What is CPQ, and how do you choose one?The definitive guide after Salesforce CPQ end of sale

CPQ — configure, price, quote — is software that lets a seller assemble a valid product configuration, price it under the current rules, and produce a quote document, inside the CRM, with approvals enforced and the accepted quote converting to an order without re-entry. On Salesforce, "CPQ" also names a specific product: Salesforce CPQ, formerly SteelBrick, which has been end of sale since March 2025 — not end of life — and which most teams are now evaluating alongside Revenue Cloud Advanced and the AppExchange and external alternatives.

What CPQ does

CPQ breaks into three steps, and each one removes a specific manual task. The primer on CPQ in Salesforce walks through them with a before-and-after workflow; the glossary keeps the terms beside you.

The pieces around those three steps matter as much as the steps. Approval workflows turn discount policy from an honor system into a guardrail. E-signature or online acceptance captures the yes without a scan. Order conversion is where CPQ meets billing, and the test of a CPQ is whether that conversion happens without anyone re-typing lines. Reporting closes the loop: quote velocity, win rate by discount band, and approval cycle time are only visible if quotes are records in the CRM.

Two published studies are the usual proof that CPQ pays: Aberdeen found reps at companies with CPQ 56% more likely to hit quota and reported a 48% revenue growth lift. Those are widely cited analyst figures and should be read as direction, not forecast; the better proof is your own quote turnaround time before and after.

Do you need a CPQ at all?

Not every team does, and buying one too early costs almost as much as buying one too late. The honest thresholds, from the guide on whether you need a full CPQ:

• Quote volume. Fewer than a few dozen quotes a quarter, all similar, and standard Salesforce quotes with a disciplined template will hold.
• Pricing complexity. Flat-rate products with no discounting do not need a rules engine. Tiers, bundles, volume discounts, multi-year terms and account-specific prices do.
• Approvals. If a discount needs a manager's yes and that yes lives in email, you are already paying a workaround tax; a CPQ makes the rule enforceable.
• What happens after the quote. If the accepted quote has to become an order, an invoice or a subscription, the re-entry between systems is the cost a CPQ removes. This is usually the threshold that decides it.
• Team size. Five reps can share a template. Fifteen reps produce fifteen versions of it.

When you do cross the line, buy right-sized. A team of twenty reps with a two-hundred-product catalog does not need the platform built for a global enterprise with attribute-based configuration, and will pay for the difference in implementation time.

How to choose a CPQ: eight criteria

The evaluation guide scores platforms on eight criteria. In the order they tend to decide the outcome:

1. Native versus bolt-on architecture. Where does the quote live — as a Salesforce record in your org, or on the vendor's platform with a copy synced back? This decides reporting, security, admin ownership and what AI agents can see. The five-question native test is the neutral way to score it.
2. Product and Price Book. Does the CPQ price from Salesforce's standard Product and Price Book objects, or from its own catalog? Standard objects mean your existing admin skills transfer and the catalog is maintained once.
3. Quote-to-close speed. Time a rep from opportunity to sent quote on a realistic deal, in a trial org, with your catalog. Also time the catalog load; a large catalog that takes twenty seconds to open changes how reps behave.
4. Approvals and discount authority. Ask for a live demonstration of three-level conditional routing on your own rules, and check whether a quote under review can still be sent by mistake.
5. Subscription and recurring revenue. If you sell subscriptions, the CPQ must create the subscription and the renewal from the order, co-term expansions and apply uplifts — or hand off cleanly to a system that does. See the subscription management guide.
6. Implementation time and who does it. Weeks with your own admin, or months with a partner? Ask for the last three go-live dates and the team that delivered them.
7. Pricing model and three-year cost. License, implementation, ongoing admin or consulting, and integration upkeep. Published prices are a signal in themselves.
8. Customization without code, and reporting. Can the admin change a pricing rule, a template or an approval path in Setup? Can a standard report see quote lines without an export?

The mistakes are the mirror image: choosing on demo polish, comparing per-user price instead of three-year cost, skipping the trial with real data, ignoring what happens after the quote, and buying more configurator than the catalog needs.

What Salesforce CPQ end of sale changed

In March 2025 Salesforce stopped selling Salesforce CPQ to new customers. That is the whole of the announcement, and the explainer on end of sale is careful about what was not announced.

So: nothing stops working, nobody is forced anywhere, and you can still renew. What changed is the direction of investment. New features go to Revenue Cloud Advanced, the documentation has thinned, and the pool of admins and partners who know SBQQ will shrink over time. The practical position for a Salesforce CPQ customer is not urgency but a decision date: pick a quarter by which you will have chosen to stay deliberately, move to Revenue Cloud Advanced, or move to an alternative. The end-of-sale timeline and the end of sale versus end of life definition are the reference pages.

The alternatives landscape

Six options cover the market for a Salesforce team. They differ less on features than on where the data lives, what the catalog is built on, whether the price is published, and how long the implementation takes. The full treatment, with each option's strengths conceded, is in Salesforce CPQ alternatives; the comparison hub has source-cited pages for each.

Three things to concede. Revenue Cloud Advanced is the only option with Salesforce's own roadmap behind it. Conga's contract lifecycle management is more mature than anything in the native CPQ packages. DealHub's DealRoom is a genuinely different buying experience, and it is the only option here that supports HubSpot and Dynamics alongside Salesforce. None of those advantages is architectural, which is why the first two criteria above usually settle the choice before the feature comparison starts. Recent ownership changes — Conga's acquisition of PROS's B2B business in February 2026, DealHub's acquisition of Subskribe in November 2025 — are worth a roadmap question in writing before you sign.

Implementation realities

Whatever you choose, the move is a reimplementation, not a lift and shift. That is true of Revenue Cloud Advanced, which has a different data model from Salesforce CPQ, and it is true of every AppExchange and external option. The migration playbook covers the six steps; the things that surprise people are these.

What moves and what is rebuilt. Products and price book entries move, and on a platform that uses the standard Price Book they move as they are. Bundles, product rules, price rules and quote templates are rebuilt in the new platform's terms. Custom Quote Calculator Plugin scripts do not migrate anywhere; they are either rebuilt as pricing logic or, more often, found to be unnecessary. Historical quotes stay in Salesforce as records; the new platform starts with open deals. The object mapper shows where each Salesforce CPQ, Conga, Revenue Cloud Advanced, DealHub and Nue object lands.

The install base is the one data set that must move completely. Active subscriptions, assets and contract dates are what the renewal engine runs on. Reconcile the count and the value before and after, and do it in one pass rather than in phases.

Inventory what you actually use. Most Salesforce CPQ orgs carry rules and templates nobody has touched in years. The ninety-day feature list — what reps used in the last quarter — is the migration scope; everything else is archived.

Parallel-run one quote cycle, then cut over. Two CPQs in one org for a few weeks is workable; two CPQs for months is not, because quote data drifts. The parallel-run guide and the checklist cover the mechanics, and the readiness check returns a timeline range from twelve questions.

Timelines. Four to eight weeks from Salesforce CPQ to a native package on the standard Price Book is typical; six to ten weeks from Conga, because the Price List objects have to become Price Book entries; four to six weeks from DealHub; and 12 to 18 months in practice for a full Revenue Cloud Advanced rebuild. The week-by-week timeline sets out what drives each.

Total cost: compare three years, not the list price

Per-user price is the number vendors publish and the number that matters least. A CPQ's three-year cost is license plus implementation plus ongoing administration or consulting plus integration upkeep, and the second and third items routinely exceed the first. Salesforce publishes Revenue Cloud Advanced at $200 (Advanced) and $150 (Growth) per user per month, billed annually, before implementation; Revenue Cloud Billing is priced separately and not published. Kugamon publishes $65 to $125 per user per month with a fixed implementation fee. Conga, DealHub and Nue do not publish list prices, which does not make them expensive — it makes them unquotable until you ask. The three-year TCO guide and the ROI calculator run the comparison with every estimate labeled as one, and the CFO business case turns it into a model finance will accept.

How Kugamon handles it

Kugamon CPQ is a managed package that runs on the standard Salesforce Product and Price Book: quotes and orders are Salesforce records, pricing rules are tiered, volume and account-specific entries the admin maintains, approvals are native Salesforce approvals or Flow, and a 100K-product catalog loads in the Lightning configurator in about three seconds. The CPQ edition covers quotes and orders at $65 per user per month; Quote to Cash, Subscription Management and Subscription Billing extend the same records through invoicing, payments, contracts and renewals. Typical implementation is four to eight weeks, usually by the customer's own Salesforce admin rather than a partner, and 150+ companies run it. It is not the right choice for a multi-CRM company, for deep standalone CLM, or for very high-volume usage rating; the Salesforce CPQ migration playbook and the product page say so.

Keep reading

The articles in this topic, grouped by the question they answer. The full index, with glossary terms, follows.

• What it is: What is CPQ in Salesforce? · Do you need a full CPQ?
• How to choose: How to choose CPQ · Salesforce CPQ alternatives · How much does Revenue Cloud Advanced cost? · What is Agentforce Revenue Management?
• End of sale: Salesforce CPQ is end of sale · Can you still renew Salesforce CPQ? · Salesforce CPQ documentation is gone
• Moving: How to migrate off Salesforce CPQ · Conga CPQ after the PROS acquisition · Migrate from Salesforce CPQ