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ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Configure, Price, Quote: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.
The fact that many enterprises have already begun or are in the process of digital modernization is a testament to the rapid rise of digital products and services, new direct 
online engagement channels and mixed pricing models such as subscription and consumption. One of the biggest changes is that the economics of business using these newer models is very different. And this is giving rise to new software categories, such as Revenue Lifecycle Management.
With additional sales models other than one-time sales, the revenue from a sale is spread over the lifetime of the engagement rather than received as an upfront lump sum. This requires sustained engagement with customers beyond the break-even point in order to have a profitable business model. This sustained engagement can also be referred to as the customer lifecycle and, in this case, the processes and people supported by technology to ensure that a provider is doing all it can to encourage the customer to engage with the seller. Often starting at the quote stage of a qualified sales engagement, the revenue lifecycle follows the buyer’s journey through to contract negotiation and agreement, provisioning and fulfillment as required, invoicing, payment, and on to renewal or contract and potential amendments to the initial order or additions in terms of new product and services.
ISG Research defines revenue lifecycle management as a unified platform approach that connects customer-facing teams to boost revenue and margin through consistent, long-term customer engagement. We define Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) applications as those that support CPQ activities within revenue lifecycle management. This includes supporting multiple pricing models including subscriptions and usage, providing the ability to select and configure products and services from over 1,000 items, creating quotes in various digital formats, offering guided selling and approval and workflow support, and featuring analytics and reporting.
More broadly, revenue lifecycle management can start with an initial quotation and move through contract negotiations to fulfillment and invoicing and on to renewal and expansion. Individual applications that could be used as part of this process are Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ), contract lifecycle management (CLM), billing, revenue recognition, and revenue lifecycle platform services. As this quote-to-cash process touches many different internal processes, to avoid common issues with handover from one team to another, a true revenue lifecycle management system not only manages digital documents but also extracts, digitizes and stores all the important terms from within the documents. In this way, errors are minimized, and all necessary terms and information is made available to all who are involved with the customer at every part of the lifecycle.
Likewise, with digitized billing schedules and calendars, key events can trigger automatic activity such as renewal outreach. With digitized terms, there is no need for one team to input data to pass on to the next team as the key data persists in the relevant platform data store. Likewise, analysis of repeated steps within the overall process can identify areas for process improvements; for example, a particular type of contract for a particular type of customer often requires responses from the customer’s legal counsel. In fact, all areas of the process are open to analysis if the overall process is represented within the revenue lifecycle platform. Analytics can be used to better understand what the ideal or expected intervals between processes are, or where certain characteristics of a customer, region or product cause processes to take longer or require additional steps. In this way, the revenue lifecycle management system and process can be continually analyzed and improved to the benefit of the customer experience and ultimately contribute to sustained customer engagement.
As has been previously mentioned, the overall revenue lifecycle management process has, at its core, clearly defined activities spread across different departments and teams. 
These activities have been, and continue to be, executed across many industries and companies of all sizes, but historically these have been mostly performed as discrete separate tasks. These tasks can include creating and getting approval for a quote for a prospective customer, embedding the quoted terms into a contract used to sign the deal, triggering fulfillment as well as invoicing for the sale, and generating billing schedules that help project when revenue can be recognized. When most sales were one-time sales, there was less focus on the overall customer experience as being an economic imperative. However, for the modern enterprise, embracing subscription and usage as part of adopting more responsive pricing models requires a different approach. As sustained (customer) engagement is a necessity to achieve profitability with these types of pricing models, enterprises will need to pay attention to all active touch points with the customer.
Despite the business imperative, we assert that through 2026, more than one-half of enterprises will still be using manual processes to integrate quotes and contracts, leading to billing and delivery errors and poor customer experience.
In addition to the overall Revenue Lifecycle Management Buyers Guide, there are sub-guides covering the individual components of revenue lifecycle management, including CPQ. For many enterprises, both as part of the initial sale as well as subsequent adjustments to orders and subscription plans, the CPQ application is typically one of the first significant touchpoints with a customer or serious prospect.
Historically, the configuration part of the CPQ process was restricted to certain industries such as manufacturing and chemicals. For other types of businesses, it was like using a hammer to crack a nut. But, as different digital products and bundles become commonplace, more industries are transforming the CPQ process. CPQ applications are more closely integrated with pricing and margin details; some enable salespeople to see the commissions they might get for the deal. More advanced systems identify the implications for competitiveness based on buyer propensity for a given discount and the implications for margin. Still others offer a shared digital space for live, on-demand interaction with prospective buyers rather than a slow, back-and-forth via email or a deal desk function. Increasingly, as reflects today’s expectations, speed of response is important, making performance a priority for long and complex efforts via a conversational interface.
The traditional deployment approach for CPQ applications is a waterfall-style IT project, with the implementation team trying to capture every edge case they can document. The result is a project that takes too long to implement, along with the recognition that not every use case can be captured or that it is necessary to support a long tail of permutations. Given the impact on time to value, the Buyers Guide examines how CPQ providers use technology to improve implementation. We also assess innovative ways providers digitize the process to exchange and approve quotes electronically, ensuring that the terms persist as actionable values and not just as an electronic document. Since many configuration rules are set up by hand, providers are tapping into a combination of AI, innovative data model designs and extensive integrations to improve the implementation process.
Evaluations also rate the innovative use of predictive analytics and generative AI. Enterprises are focusing on ways to speed up the quote-to-cash process, as delays and the need to walk back information can lessen the all-important customer experience. Some providers use advanced analytics that enable guardrails as part of the CPQ process, guiding pricing and configuration discussions with detailed information and recommendations on prices, discounts, margins and the impact on sales commissions. Although the typical deal desk is needed for larger and more complex deals, the more guardrails can work at the point of sale, the less back-and-forth that delays the process.
Like many areas of B2B software, user expectations for simplicity of screen design and responsiveness have increased. Users need a performant response when configuring and quoting from potentially tens of thousands of products and service line SKUs. Software providers are reimagining how the user interacts with the application and the benefits of an AI-assisted text interface to replace the current method of choosing from pick lists. Expectations for communication focus on digital engagement, where the quote becomes interactive and adjustable by the customer with real-time responses rather than the typical back-and-forth of email communication.
Although revenue lifecycle management is a relatively new term, the need for such an approach has been around far longer. As hybrid pricing models extend into the broader economy, many of the existing systems enterprises are using will be unable to accommodate the challenges of a shift to more complex pricing and revenue models and, more importantly, are not platforms that support rapid change and innovation. The danger, as highlighted in this overview, is that by not modernizing processes and systems that support the revenue lifecycle of customers, there exists the potential for mistakes across teams as one group hands over to another. As part of the need to maintain sustained engagement with customers, meeting the customers’ expectations in terms of responsiveness and accuracy is essential. These platforms and applications are an important set of functions and capabilities to ensure that changes to business models, necessary for competitiveness, are not held back by process or technology. And whether you are looking for a single supplier or a series of applications that work in conjunction with a core platform, this Buyers Guide will help identify providers that represent a relevant set of suppliers to seek out and evaluate.
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Configure, Price, Quote evaluates software providers and products in key areas that support the CPQ aspects of the customer revenue lifecycle. This Buyers Guide evaluates products based on capabilities that facilitate the use of an integrated and extensible platform to orchestrate activities across all teams involved in sales, finance, legal and operations. The data and data model should be accessible using a set of standard reporting and analytic methods. The revenue lifecycle management platform supports these distinct activities with applications for CPQ.
This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of CPQ within revenue lifecycle management as we define it: Conga, DealHub, Epicor, Experlogix, GleanQuote, Logik.ai, NetSuite, Oracle, Paperless Parts, Pricefx, PROS, Salesforce, SAP, Tacton, Vendavo, Zilliant, Zoho and Zuora.
This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of configure, price, quote software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.
We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating configure, price, quote offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.
The Buyers Guide for Configure, Price, Quote in 2025 finds Conga first on the list, followed by Oracle and PROS.
Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.
The Leaders in Product Experience are:
- Oracle.
- Conga.
- PROS.
The Leaders in Customer Experience are:
- Conga.
- Oracle.
- PROS.
The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:
- Conga, which has achieved this rating in seven of the seven categories.
- Oracle in six categories.
- Zuora in three categories.
- PROS in two categories.
- Salesforce, Tacton and Zoho in one category.
The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.
Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle configure, price, quote, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.
ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our configure, price, quote blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.
You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.
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