CPQ, pricing and RFP software

Getting the quote right, and answering the buyer's request for proposal

Back to the Pune company that sells payroll software to hospitals, from Market Segments 14.2 to 14.4. The Chennai hospital is ready to buy. At the end of a business-to-business (B2B) sale like this, there are two documents.

The quote

It has to get the configuration, the price, the discount and the terms right. The configuration is the exact set of options the customer is buying, and many products have thousands of options. The terms cover things like how long the contract runs and when the customer pays. The price also has to follow a pricing policy that the finance team will audit.

The proposal

for the larger deals. Here, the buyer sends a request for proposal (RFP): a forty-page questionnaire, security review and all. Imagine a large hospital chain in Bengaluru sending one to the payroll company. Every question has to be answered accurately and consistently, and by Friday.

This Market Segment is the software for both documents, in that order. It is a small Market Segment with a large Indian share, because the RFP-response tools in particular are built in Bengaluru and Kolkata.

The quote must get the configuration, price, discount and terms right under an audited pricing policy, and larger deals also need a proposal answering the buyer's forty-page request for proposal.

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

After the quote comes the contract. (More on it in Market Segment 43.1, Contract lifecycle management (CLM) software, in Industry Vertical 43, Legaltech.) Creating the document and signing it are covered in Market Segment 10.4, Document processing, management and e-signature software (in Industry Vertical 10, ERP and business automation). One company from there, Conga, also appears here.

After the quote comes the contract, covered in Market Segment 43.1, and then creating the document and signing it, covered in Market Segment 10.4.

This Market Segment has two sub-segments. The first covers the quote and the price. The second covers the proposal and the RFP.

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The quote and the price
The proposal and the RFP

The quote and the price

Configure-price-quote (CPQ), pricing for B2B sales, and guidance on each deal

Back to the Chennai hospital. The salesperson has to send a quote with the right modules, the right number of employees and the right discount. The software in this sub-segment is called configure-price-quote, or CPQ: it configures the product, prices it and produces the quote.

Vendavo

with engineers in Bengaluru, sells price optimisation to manufacturers and distributors. It analyses millions of past sales to tell a salesperson what price a given customer will accept for a given product. It also sells a CPQ tool, and deal guidance that puts that answer in front of the salesperson at the moment of quoting. (More on how retailers set their prices in Market Segment 27.2, Retail pricing and merchandising analytics, in Industry Vertical 27, Retail tech.)

DealHub.io

with engineers in Bengaluru, sells the quote-to-close platform for software companies. It combines CPQ with a digital deal room, a shared online space where the buyer and the seller finish the negotiation. It also handles the subscription billing that follows. (More on subscription billing in Market Segment 11.2, Subscription billing software, in Industry Vertical 11, Finance and accounting software.)

Conga

with engineers in Bengaluru, has posted more jobs than any other company in this Market Segment. It is covered mainly in Market Segment 10.4. Its CPQ and document generation run on data in Salesforce. They produce the quote and the contract straight from the deal record in the CRM. (More on Salesforce and CRM in Market Segment 14.1, CRM software.)

The proposal and the RFP

Answering RFPs and security questionnaires, managing proposals, and AI assistants for sales knowledge

Back to the hospital chain's RFP, due on Friday. Most of its questions have been answered before, for other buyers. The software in this sub-segment keeps those answers and reuses them.

Responsive

with engineers in Bengaluru, is the company that turned the RFP response into software. It was formerly called RFPIO, and it was founded by Indian entrepreneurs. It sells three things:

a library of approved answers
a workflow that sends each question to the expert who owns it
an AI model that now drafts the first version of every answer from the library

Loopio

with engineers in Bengaluru and Kolkata, is Responsive's Canadian rival, with the same library and workflow.

Two Indian start-ups work on the same problem, with AI models first:

OrbitShift.AI

with engineers in Bengaluru, generates the RFP response and the sales content from what it knows about each account. (More on sales content in Market Segment 14.6, Sales enablement platforms.)

SiftHub

with engineers in Mumbai, sells an AI sales assistant. It answers the RFP, the security questionnaire, and the salesperson's questions about a competitor, all from the company's own knowledge.

The RFP answered by a model.

The RFP response was the most tedious job in enterprise sales: the same hundred questions, answered again for every buyer. Now an AI model drafts the answers from the library, and the expert reviews them. The security questionnaire is where the same model saves the most time. The questionnaire overlaps with governance, risk and compliance, a part of cybersecurity. (More on it in Market Segment 4.14, Governance, risk and compliance (GRC), in Industry Vertical 4, Cybersecurity.)

Most RFP questions have been answered before, so an AI model drafts each answer from the library of approved answers and the expert reviews it.

That is closing the deal: the quote priced and produced correctly, and the proposal answered from a library. For the payroll company, it means the Chennai hospital gets its quote, and the hospital chain gets its answers by Friday.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What CRM and sales tech companies hire for.

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