Once you’ve selected the right CPQ vendor for your business, you enter into an important stage — CPQ implementation. Implementations don’t have to be painful or drawn out. With the right process in place, you can help your team go live quickly and save time and resources. Consider the following steps to ensure successful onboarding, change management, and ongoing maintenance.

Provision the appropriate resources

As you begin the implementation process, it’s critical that you have the right resources at the ready. Many CPQ implementations fail because businesses don’t have enough people with the right skill sets to ensure that the CPQ platform, integrations, and workflows are rolled out properly and continue to work.

“A CPQ is not a one-and-done thing, even after it’s implemented,” explained Shreenath Panditrao, Head of Business Systems at Benchling. “You need to keep tweaking the system so it continues to work like you want it to. Invest in a team that can keep the system up to date, and maintain the hygiene of the system by evaluating new features and functionality, workflows and processes, and approvals.”

Meet regularly with cross-functional stakeholders to evaluate the resources available, and make a plan to provide the required resources for a successful implementation. Make sure to loop in the core implementation team so that all stakeholders are on the same page, and you can tackle issues as they come up instead of having to put out fires later.

Establish a change management team

As mentioned before, the success of your implementation depends on how fast and easy users can be onboarded and trained to use the new solution. Remember that a CPQ doesn’t just impact the sales reps using the product, but it affects the entire organization, including finance, operations, IT, product, and legal.

Establish a change management team with a representative from each department to drive CPQ adoption forward. Make sure that everyone impacted by the CPQ understands why it’s being adopted and its benefits, as well as the timeline of the rollout. Next, deliver basic training to the workforce by providing training materials, such as short tutorial videos, a user manual, or an FAQ page.

Finally, choose top-performing sales reps with a range of experience to be your internal champions of your CPQ. They can help reinforce CPQ adoption, engagement, and accountability.

Track and evaluate the impact on the business

Upon successful rollout of the CPQ solution, it’s incredibly important to evaluate your CPQ regularly. Showing how your CPQ drives revenue and adds efficiency is critical to truly demonstrating its value and to win over skeptics in the workforce.

Use the targets you established early on as a baseline to measure against the performance of your CPQ. Other metrics you may consider tracking are onboarding time, number of tasks automated, time to respond to a client, or the number of customer queries after sharing a quote.

Consider leveraging a reporting dashboard to easily capture and share performance metrics with senior management and other stakeholders.

You may also want to conduct internal user satisfaction surveys to understand how the software has impacted their workflows and overall productivity and if there are ways to improve the CPQ implementation. As your business grows and your needs change, make sure your are regularly reevaluating KPIs to ensure they align with your business goals and requirements.

This blog post is an excerpt from our eBook "The Definitive CPQ Buyer's Guide for SaaS." To read more, download the full guide here.