How much time do you need to allocate for CPQ implementation and enablement?
Of all the questions SaaS businesses have about CPQs, this is one of the most common. Of course it is! To invest and commit time and money to any new tool, it’s reasonable to want to know how long it will take until you realize its value — and how many challenges you’ll face along the way to go live.
The unsatisfying — but real — answer is that it depends on how complex your business is. But fortunately, we can largely boil that complexity down to one key factor: data.
When it comes to CPQ implementation, don’t underestimate the importance of data migration — this is the frustrating, time-consuming truth. Data migration needs to be your first thought, not an afterthought.
And data — and thus complexity — grows based on a number of factors, including number of items in your product catalog and pricing packages (usage based, per user, consumption, professional services, etc.). Company size can also be a meaningful factor because that can impact what resources you have to support implementation and also how many people will need to be trained for adoption.
Number of Customers As Proxy for Implementation Time
Company size is especially important because it can serve as a proxy for the most important factor of all: number of customers (i.e. the more customers you have, the bigger your company is).
Effectively, every customer you have is attached to a wealth of historical data: what they’ve purchased, renewed, not renewed, upsold. And all of this customer-related data will need to be migrated over into a new CPQ.
Based on how many customers you have, it’s possible to get a pretty good rough estimate of how long your CPQ implementation will take. Note that the cut-off points provided here aren’t exact but intended to be general guidelines.
Using this framework, let’s explore implementation across the complexity continuum and dig into some of the most important considerations as you plan out your own CPQ implementation.
Brand New CPQ Implementation
If you’ve decided it’s time for a CPQ, are starting fresh, have less than 50 customers, and have no additional complicated factors, it’s safe to estimate about three months for this type of “vanilla” green-field implementation.
It’s certainly possible to do it in less time, but that’s optimistic. Even if you have no existing customers, you’ll need to take the time to define your business processes, so plan on three months as a reasonable estimate.
That said, here’s a caveat: even for a green-field implementation, there are certain scenarios that could add complexity. A particularly complex use case we often see is companies with extensive product catalogs. For example, I spoke with a company that had not yet implemented a CPQ and had 1,200+ SKUs. No company should have 1,200+ SKUs! Because of this, the implementation took much longer as the organization had to update the whole product catalog and migrate to a new one.
Easy CPQ Implementation
When you’re dealing with a small(er) number of customers — in the 50-100 range — you don’t have to sweat a complicated and lengthy data migration initiative.
You’ll still face the migration issue from one tool to your new CPQ, but, with so few customers, you can brute force the problem. Often, companies will use manual entry to migrate the data quickly. Not having to define a data migration strategy will shave months off your implementation process.
Medium CPQ Implementation
When you’re in the range of 100-1,000 customers, you’re going to need a defined data migration strategy.
At this size, it’s also likely that you have a variety of platforms that will need to seamlessly integrate with your CPQ to streamline the entire quote-to-revenue process. So, an important step in the process becomes identifying every system in your tech stack and how the CPQ will play with your existing systems post-implementation and integration.
Hard CPQ Implementation
When you have 1,000+ customers, that’s a whole lot of data to migrate. That’s when you’re looking at two years (sometimes more) to complete implementation.
The first step is to confirm that your data is ready for migration. This means you need to clean data as necessary to ensure quality. While that may sound obvious, clean data is paramount. Without it, everything else that follows in the migration process will be negatively impacted. And the more data you have, the bigger the mess.
The longer it takes to implement, the longer it takes to show a return on your investment in a CPQ platform. But don’t be tempted to cut corners to rush the process because this only leads to more issues down the road.
The Pros and Cons of Phased Implementation
Some companies on the larger end of the spectrum choose to take on a phased approach, which can be quicker and more consumable. You might, for example, choose to implement a new CPQ to turn on for new business while keeping legacy business on an old system.
But those who go down this path will pretty quickly encounter some complications: what do you do if your existing customer on the old platform wants to buy a new product that only exists on your new CPQ? How do you quote them? How do you co-term those things?
If you’re small enough, you may be able to run two parallel systems for some period of time. But once you hit a critical mass of people, not having a full cutover won’t work because it will just create confusion.
CPQ Implementation Best Practices
Of course, the smoothest and quickest implementations are the ones that are best planned.
This starts with sourcing the best product. While scoping out vendors, make sure that you ask about implementation timelines — in addition to all the other important questions around system functionality, configuration, and usability. Even better? Speak directly to a current customer with a similar business use case to your own to get the real deal on how long implementation takes.
Once you’ve decided on a CPQ vendor, there are multiple stages to implementations, of course — from information gathering to assessing the readiness of your data to actual go live. As the saying goes, even the best laid plans can run into some snags along the way. But the closer you try to hew to implementation estimates and the more you can prepare ahead of time, the smoother the process will go and the more likely you will be to come in at (or under) schedule.
Putting Your CPQ to Work for Your Business
As Matt Darrow, Co-Founder & CEO of Vivun (and Subskribe customer), so aptly noted about the implementation process: “So much of the challenge is lengthy deployments, go lives that never happen, systems that are too brittle to go and change."
But with the right CPQ product, realistic expectations, steady prep, and fixation on data quality, you’re set for success and will soon reap the rewards of having a CPQ work for your business.
Learn more about best practices for CPQ implementation — and everything else you’ve ever wanted to know about CPQs — in our CPQ resource library.
