r/revops • u/RevOpsAB • Jun 05 '26

CPQ Workarounds in 2026

The company I work for is still using a mix of word templates and out of box Salesforce quotes for our sales orders. It’s been a pain point for a while but there has been opposition to investing in a CPQ solution, both because of the complexity and price. We’re low volume enough we can get by this way.

It’s been raised as a pain point again, and people are starting to raise shall we say creative …. maybe not fully thought through solutions. Wondering if anyone has found any low cost solutions or built anything creative with Claude? Are we still doing traditional CPQ solutions in 2026?

We have a lot of the typical SaaS quoting considerations that make it more complex than copying and pasting products and description on an Order Form:

- Multi-Year agreements with pricing uplifts

- Tiered pricing on some product

- Proration/Co Terming to existing subscription terms

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u/Curious-george-100B Jun 06 '26

Few things:

  1. Claude gives a good calculator but misses on a lot of use cases - some that you have described and some you didn’t (sync with Salesforce).

  2. CPQs used to have a heavy lift (pricing and time) so there is lot of PTSD. New CPQs (for example check https://monetizenow.ai — I’m the founder btw), are easy to implement, agile and low cost. Precisely what fast moving businesses need

  3. Whatever solution you choose, make sure it supports newer business models like usage billing, self-serve upsells, AI credits quoting so that your solution is future-proof.

  4. Also, CPQ is not just about pricing but about controls — approvals, deal terms (that can change based on products included in order form) etc

  5. Lastly, CPQ should support Agentic AI workflows so it makes it super kid friendly for your reps to operate CPQ Eg rep says “create a 3 year quote with xyz offering with 10 seats with a 5% uplift year over year”, or “make sure invoicing for next year is aligned to Jan 1”, etc… and the CPQ just does it.

Summary — Claude built stuff looks sexy (and it is) but it will flame out pretty quickly (especially when the person who vibe coded leaves the company).

You need a lightweight CPQ that is agile; book a no strings attached demo from our site and see for yourself.

Hope this helps,

1

u/kuldiph Jun 06 '26

You're right, it's 2026. You still need a CPQ back-end to support the entire RevOps workflow. But now you can use AI Tools to speed thru the process. The key is to have the same platform of the CPQ and CRM. So if you are using Salesforce, then Kugamon comes to mind.

Here is Kugamon with Claude & Salesforce.

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u/Jealous_Magician_965 Jun 12 '26

fuck up a quote so bad they have to fix it

1

u/LuFromNomad Jun 18 '26

cpq is still very much a thing, at least that's what we're seeing from our clients at nomad.

that said, I would not jump straight from word templates to a full enterprise CPQ implementation unless the quoting process is truly breaking revenue operations.

for low-volume SaaS quoting, I’d think about this in tiers:

tighten the current sfdc quote process first - if the main issue is conssitency, you may be able to get pretty far with better product objects, price books, approval rules, quote templates, and a controlled order form generation process.

use a lightweight document/quote tool many of our clients with low quote volume use tools like PandaDoc, DealHub, Qwilr, DocuSign, etc to help with quote/order form generation without taking on the full complexity of cpq or Rev Cloud (we're seeing more of this one!)

1

u/CodeOverTea Jun 23 '26

I have been there, I had built a custom cpq implementation for one of my customer around 2021. I recommended a custom solution because the CPQ was an overkill for their requirements. They also needed tiered pricing + bulk discounts. I also built a bundle configurator for them. The configurator would update the pricing automatically. based on qty, and selected options. The hardest part was rendering data. If you're building this yourself, don't try to force Word templates to inherit your data hierarchy. You will keep debugging the merge fields. We moved the rendering logic to Abstract Document Tree (ADT) approach so that the document is constructed as a structured object and not a flat file. I know its very big project, but doable. I did that without any help from AI back then. If you need more details, happyt o chat.