Providing quick, accurate sales quotes to customers is a significant part of a successful sales process for many businesses.
Yet, it’s not easy for businesses that sell configurable products, with many rules and calculations applied across various offerings.
That is where CPQ applications can save the day, lowering complexity and giving salespeople the foundation to do their jobs well.
Many businesses now recognize this, with the CPQ market growing by 13.1 percent in 2022 to an estimated $1.72BN – as per Gartner.
Yet, many vendors cram inside the crowded space, making it tricky for these businesses to select the best-suited CPQ offering.
That’s where the Gartner Magic Quadrant comes in, evaluating 16 of the most prominent CPQ providers and helping companies see through the weeds.
The Definition of Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) Applications
According to Gartner, CPQ applications allow sales teams to "automate and optimize" the development of customer quotes and capture of orders.
Moreover, they provide the space for salespeople to input customer requirements and design custom configurations in real-time.
With this, sellers can present customers with relevant options at an accurate price while reducing costs and helping sales teams close deals faster.
Gartner suggests that there are several must-have capabilities for this market. These are:
- Integrations with prominent sales force automation solutions
- The ability to search and select products and services to sell
- The ability to configure product options and features
- Automatic pricing of the selected products and services
- Proposal generation and terms negotiation features
- Order placement tools
- An extensible framework that allows a business to flex the CPQ around its processes, products, and services
Yet, the analyst also proposes a host of standard capabilities. These include support for digital commerce channels (via pre-built UIs and/or APIs), integrations with fulfillment apps (like an ERP), approvals workflows, and subscription selling and management.
Having established all these fundamentals, Gartner split the 16 CPQ providers into four categories: Leaders, Challenges, Visionaries, and Niche Players. Here, we review them all.
Gartner Magic Quadrant Leaders
Leaders in the Magic Quadrant demonstrate "solid" business results – via earnings – which allow them to execute on an astute vision through product innovation and adept services. Moreover, they have above-average CX scores across all deployments, including large-scale implementations, becoming the providers that competitors often measure themselves against. This year's leaders are:
- Tacton
- SAP
- Oracle
- Bit2win
- Infor
- Salesforce CPQ
Tacton
Tacton CPQ excels in complex manufacturing environments, especially for modeling complex configure-to-order and engineer-to-order products. It also features a robust constraint-solving rule engine, supports 3D/AR visual configuration, and seamlessly integrates with SAP R/3 and SAP S4/HANA. Moreover, it offers significant extensibility through a state workflow engine and dynamic attribute calculations. Gartner highlights these core strengths alongside Tacton's innovation, as evidenced by unique features like its quote comparison tool and real-time model updates.
SAP
SAP CPQ stands out in product selection, offering powerful search, a "robust" sales catalog, and features like product comparison and rapid order entry. Meanwhile, its configurator has a flexible UI that supports advanced requirements and features a cutting-edge condition/action rule engine. Alongside these features, Gartner pinpoints the extensive integrations with various SAP products as a major plus point, including seamless connections to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP ECC, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, SAP BRIM, and SAP Subscription Billing.
Oracle
According to Gartner, Oracle CPQ offers top-notch selling services that cover renewals, amendments, suspensions, terminations, order stacking, and service billing. Its integration with Oracle Subscription Management Cloud is critical here. Moreover, the analyst notes Oracle's track record in large deployments, with over ten implementations serving 10,000 users or more – highlighting its capacity to support enterprise-scale operations. Lastly, Oracle boasts a huge global base of sellers and services, supporting 22 languages, which Gartner commends.
Bit2win
Bit2win is often the CPQ application of choice across utilities, thanks largely to its sector-specific functionality, needs-based product recommendations, and subscription management capabilities. Moreover, the product integrates tightly with SAP IS-U. In addition, Bit2win is known for large-scale deployments, with many implementations crossing 10,000 sales users. Finally, Gartner picks out Bit2win's pricing functionality as a significant strength. That includes various pricing models, volume-based discounting, bundling, and much more - all presented as a user-friendly, headless service.