Vendavo CPQ Overview

Vendavo CPQ is built for enterprise B2B sales teams selling highly configurable products. Its software services are custom-made to accommodate the demands of some of the world’s largest manufacturers and distributors. By using its quoting tool, multinational B2B corporations can realize substantial financial gains and significantly boost their profit margins. By leveraging advanced insights into customer behavior and adopting pricing strategies based on market trends, manufacturers and distributors using Vendavo enjoy enhanced sales effectiveness and customer satisfaction.

Vendavo’s advanced analytics and expertise in the industries they operate have led to collective yearly margin enhancements exceeding $2.5 billion for firms across various sectors, including chemicals, distribution, high-tech, and manufacturing. Specifically, Vendavo predominantly caters to wholesale distribution, packaging, shipping and logistics, oil and gas, pharmaceutical distribution, building products, aftermarket manufacturing, healthcare, and medical device sectors.

Vendavo CPQ is a configure, price, quote tool that’s part of the larger Vendavo sales and pricing optimization product suite. B2B sales teams use Vendavo to generate and deliver accurate quotes for highly configurable products and manage complex pricing scenarios, all while maintaining control over margin and profitability. High-level decision-makers use its data to optimize their profit margins and drive better overall company performance. And customer success teams take Vendavo CPQ’s feedback to identify upsell/cross-sell opportunities and pinpoint at-risk customers.

Features include:

• Visual configuration
• Guided selling
• Branded proposal generation
• Approval automation
• Pricing analytics
• Risk alerts
• Upselling and cross-selling

Visual configuration and quoting. Vendavo’s product configurator shows sellers how to put together complex products by providing them with a visual representation of the product’s structure and dependencies. That way, sales reps know which options are compatible, and they can show customers what the product will look like when it’s finished. Branded quote and proposal templates bring your marketing assets, product information, and legal agreements together to create a consistent brand image and customer experience.

Advanced pricing and discounting logic. Vendavo’s platform gives you the tools to quote for any sort of situation — customer-specific agreements, time-bound promotions, bundled sales, and more. The platform simplifies pricing and discounts into one agreement, meaning you can quote across a wide product and service portfolio (and expand into new servitized offerings over time) without worrying about the platform’s flexibility.

Guided selling. Vendavo’s guided selling works a little differently from most — it’s more deeply integrated into the platform and improves based on data, rather than solely relying on your product rules and configuration requirements. Like most, it leads reps through structured workflows and filters out incompatible options. By asking targeted questions, the system identifies customer needs and recommends suitable products or services. But the AI-powered Sales Optimizer leverages your own pipeline data to provide actionable, customer-specific cross-sell and upsell recommendations directly within your CPQ system.

Approval automation. Use Vendavo to eliminate manual approvals and speed up the sales cycle. Create basic rules that trigger notifications for members of your deal desk when sections of quotes require special review. 

Pricing analytics. During the quoting process, price waterfalls embedded in Vendavo’s CPQ software show you how discounts, price agreements, markups, and other factors affect the final net price and overall pocket margin of a line item or quote. When you’re calculating prices, Vendavo’s Ensemble AI uses multiple algorithms to display suggested prices and insights for reps, right within CPQ. In turn, this helps them avoid bad deals, protect their margins, and speed up quoting by reducing approval complexity.

Risk alerts. Insights into customer behavior tell Sales and Customer Success which customers are at risk of churning, so your team members can proactively address their concerns (and potentially upsell them on new or existing products).

Rebates and channel sales incentives. You can include incentive programs, such as rebates, in your quotes and proposals by integrating Vendavo’s Rebate & Channel Manager with Intelligent CPQ. With this, manufacturers and distributors can cover the entire process, from deal creation and accruals to payment generation and end-to-end reporting. The platform supports a wide range of rebate types, including traditional channel programs, volume or revenue tier-based incentives, and commission-based structures.

For large manufacturers and distributors with complex quoting and sales processes, there are plenty of reasons to use Vendavo. In addition to a considerably faster time-to-quote and a streamlined overall sales cycle, the sales and product analytics Vendavo CPQ provides add significant value.

The benefits of using Vendavo include:

• Streamlined, visualized, and automated pricing waterfalls and agreements ensure your sales team has the best price for each quote as quickly as possible.
• 100% accurate quotes empowered by admin-configured pricing and product rules.
• Increase sales velocity with guided selling, automated approval workflows.
• Quickly spot trends and identify opportunities to optimize margins and add more value to customers with real-time pricing analytics and risk alerts.
• Total visibility into your sales pipeline, pricing decisions, and customer behavior, which drives strategic decision-making.
• Customers enjoy a better buying experience when they work with your sales reps, who can answer their questions quickly and efficiently.

Vendavo CPQ is designed to address the challenges manufacturers, distributors, and consumer goods companies face when they quote and sell complex products. Its intuitive configurator, high degree of flexibility, and enterprise-grade analytics engine make it an ideal solution for large B2B businesses selling physical goods.

Manufacturing

Value-based pricing strategies: The platform enables companies to analyze historical data, forecast future trends, and implement value-based pricing strategies. For instance, a global manufacturer with over 500,000 SKUs used Vendavo to execute a value-based pricing strategy, creating a price waterfall and standardizing price updates, which led to increased profitability and customer satisfaction.

AI-powered deal price optimization: Vendavo’s Deal Price Optimizer leverages artificial intelligence to provide data-driven pricing guidance. Manufactured products’ profitability varies based on input costs, and the platform delivers optimal pricing recommendations by analyzing historical data and market trends. This significantly reduces companies’ reliance on manual calculations and intuition when coming up with prices to quote customers.

Multi-level sales approval workflows: When manufacturing highly configurable products, like heavy equipment or industrial components, the end product will need approval from several departments before it reaches the customer. Within Vendavo Intelligent CPQ, you can create approval workflows that automatically route approvals to the right people for point-and-click collaboration.

Wholesale Distribution

Dynamic pricing management with Vendavo Pricepoint: Vendavo Pricepoint enables distributors to execute straightforward, scalable price management across their organization. This tool allows for rapid updates to pricing across numerous product catalogs, ensuring that sales teams have access to the most current pricing information. For example, a leading electrical distributor used Vendavo to manage prices and discounts and renew customer terms, resulting in more efficient pricing operations and improved customer satisfaction.

Optimized upsells and cross-sells: With Vendavo CPQ, distributors can easily identify and recommend complementary products to customers, even across large product portfolios and geographic regions. By analyzing customer data and purchasing patterns, the platform suggests complementary products that align with customer needs, thereby increasing average order value and enhancing customer satisfaction.

Streamlined B2B buying: Vendavo’s Intelligent CPQ solution can help you manage configurations and generate dynamic proposals when dealing with a vast array of SKUs and diverse customer requirements. With its user-friendly interface, sales reps can easily input customer requirements and generate accurate quotes in real time, for a streamlined buying process and shorter sales cycle.

Consumer Goods

Price segmentation: Vendavo helps you implement sophisticated price segmentation strategies, allowing you to tailor pricing based on various customer attributes and market conditions. This dynamic approach helps you capture maximum value by aligning prices with customers’ willingness to pay.

Efficient pricing and promotion management: Compiling and analyzing pricing data can be a daunting task for consumer goods companies because of the sheer number of different SKUs and promos. Vendavo’s CPQ solution helps you manage complex pricing and discounting structures with ease, making it easier to manage and track the results of your promotional campaigns.

Value Acceleration: Vendavo emphasizes rapid and sustainable revenue growth. When you work with a member of their Value Acceleration team, they’re doing more than just helping you implement CPQ. They’re helping you implement the processes, behaviors, and pricing strategies that’ll help you maximize sales revenue. Discounts, cross-sells, channel mix optimization, price increase planning, and SKU rationalization are among the many factors contributing to faster time-to-market and overall higher growth.

Vendavo CPQ and its add-on sales and pricing automation tools are only available with a custom, quote-based plan. For pricing details, book a call with their sales team directly.

Although Vendavo is a solid manufacturing CPQ, there are options worth considering. Depending on the size of your business or level of product complexity, you may want to evaluate one of these Vendavo alternatives.

Top Vendavo CPQ Alternatives

Zilliant CPQ

Zilliant CPQ is tailored to the complexities of modern manufacturing. Strengthened by acquiring In Mind Cloud, Zilliant delivers a unified platform that simplifies product configuration with intuitive 3D/2D visualization, guided selling, and automated rules to eliminate errors. It seamlessly integrates with systems like SAP and Salesforce, streamlining workflows and ensuring data accuracy. Zilliant’s expertise in pricing optimization enhances sales processes by providing real-time pricing and dynamic costing for accurate, market-responsive quotes. With interactive visualizations and self-service options, Zilliant CPQ empowers manufacturers to drive sales success.

XaitCPQ

Manufacturers seeking an alternative to Vendavo CPQ should consider XaitCPQ, a robust solution that streamlines sales processes and drives efficiency. While Vendavo excels in managing complex product sales, XaitCPQ stands out with its focus on guided selling, channel integration, and automation. It empowers manufacturers to configure product bundles, automate quotes, and connect seamlessly with distributors, accelerating the quote-to-cash cycle and enhancing sales performance. Key features like real-time collaboration for quote approvals, guided selling workflows for upselling and cross-selling, automatic error-free pricing, compliance with configurable business rules, and the ability to generate Bills of Materials (BOMs) make XaitCPQ a comprehensive and reliable choice for manufacturing sales teams.

FPX CPQ

FPX CPQ stands out among manufacturing CPQ platforms. Designed for sophisticated omnichannel selling and buying processes, it offers automatic quote, order, and BOM generation. It also includes comprehensive product and pricing rule management, seamless integration with front- and back-end business systems, the ability to provide instant budgetary quotes for project planning, and dynamic pricing that adjusts to market conditions and customer segments. For larger manufacturers managing multiple supplier relationships, FPX could be your best bet.

Infor CPQ

Infor CPQ enables sales teams to create intricate product and service bundles with tailored add-ons, ensuring precise quotes that meet unique customer needs. Seamlessly integrating with the Infor CloudSuite CRM platform, Infor CPQ delivers industry-specific functionalities, robust security, and scalable capabilities. It provides advanced features like real-time 3D visualization, parametric 2D modeling, and integration with Infor Birst® for actionable sales insights. Its robust rules engine also ensures accurate configurations, while production-aware quoting aligns inventory and lead times for efficient manufacturing. 

Epicor CPQ

Epicor CPQ prioritizes ease of use and seamless integration with production systems. It streamlines the quote-to-manufacture process with intuitive visual configurators (2D, 3D, and AR) that enhance the customer experience. Epicor’s advanced pricing rules handle intricate pricing models, ensuring accurate, profitable quotes. It also automatically generates precise Bills of Materials (BOMs) and CAD files directly from configurations, minimizing errors and speeding up production. With built-in CPQ analytics and a user-friendly interface, Epicor CPQ helps manufacturers engage buyers, simplify workflows, and accelerate their sales cycle.

Out of 33 reviews, Vendavo CPQ has a rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars on Gartner Peer Insights. In their reviews, users note the software is intuitive and easy to learn. However, some reviewers note that support and implementation can be challenging.

The reviewers and customer demographics are as follows:

Reviewer’s Company Size

• <50M: 19%
• $50M-$1B: 50%
• $1B-$10B: 22%
• Over $10B: 3%
• Gov’t/PS/Ed: 6%

Reviewer’s Industry

• Manufacturing: 69%
• Services (non-Government): 8%
• IT Services: 6%
• Consumer Goods: 6%
• Other: 11%

Reviewer’s Deployment Region

• North America: 86%
• Europe, Middle East, and Africa: 6%
• Asia/Pacific: 6%
• Latin America: 3%

Gartner Peer Insights affirms that Vendavo CPQ is highly customizable and supports complex pricing, making it an industry-leading product.

Andrew Parker

Andrew is a professional copywriter with expertise in creating content focused on business-to-business (B2B) software. He conducts research and produces articles that provide valuable insights and information to his readers.

Vendavo CPQ Overview

• 1Why this product is good
• 2Product Details
• 3What are the advantages of using Vendavo CPQ?
• 4What industries are CPQ solutions best suited for?
• 5Prices
• 6Is there anyone else out there?
• 7Valuable Insight From Real Customers
• 8FAQs