What is CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote)?
CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) software helps companies configure products, calculate accurate prices, and generate quotes. CPQ is especially useful when products have many variants, rules, options, or customer-specific prices that make manual quoting difficult.
A CPQ system brings product rules, pricing logic, and quote generation into a single process. For example, a sales rep can configure a technically valid solution, calculate the correct price, and generate a quote without first sending the configuration to engineering or calculating the price manually in Excel.
CPQ typically becomes relevant when a sales rep can no longer determine on their own whether a product combination can be manufactured, what it should cost, or which components are required — without help from engineering, Excel spreadsheets, or the ERP system.
Gartner defines CPQ software as tools that help sales teams configure products and services, set prices, and generate quotes — often integrated with CRM and ERP.
Source: Gartner
Reference — hurtigt overblik
CPQ in 60 seconds
| CPQ stands for | Configure, Price, Quote |
|---|---|
| Purpose | From customer need to correct configuration, price, and quote |
| Used especially by | Companies with complex or configurable products |
| Typical users | Sales, engineering, dealers, and customers |
| Automates | Product selection, rules, prices, discounts, approvals, and quotes |
| Typically integrates with | CRM, ERP, PIM, CAD, and e-commerce |
| CPQ is not | CRM, ERP, or just a product configurator |
What do Configure, Price, and Quote mean?
The sales rep or customer selects product attributes, options, and components. The CPQ system enforces rules so only technically valid combinations can be chosen. The result is a valid product configuration — often with an associated bill of materials (BOM).
The system calculates the price based on base prices, options, customer-specific prices, discounts, currency, and market. Pricing logic can pull data from the ERP or be maintained in CPQ — depending on your architecture.
CPQ generates a quote document with product description, specifications, prices, and commercial terms. Output can be PDF, Word, Excel, or data for CRM/ERP.
How CPQ works
CUSTOMER NEED
CONFIGURE
What can the customer buy?
PRICE
What should the solution cost?
QUOTE
How is the solution and quote presented?
ORDER
CRM
Who are we selling to?
CPQ
What can we sell, and at what price?
ERP
How do we handle the order and delivery?
A concrete CPQ example
Imagine a manufacturer of industrial ventilation systems. A customer specifies airflow, installation environment, dimensions, voltage, controls, accessories, and market.
Kundens behov → Configure → Price → Quote
Customer specification
- Required airflow: 8,000 m³/h
- Outdoor installation in a cold-climate region
- Limited space in the plant room
- 400 V motor and digital controls
- Fire dampers and sound attenuation as options
- Delivery to the UK market
Configure – what the system determines
- Which unit sizes can deliver 8,000 m³/h
- Compatible motors and control units
- Valid accessories and fire-safety requirements
- Regulatory requirements for outdoor installation below -10 °C
Rule examples:
IF installation = outdoor AND temperature < -10 °C THEN heating package = required IF motor = 400 V THEN control unit must support 400 V Price – what the system calculates
- Base price for the selected unit
- Options (controls, fire damper, sound attenuation)
- Customer-specific discount
- Currency and market
- Margin and approval if margin is low
Base unit: £185,000 · Controls: +£12,500 · Fire damper: +£8,400 · Customer discount 8%: −£16,392 · Quote price: £189,508 (example — not an actual customer price)
Quote – what the customer receives
- Product description and technical specifications
- Price overview and commercial terms
- Drawings or product visualisation
- Bills of materials for production and procurement
How does a CPQ process work?
Typical quoting process without CPQ
The exact workflow varies from company to company, but the pattern is familiar in many manufacturing environments:
Customer
Sales
Excel/email
Engineering
Revisions
Pricing
Word/PDF
Customer
ERP
Typical quoting process with CPQ
Engineering does not disappear — the role changes:
Customer need
CPQ
- Guided configuration
- Product rules
- Pricing
- Approvals
- Documents
Quote
ERP
Engineering defines and maintains product knowledge and handles cases that genuinely require engineer-to-order work. Routine configurable orders can increasingly be handled directly by sales.
What does a CPQ system automate?
| Task | Traditional | With CPQ |
|---|---|---|
| Product selection | Sales experience | Guided selling |
| Technical validation | Engineering | Product rules |
| Configuration | Excel/ERP | Configuration engine |
| Price calculation | Excel/price lists | Pricing engine |
| Discounts | Manual checks | Pricing rules |
| Approvals | Workflow | |
| Quotes | Word/Excel | Automatic generation |
| BOM | Engineering | From configuration |
| Order data | Manual entry | ERP integration |
When does a company need CPQ?
CPQ is relevant when the sales process depends on product knowledge that today is scattered across the organisation:
- Sales reps rely on engineering to validate routine quotes
- Price calculation requires Excel spreadsheets
- Only a few experienced employees know all product combinations
- Invalid combinations regularly reach engineering or production
- Quotes take hours or days to prepare
- Different sales reps calculate different prices for the same solution
- Product knowledge lives in people's heads rather than in systems
- Dealers need access to product configuration
- The company has thousands or millions of theoretically possible product combinations
- Quotes require technical documentation, drawings, bills of materials, or calculations
- Sales must combine data from CRM, ERP, PIM, and spreadsheets
When do you not need CPQ?
CPQ is not the answer to every sales challenge. It often delivers limited value when:
- Products are simple SKUs with no configuration
- Prices are fixed and the same for all customers
- There are almost no dependencies between options
- Quotes contain minimal technical information
- Standard CRM or ERP quoting functionality already covers the process
Recognising this early saves both implementation time and internal expectation-setting.
Is CPQ relevant for your business?
See which signs typically indicate a company is ready for CPQ — and when a CPQ system is probably unnecessary.
Take the CPQ assessment →Configure: Product configuration and rules
The Configure part of CPQ is about translating product knowledge into structured attributes, options, and rules. In practice, you model your product families as a decision tree where each choice can affect later choices.
Product modelling is the process of making your company's product knowledge machine-readable — so rules, constraints, and dependencies can be maintained and reused across sales, dealers, and channels.
Industrial product models can contain hundreds or thousands of interacting configuration rules. This is where CPQ differs from a simple options catalogue.
- Attributes and options – e.g. airflow, material, voltage, control type
- Rules and constraints – technical validity, dependencies between components
- Guided selling – the system guides the user through relevant questions
- Needs-based configuration – the customer states a requirement (e.g. airflow), the system suggests solutions
- Bills of materials (BOM) – the configuration generates component lists for production
- Visualisation – 2D/3D view of the selected solution
- Configure-to-order vs. engineer-to-order – CPQ handles the configurable; engineering handles the unique
Rules in practice
IF installation = outdoor AND temperature < -10 °C THEN heating package = required IF motor = 400 V THEN control unit must support 400 V IF airflow > 6,000 m³/h THEN frame = heavy-duty Price: Automatic and consistent pricing
The Price part ensures the configured solution is priced correctly and consistently. Pricing logic can be as complex as product rules — especially when there are customer-specific prices, market differentiation, and approval workflows.
- Base prices and option prices
- Price matrices and formulas
- Customer-specific price agreements
- Currencies and markets
- Discounts and campaigns
- Cost price, margin, and approval workflows
- ERP price lists as a data source
In McKinsey's analysis "The Power of Pricing" (2003), for larger companies, a 1% improvement in realised price — at unchanged volume — typically had a markedly greater effect on operating profit than comparable improvements in volume or costs. That underlines why pricing discipline in the CPQ process matters economically.
Source: McKinsey
An air handling unit at £185,000 with add-ons for £20,900 and an 8% customer discount gives a quote price of £189,508 — calculated automatically from your pricing rules, not manually in Excel.
Quote: Automatic quote generation
The Quote part produces the document or data package the customer and internal organisation need. A CPQ quote is much more than a price — it is the structured output of the entire configuration and pricing process.
- Commercial quote
- Technical specifications
- Images, drawings, and visualisations
- Bills of materials (BOM) and component lists
- Order data for ERP
- Production data
One configuration can create multiple outputs — commercial quote, technical specifications, visualisations, BOM, order data, and production data — without repeating the work manually.
Quote contents
- 1 Cover page
- 2 Product overview
- 3 Pricing
- 4 Terms and conditions
- 5 Documentation
Airmaster A/S
Branded quotes from configuration
Pages
62
Products
2
Sections
5
Format
CPQ vs. product configurator, CRM, and ERP
CPQ is often confused with adjacent software categories. The difference lies in which problem each system solves:
| System | Primary responsibility |
|---|---|
| CRM | Customer, opportunity, and sales activity |
| CPQ | Configuration, pricing, and quoting |
| ERP | Items, orders, inventory, finance, and production |
| PIM | Product information and media |
| CAD | Engineering geometry and design |
| Product configurator | Primarily configuration; can be part of CPQ |
CPQ vs. CRM
A CRM records and tracks customer relationships. CPQ executes the quoting process within those relationships. CRM tells you who to sell to; CPQ tells you what to offer and at what price.
CPQ vs. ERP
CPQ is specialised in the technical and commercial decision process around configurable quotes. ERP is the broader transaction and resource system that handles items, finance, inventory, production, and orders, among other things. ERP can hold quote and price data, but CPQ focuses on the guided configuration and quoting process before the order.
CPQ vs. product configurator
A product configurator focuses on selecting and validating a product variant. CPQ typically includes product configuration but connects it with pricing, commercial rules, approvals, and quote generation. A product configurator can therefore be part of a CPQ system, or exist as a standalone system.
How is CPQ integrated with business systems?
CPQ typically sits between sales channels and backend systems. Architecture varies, and modern CPQ systems do not need to be the master database for everything:
CRM / website / dealer portal
CPQ
ERP / PIM / CAD
Integration with ERP ensures prices, items, and order data stay consistent. CRM integration links quotes to opportunities. PIM provides product descriptions and media. CAD can supply technical specifications where product design is central.
The important part is defining which system owns which data — product structure, prices, customer data, and configuration rules.
- Customers
- Opportunities
- Products
- Prices
- Discounts
- Product attributes
- Descriptions
- Images and documents
- Classifications
- Relationships
- Variants
- Rules
- Quotes
- Line items
- Orders
- Quotes
- Bills of materials (BOMs)
- Configurations
Who uses CPQ?
Sales
Configuration, pricing, and quotes.
Technical sales
Complex solutions and exceptions.
Engineering
Product rules and engineer-to-order (ETO).
Product management
Product structure and options.
Finance
Pricing, margin, and approvals.
Dealers
Self-service quoting.
Customers
Digital product configuration.
CPQ in manufacturing companies
Manufacturing companies with configurable products are the core target audience for CPQ. CPQ relevance often depends on the production model — including configure-to-order (CTO), make-to-order (MTO), and engineer-to-order (ETO):
CTO, MTO, and ETO — production models and CPQ
| Model | CPQ relevance |
|---|---|
| Standard SKU | Limited |
| Configure-to-order (CTO) | Very high |
| Make-to-order (MTO) | High |
| Engineer-to-order (ETO) | CPQ automates the standardisable part |
CPQ does not necessarily replace engineering in engineer-to-order businesses. It can reduce the part of the process that requires design work by automating known, rule-based choices.
Waste handling equipment (Bramidan)
- Problem
- Complex product combinations, market variations, and manual price calculation made quoting slow and dependent on a few key people.
- CPQ
- Configuration with product rules, market filtering, lease calculation, and dynamic pricing.
- Resultat
- According to the company, they can now prepare quotes on complex products in minutes rather than through the previous process.
Garage doors (Lindab)
- Problem
- Tens of thousands of product variants and a need for consistent price and BOM across end users and dealers.
- CPQ
- Configurator with advanced pricing and detailed bills of materials.
- Resultat
- The solution is used by end users and dealers with validated configurations and automatic pricing.
Welding robots (Migatronic)
- Problem
- Many technical constraints and a need for both internal sales and digital lead generation.
- CPQ
- CoWelder configurator with 1,000+ configuration rules and shared product logic.
- Resultat
- Used internally by sales and as a configurator on the website.
What we have learned from CPQ implementations
After CPQ implementations at manufacturing companies with configurable products, we typically see these patterns:
- The hard part of CPQ is rarely the user interface — it is structuring product knowledge
- Product rules are often scattered across ERP, Excel, documentation, and experienced employees
- Trying to model all edge cases in phase one makes implementation unnecessarily difficult
- Start with the product families that have the highest volume
- Clearly define which system owns product information, prices, and customer data
- Separate configure-to-order from cases that genuinely require engineer-to-order work
- Involve sales and engineering together when configuration logic is defined
What results can CPQ deliver?
CPQ creates value through concrete mechanisms — not through generic promises of "revolutionary sales". When quoting work moves from Excel and email to structured rules, time is freed for customer contact: according to Salesforce State of Sales, sales reps spend on average only around 28% of their time on actual selling — the rest goes to administration and preparation. For companies with complex quotes, configuration, pricing, and document production can be part of that administrative work.
Source: Salesforce State of Sales, 2024
- Shorter quoting process and fewer manual handoffs
- Consistent product rules across sales, dealers, and channels
- Uniform pricing and fewer pricing errors
- Less routine engineering involvement in standard quotes
- Scalable dealer and customer self-service
- Structured quote and order data for ERP
From internal sales tool to omnichannel CPQ
CRM → Sales → CPQ → Quote
Shared CPQ engine (product logic)
The same product and pricing logic can be reused across channels — so customers, dealers, and internal sales reps work from the same rules.
67% of B2B buyers prefer a buying experience without a sales rep, according to Gartner — which increases the relevance of digital self-service channels, including in complex B2B purchases, when product and pricing logic is centralised in CPQ.
Source: Gartner, 2026
How do you implement CPQ?
Implementation complexity depends far more on product complexity, data quality, and integrations than on the number of users. A typical approach:
Preparation
- Map the existing quoting process
- Select initial product families (highest volume)
- Structure attributes and options
Modelling
- Document rules and constraints
- Model pricing
- Define integrations and data ownership
Delivery
- Build quote templates
- Test with historical configurations
- Pilot with sales users
- Expand to more products and channels
Start narrow. Trying to model all edge cases in phase one makes implementation unnecessarily heavy.
10 questions before choosing a CPQ system
- 1 Can the system model our actual product rules?
- 2 Who can maintain the rules after implementation?
- 3 Can pricing be maintained without developers?
- 4 How does it integrate with our ERP?
- 5 Where should master product data live?
- 6 Can it generate the required BOM/order data?
- 7 Can sales, dealers, and customers use different interfaces?
- 8 Can it handle multiple markets, languages, and currencies?
- 9 How are exceptions and engineer-to-order handled?
- 10 What happens when our products or prices change?
Evaluating CPQ systems?
Download the CPQ requirements specification
A practical checklist of requirements for product configuration, pricing, integrations, documents, administration, security, and implementation — for comparing CPQ systems.
Get the PDF version (English) by entering your details. You can also read the full requirements specification free online.
AI and CPQ
AI in CPQ is not about replacing product rules with guesses. It is about accelerating the work around the structured core:
- Assist with building configuration rules
- Translate natural-language product knowledge into structured logic
- Suggest configurations based on customer requirements
- Extract requirements from emails and documents
- Assist sales reps during configuration
- Generate proposal text
- Identify missing information
- Analyse historical configurations
Important distinction
AI can interpret: "The customer needs an outdoor unit for approximately 8,000 m³/h." But deterministic configuration rules must ultimately validate whether the selected motor, dimensions, controls, and accessories form a technically valid product.
CPQ should not necessarily replace sales reps. For complex products, the strongest model combines digital configuration and self-service with expert assistance where customers need contextual guidance.
Learn about AI and CPQ at Mercura →Frequently asked questions about CPQ
- How much does CPQ software cost?
- Pricing varies with product complexity, number of users, integration requirements, and implementation scope. Most vendors offer project-based implementation plus ongoing licensing. Contact vendors with your specific product and process description for a realistic estimate.
- What is the difference between CPQ and a product configurator?
- A product configurator focuses on selecting and validating a product variant. CPQ typically includes configuration plus pricing, commercial rules, approvals, and quote generation.
- What is the difference between CPQ and CRM?
- CRM manages customer relationships and opportunities. CPQ handles the technical and commercial quoting process — configuration, pricing, and quote generation.
- Can CPQ integrate with ERP?
- Yes. CPQ typically integrates with ERP for items, prices, inventory, and order transfer. See Mercura's integration options for examples.
- Can CPQ generate bills of materials (BOM)?
- Yes. CPQ can generate bills of materials based on the selected configuration — either directly in CPQ or as data for ERP.
- Is CPQ only relevant for manufacturing companies?
- No, but manufacturing companies with configurable products are the typical core audience. CPQ is also used by distributors and companies with complex service or solution packages.
- How long does a CPQ implementation take?
- A focused pilot can take a few weeks to a couple of months. Full rollout across multiple product families and channels typically takes longer — depending on product complexity and data quality rather than number of users.
- Can customers or dealers configure products themselves?
- Yes. Many CPQ implementations include dealer portals or customer-facing configurators with the same underlying product rules as internal sales.
- Can AI be used in CPQ?
- Yes — to assist with rules, requirement extraction, and sales support. Deterministic product rules should still validate technical validity. Learn more under AI and CPQ.
- When does CPQ not make sense?
- When products are simple SKUs with fixed prices, few option dependencies, and minimal technical quote content. In those cases, CRM or ERP often covers the need.
From understanding to evaluation
Do you recognise your quoting process in this description? The next steps are usually to assess CPQ relevance and gather requirements before comparing vendors.
See CPQ with your own product
Do you have a product or quoting process you would like to test CPQ against? We can start from your own rules, prices, and outputs and show how the process could be modelled.
See CPQ with your product →