#product visualizations

When it comes to boards putting pressure on CFOs, it normally has to do with three things: pricing, margin, and/or forecasting.

By now you’re probably familiar with Gartner’s famous Magic Quadrant report. If not, it looks like this:

FPX CFO Grant Stanis was kind enough to sit down with us and tell us a little bit about his journey as a CFO as well as his particular take on how CPQ solutions can benefit a business.

Here’s what we learned.

As you may have noticed, we’ve recently been discussing homegrown quoting solutions on the blog. 

  First, we looked at how to know when it’s time to transition from a homegrown to a third-party quoting solution. Next, we covered the top two objections to using third-party quoting solutions. Now we’re going to dive into how most homegrown quoting solutions compare to those of third-party vendors.

It’s a lot easier to be a CFO when a company is growing, it’s just plain difficult during an economic downturn.

  Pair that with the fact that CFOs are always looking for ways to be efficient: achieving the maximum amount of growth with the minimal amount of resources.

We recently discussed homegrown vs. third-party quoting solutions and how to know when it’s time to make the transition.

  However, this transition is often met with quite a few objections; that’s why we’d like to take a closer look at the top two and demonstrate why these objections are often misguided.

It’s common to take pride in your company’s homegrown quoting solution. A lot of love, hard work, and time went into creating it, and you want to make sure that you honor that.

But here’s the problem: it’s difficult for homegrown quoting solutions to scale as your company grows and evolves.

If you’re a CFO or VP of Finance, we understand you’re wired to identify issues, seek solutions and drive results. If you believe your distribution channels are unable to optimize margin in every transaction, you recognize a problem and opportunity.

This problem is especially frustrating when the necessary information to solve the problem lives within your company but is not being applied by distribution channels to optimize for margin. Why? Because the information—which lives in confidential spreadsheets that show exactly what price point and negotiation strategy to use based on a particular product or solution in order to land the sale—is owned by the small number of trusted people who have access to it.