of CPQ Solutions in Supporting the Quote-to-Cash Process:
To support the quote-to-cash process, many businesses are working backward and reassessing the state of their CPQ solutions. The past few years have helped redefine the role CPQ plays in commerce, resulting in more attention being paid to its architecture.
Rapid advancement in the CPQ sphere is projected to continue, with 77.1% of SI partners expecting market demand for solutions to grow in 2023.
Priyanka Shende, Tech Lead at Jade Global, says that with this wave of growing demand, equally demanding shoppers will be expecting “speedy implementation,” regardless of how many more features come with the territory.
In terms of use cases for CPQ technology, about 73% businesses are looking to leverage such software to increase their overall sales performance in comparison to 2022.
50% of survey respondents want to increase general sales efficiency through enhanced CPQ offerings, while 22.9% are looking to CPQ to accelerate their sales cycles.
1 IN 5
Partners listed reduction of costs and energy requirements as their main priority for the coming months.
Product Configuration Remains a Primary Challenge
Navigating Configuration Challenges and Identifying Operational Gaps in CPQ Solutions
While CPQ is often discussed as a singular solution, the actual configuration, pricing, and quoting mechanisms of modern setups are not all created equal.
More than half of our system integration partners identified configuration as the most challenging component of CPQ software solutions, at a response rate of 56.3%. Conversely, 81.3% partners rank quoting as the easiest aspect to manage.
Chad Borer, Executive Director of ATG, says “Configurations are always incredibly difficult, especially if we’re constrained by platform limitations.”
Thomas Gilbert, Solution Architect at Original Shift, echoes the struggles of system limitations; he explains that companies often “burden end users with subpar user experiences in order to keep solutions ‘out-of-box’.”
But, out-of-the-box solutions haven’t necessarily been built with the newest, freshest buyer preferences in mind. Even in digital environments, these buyers are looking for hints of personal engagement and visual representations of tangible products.
William Weisgerber, Lead Solutions Architect at Mountain Point, underlines the need to incorporate “[d]ynamic configurations with a supported image or diagram” to help satisfy that visual want.
When asked what key operational gaps they’d like to see addressed by future CPQ offerings, our system integration partners were almost equally split between four main pain points: rule complexity, costly maintenance, slow performance, and a lack of guided selling.
29.2% of partner clients
are unsatisfied with current market offerings because they have product rules that are too complex for out-of-the-box solutions to deftly accommodate.
20.8% of partner clients
report that they are struggling to provide a speedy configuration experience because of system limitations, which is a cardinal sin against consumerized buyers who prioritize time above all else.
If requirements, recommendations, relationships, and restrictions cannot be layered and integrated with each other, buyers and administrators alike will feel the repercussions.
Similarly dissatisfied with the CPQ status quo are the 29.2% bleeding resources on costly maintenance.
A tech stack constantly struggling to bear its own weight or facilitate no-script updates means a disproportionate amount of labor and financial resources to keep it somewhat functional.
Mike Jortberg, Director at Slalom, notes two commonly-seen challenges with “SKU proliferation and ERP integration to frontend systems,” each of which contribute to consistent back-end administration needs.
To properly serve this buyer segment, Stewart Magnuson, Sr. Consultant at Neuraflash, says software solutions will need “to be more client-facing and cut out a lot of the manual tasks/decisions” that eat into the shop.
Miles Sims, Revenue Cloud Practice Head at DemandBlue forecasts that, “as lowconfiguration sales processes are being automated, more technical sales processes will require advanced guided selling tools for sales and clients.”
Salesforce Stays at the Center of Quote-to-Cash Operations
Leveraging Salesforce as a Solution for Quote-to-Cash and Ecosystem Integration
As so many partners agree on the inherent difficulty of configuration, they too agree on a way to make things easier – migrating to a Salesforce-based tech stack.
95.9% of the surveyed partners’ clients are expressing interest in consolidating to a Salesforce-centric ecosystem, inclusive of Logik.io’s commerce logic engine. 16.7% of partners class their interest as growing dramatically in the face of total market consumerization.
Nazeeb sees Salesforce CPQ as a “[s]ingle scalable platform that has the power to enable the 360 experience for all stakeholders involved in the business processes.”
Emphasis there on the all. In a world of omni-channel commerce, it only makes sense that all parties with a role in the sales funnel itself benefit from the Salesforce ecosystem.
Alekhya Mandadi, Solution Architect at Simplus, says, “Salesforce as a platform provides flexibility and businesses can move more than just sales departments into Salesforce. They can move more operations into Salesforce, giving them full visibility into who they are doing business with.”
Those who have already begun the migration process may have done so as a result of existing data and integration issues.
Tori McGillen, Consultant at Slalom, makes the connection that legacy systems with “poor UI [are] hard to configure [and] hard to integrate, [resulting in] poor experience, poor compliance, tons of workarounds [and] bad data.”
If trying to reconcile explicit buyer demands for top-tier experience with a manageable, scalable software solution is the goal, none of the aforementioned issues will do.
So, knowing where the quote-to-cash and configure, price quote solutions stand – in a precarious position, struggling to cover the market in ways buyers deserve – we can most intelligently engineer a roadmap forward.
Where Logik.io Fits
Empowering B2B Manufacturers with Advanced CPQ and E-commerce Capabilities
At Logik.io, we boast more than 100 years of collective industry experience that we’re specifically leveraging to help you sell more, sell faster, and maintain less.
Our innovative commerce logic engine comes equipped with:
• unparalleled solving engine
• uniquely designed headless architecture
• advanced product rule and logic capacities,
• & customization options you won’t need a degree to engage with.
For example, proprietary “Sets” accommodate a level of input replication that lessens the manual data requirements during configuration, and provides an easier-to-navigate experience for the end user. As compared to explicit rule definition, Sets mark a shorter time-to-value because of their duplicative nature.
Kamryn McKell, Director of Sales Engineering for Logik. io, says that “whether you need increased system performance, have to support large rules or option sets, or need a single configurator for your omnichannel experience – Logik.io has you covered.”
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