New Nucleus Research: Legacy CPQ Systems Are Leaking 4% of Your Revenue

A new October 2025 market analysis from Nucleus Research quantifies the significant financial drains caused by legacy Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) systems. The report, “The opportunity cost of inaction,” provides third-party validation for the daily frustrations that Revenue Operations Managers and GTM Systems Stakeholders face: revenue leakage, quoting errors, and disconnected processes are not just operational headaches; they are measurable drags on profitability. This summary breaks down the key findings and what they mean for your technology stack.

This article summarizes key findings from the Nucleus Research report ‘The opportunity cost of inaction: State of the CPQ market 2025′ published in October 2025. All research and data are the property of Nucleus Research. The full report can be accessed directly from Nucleus Research.

The Core Argument: Inaction Creates a Competitive Disadvantage

The central theme of the Nucleus report is that the gap between modern and legacy CPQ platforms is widening, with tangible financial consequences. In contrast, companies investing in modern CPQ are reporting substantial, quantifiable improvements that build a powerful business case:

• Quoting errors reduced by 20% to 30%: This means fewer costly downstream errors for RevOps and more selling time for sales reps. ROI Calculation: If your company processes 10,000 quotes a year and 10% have errors that cost $500 each to fix, a 20% reduction saves $100,000 annually in operational costs.
• Approval cycles shortened by 15% to 20%: This directly accelerates deal velocity, helping sales leaders hit quarterly targets. ROI Calculation: Shortening a 30-day sales cycle by 15% (4.5 days) can increase selling capacity and pull revenue into the current quarter.
• Margins lifted by 2% to 5%: Enforcing pricing discipline helps protect deal profitability. ROI Calculation: For a company with $100 million in revenue, a 2% margin lift adds $2 million directly to the bottom line.
• Revenue leakage cut by 2% to 4%: This is found money from ensuring all quoted services are billed correctly. ROI Calculation: On $100 million in revenue, cutting leakage by just 2% recovers $2 million in lost revenue annually.

The report identifies four primary challenges where legacy systems create these significant operational and technical burdens:

1. Product Complexity & Technical Debt: Legacy systems’ rigid, hard-coded rules create a constant maintenance burden and risk of system failure, a major source of technical debt for any GTM Systems Stakeholder.
2. Pricing Volatility & Inconsistent Data: Static pricing engines can’t keep up with market changes, forcing manual updates that create constant fire drills for Revenue Operations Managers and lead to quoting errors and margin erosion.
3. Disconnected Processes & Integration Failures: Siloed legacy CPQ requires fragile, point-to-point integrations that frequently break, forcing GTM Systems teams to troubleshoot sync failures while RevOps manually reconciles data.
4. Slow Deployment & Heavy IT Reliance: The real cost of outdated platforms is the ongoing dependency on IT. Every developer cycle spent on a minor pricing update is a cycle not spent on strategic initiatives, trapping technical resources in a reactive role.

How Modern CPQ Platforms are Solving Today’s Core Challenges

Nucleus highlights four key areas of technological advancement where modern CPQ vendors are delivering the most value.

1. Stronger, AI-Powered Configuration Engines

Modern AI-powered engines validate complex builds in real-time, integrating with PLM and ERP systems to pull in live product data. A successful deployment hinges on a user interface that is intuitive enough for sales teams to adopt without extensive retraining.

• The Impact: This reduces quoting errors by up to 30% and shortens the time-to-quote on complex deals by as much as 25%.

2. Real-Time Pricing Intelligence & Automated Governance

Dynamic pricing engines connect to multiple data sources (CRM, ERP, market indexes) to recommend optimal prices. Crucially, they include automated guardrails that empower sales reps to quote confidently, reducing the approval bottlenecks that kill deal momentum while ensuring RevOps can enforce discounting policies.

• The Impact: In manufacturing, for example, a company with $100M in revenue could see an additional $2-5M in gross margin from better pricing discipline, helping sales leaders hit annual targets.

3. End-to-End Revenue Integration

Modern platforms use a unified data model and robust APIs to ensure data from a finalized quote flows seamlessly to create contracts and trigger billing schedules. This eliminates the need for GTM Systems teams to maintain multiple fragile connections and eradicates the manual handoffs that cause errors for RevOps.

• The Impact: Integrated workflows cut revenue leakage by up to 4%, speed up invoicing by 10-15%, and lift renewal rates by as much as 7%.

4. More Capable Low-Code Tools to Empower Business Users

Low-code tools empower business analysts and RevOps teams to safely manage workflows and pricing rules themselves. This directly tackles the tension between business users demanding immediate changes and the technical constraints of a rigid system.

• The Impact: Shortening deployment times by 20% and cutting IT reliance by 30% frees up developer cycles from tactical fixes, allowing them to be reinvested in strategic innovation projects that drive long-term business value.

Putting the Research into Practice: Market Examples

The trends identified by Nucleus Research are visible in the strategic approaches of key market players. Organizations evaluating their options can see these different philosophies in action:

• Salesforce Revenue Cloud: Represents the large, ecosystem-centric platform, often focusing on the End-to-End Revenue Integration within its own cloud, but can present the Slow Deployment & Heavy IT Reliance challenges mentioned in the report for complex use cases.
• DealHub: Exemplifies the modern, orchestrated approach focused on More Capable Low-Code Tools and Real-Time Pricing Intelligence to deliver faster time-to-value and empower RevOps teams.
• Conga CPQ: Offers a powerful, enterprise-grade suite that excels in Stronger Configuration Engines for complex product catalogs, though it can also require significant implementation resources, reflecting the trade-offs between capability and agility.

For detailed, objective reviews of these and other platforms, see our CPQ Vendor Comparison Hub.

Key Takeaway for Decision-Makers

The Nucleus Research report concludes that CPQ has evolved from a tactical tool to a strategic enabler of growth. Operationally, this means the evaluation criteria have fundamentally changed.

• A VP of Sales must find a platform that balances deal speed with the control required to protect margins.
• A Revenue Operations Manager must build a solid business case by quantifying the cost of inaction, calculating current revenue leakage, error costs, and lost margin.
• A GTM Systems Stakeholder must conduct a rigorous technical evaluation, assessing API documentation, security certifications, and data model flexibility.

The data shows that modern platforms deliver measurable ROI within the first year. Delaying modernization is actively accepting a competitive disadvantage, translating to tangible risks like losing a key deal because a competitor’s approval process was 48 hours faster.

For leaders building this business case or creating a vendor scorecard, the full Nucleus Research report provides the necessary third-party validation. Use its framework—focusing on Configuration, Pricing, Integration, and Low-Code—to structure your evaluation and ensure you are asking the right questions.

The full analysis, “The opportunity cost of inaction: State of the CPQ market 2025,” is available for download from Nucleus Research.