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What’s the best experience you’ve ever had making a purchase? For me, it was the last time I changed car insurance providers. Kind of surprising, right? It was so fast and the options were so clear every step of the way, it was practically painless (and I saved a pretty decent chunk of change).
Most of us have a story that sits in the back of our minds, even if we don’t typically think about it much. I’d be surprised if you didn’t, because if you’re anything like me, when you have a lousy experience, you probably think something along the lines of “Why can’t I just do it this way?!”
We don’t always categorize our purchasing experiences as great until we’re confronted with a frustrating one. It’s during these moments where we recognize how things could be easier, more intuitive, and more personalized, because we’ve experienced easy, intuitive, and personalized before. This is particularly true when we encounter larger or more complex purchases with multiple variables.
The more we have to consider, the more we crave clarity and guidance. Yet often, it’s this kind of purchase where we tend to get the opposite of what we need: too many details to process, limited information about the impact of each choice, and no advisor to help us sort it all out. And when we are advised, it often comes packaged with a high-pressure campaign to make specific choices that force us to neglect our own best interests.
Despite how we may feel about these experiences as a user, it’s not always fair to blame the company we’re dealing with for these challenges—at least not entirely. As competition continues to increase and customer expectations evolve at breakneck pace, companies often struggle to break out of the status quo. Doing so requires business leaders to find ways to solve some really big challenges.
The challenges require answers to:
- What tools can I give to my sellers that improve our outcomes without creating more administrative work for them?
- How can we make self-service a reality when our products are highly configurable and our processes require complex workflows?
- How do we make better use of the core systems we rely upon today?
At Oracle, we hear from these leaders regularly about the realities of the challenges that they face. In fact, we’ve had to overcome many of them ourselves, which has given us the opportunity to focus on helping change the status quo by enabling organizations with solutions designed to make sense out of the confusion. That’s why we’re thrilled that Oracle has once again been recognized as a ‘Leader’ in this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Configure, Price and Quote Application Suites.
By centralizing product and pricing data, business rules, contract management and more, CPQ solutions have long been used as the bridge between CRM and ERP to improve process efficiency for sellers and the operational teams that support them. Increasingly, though, these same tools have become pivotal to providing customers with more self-service capabilities, finally democratizing ecommerce for a wider variety of B2B organizations that previously considered the channel infeasible or incompatible with their existing sales model.
This comes at an important time, too, because as lines continually blur between work- and personal-lives, so too do your customers’ expectations. Today, customers expect B2C-caliber interactions with every company they engage with. (Remember what I said about comparing great and frustrating experiences at the top?)
As you look to recalibrate your sales and operations beyond this undeniably tumultuous year, it’s important to identify the adjustments that can have the greatest impact to your organization’s success.
How will your sellers be more attentive to every customer while also being more efficient? What will your resellers and partners need to be more successful? What opportunities exist to make customers more self-sufficient and improve their satisfaction?
Put these into the context of financial performance to better illuminate the opportunity that lies ahead.
What can automating and personalizing cross-sell and upsell tactics do to drive more revenue growth? How can new business models like subscriptions provide revenue stability and enable greater accuracy in forecasting? How will margins be protected and deal profitability be maximized every time?
Oracle believes in the unmatched value that CPQ provides as part of an incremental investment strategy, which is why we are Oracle CPQ’s largest customer. Through the unification of existing technology across the front and back office, organizations can gain greater return on investment through increased revenue, improved sales and operational efficiency, and more satisfied customers.
We’re honored by Gartner’s recognition of Oracle as a ‘Leader’ in the Magic Quadrant for Configure, Price and Quote Application Suites 2020. We believe that our consistent recognition in this report shows our strong commitment to supporting organizations faced with the challenges of continuously evolving market dynamics.
Want to learn more? Download the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Configure, Price and Quote Application Suites.You can also contact us to learn more about how the Oracle CX Sales and CX Commerce suites can help achieve greater success on your digital sales channels and revenue goals with connected real-time data at scale.
Note: This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Oracle.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Configure, Price and Quote Application Suites, 28 September 2020, Mark Lewis, Dayna Ford
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